Wolfbane

Wolfbane is a novel by Frederic Pohl and his regular collaborator C. M. Kornbluth, published under the English title Wolfbane, serialized in Galaxy Science Fiction in 1957 and issued as a book by Ballantine in 1959. The story takes place in a rewritten future: a wandering planet invades the solar system and "steals" Earth from its orbit, dragging it into interstellar space; alien machines set the Moon ablaze, turning it into a miniature sun above the Earth. This "artificial sun" must be rekindled every five years, and as the novel opens, the deadline for rekindling is near but not yet reached, and people wait in cold and hunger, secretly fearing it will never light again. After the catastrophe, Earth's population has sharply declined. Most survivors have become "Citizens": they maintain order through elaborate social etiquette, meditative practice, and restrained selflessness, and any loss of control can bring on mental collapse and violent madness, with transgressors subjected to ritual execution. A minority who retain their aggressiveness call themselves "wolves" and call the compliant "sheep," and the two sides watch each other warily. The banker Roget Germain is a model Citizen, and during meditation a mysterious "eye" appears above his head, only to vanish when he is interrupted. Glenn Tropile lives among the Citizens but considers himself a wolf. When his identity is exposed, he flees to the wolves' settlement, and because of some quality unlike his fellows he is taken by "the eye"—sent to the alien machine planet, plugged in as a "component" of a vast machine system, and joined with seven other human consciousnesses to form a "snowflake," through which he glimpses the truth that humanity is being used as a source of energy and computing power.