Look Into the Sun

In Kelly's 1987 novella The Glass Cloud , architect Phillip Wing saw his grand vision of an immense floating cloud achieved in such a way that the project, and, he felt, much of his world, was co-opted by the aliens called messengers. This novel extends that story as Wing is convinced by the messengers to take a 50-year journey to the planet Aseneshesh to design the tomb for a dying goddess. Already suspicious of the messengers' New Age religion on Earth, Wing finds himself in a theocracy whose power struggles could easily come to focus on his own work. The characters and background remain vague but Kelly is sensitive to the dislocations Wing feels, from Earth--where his wife becomes a convert to the messenger's religion, to the spaceflight on which a genetically sculptured cancer physically restructures him into an alien. (Apr.)