Hermetech n. science of orgasmic energy of or relating to properties. adj. of or related to properties of orgasmic energy.

On a ravaged Earth, the majority of the population live in protected domed cities, while the bright, the rich and the quick have elected to emigate off-world to the Tech-Green orbital havens, such as Sky City 1. Only the poor, or the stubborn, remain on the land.

In the isolated community around the monument of Taler's Bump, synapse of the ai goddess Isis Confidentia, 14-year old Ari Famber prepares to celebrate the coming festival, grateful to be out of the disapproving eye of her alcoholic mother.

The arrival of the Star Eye randomati, naturotech nomads under the leadership of Leila Saatchi, threatens to uproot An from her aimless life at Taler's Bump, and awaken more than just her dormant sexuality.

In the mean street sleaze of Arcady's Sector 23, the starveling RoadWalker takes a desperate gamble for employment, while elsewhere in the city, in the roccoco extravagance of his cybernetic playground, an intrigued Quincx Roirbak accepts a man with no apparent history as his student. A man whose theories sound disturbingly familiar.

Across poisoned wastelands, the jellycrusts record the struggles of a dying planet.

Storm Constantine takes these various and seemingly unconnected threads and pits these against the conflict between the naturotech's blend of electronic paganism and the conglomerate politics of TechGreen, and its drive to resettle the scattered fragments of the population off-world in Sky City 1.

Within Ari the legacy of a crazed genetic experiment, whose purpose Leila can only guess at, begins to surface, though the heightened perception of R J Somesense and the jellycrust Line Huggers can sense its potential.

The Star Eye caravan, in their armoured and battered trucks, Spirit of Disorder and Rentfree Aphrodite, take Ari to the underground hold of Lazar's Farm. Leila has plans that Lazar's son Nathan, may hold the key to the puzzle of Ari, if she can break though his shell of withdrawal. Lazar, however, has rather more direct plans of his own for Leila.

In Arcady, Zambia Crevecour, has a problem of identity, following some radical, and not altogether legal, surgery. Brought in to check Zambia's suicidal impulses, Roirbak's new assistant, Tammuz Malamute, becomes entangled in the confrontation of one enigma with another, when the drugged and sedated Zambia calls him by a name he thought he'd painstakingly buried.

In Arcady the plot threads twist and entwine. We learn of the bond that ties Zambia and Cabochon in twinned love and hate; relationships are sundered and reformed, and the maelstrom force that is Ari, and more besides, is unleashed on the city.

Hermetech is very much a Storm Constantine book, in its concerns for a religion of natural magic, the power of awakened sexuality, and acceptance of technology as a channel for the forces of nature. There are parallels to the concept of aruna in her Wraeththu novels, as a sexually channelled power that can only be entered into and guided from within. Ari becomes its transducer, its lightning rod. but it cannot be fully harnessed or controlled. In the grip of its Gestalt Flow, it guides the wielder as much as being guided.

Hermetech is an altogether more assured book than it's predecessor, Monstrous Regiment, although there are a few times when the style shifts, sometimes abruptly, as in the transition between the mystic lyricism of the Gestalt Flow through the streets of Arcady, to the more jarring reference to "Ari-Nate superfuck."

The adoption of the intersex pronoun "SHe" also caused me problems, mainly in it's capitalisation, which I found gave an unfortunate emphasis to the female aspect, which the adjectival "hir" avoids.

SF "trufans," junkies of hard extrapolative science, may have problems with Hermetech, with its focus of technology as a means, rather than an end in itself; while readers familiar with both current scientific trends and hermetic magic will have fun picking up the references, from the chaos icon of the Mandelbrot set to Aleistair Crowley and Egyptian mythology scattered through its pages.

The books cover plainly makes no claim of allegiance to the strictures of the sf and fantasy genres, and neither does the author.