Ferren and the Angel

Ferren and the Angel by Richard Harland

The setting is the far future, a thousand years from now, after human scientists began exploring life after death, revived the consciousness of a subject who’d died and learned that he’d been in Heaven living among the angels! That leads to the biggest news sensation ever, an international competition to explore and lay claim to the First Altitude of Heaven and war between the armies of Heaven and the armies of Earth.

In Ferren’s time, after a thousand years of war, civilization on Earth has been destroyed, leaving only scattered ruins. The original human beings have been reduced to ignorance and degradation, living in fearful, isolated tribes. The new rulers of Earth are the artificially created Humen – Hypers, Doctors and Plasmatics – who battle endlessly against the angels and plan an ultimate invasion to conquer Heaven.

The novel begins when junior warrior angel Miriael is shot down in a night-time skirmish and crashes to the Earth. Damaged and unable to fly, she waits for extinction.

But the young tribesman Ferren has seen her fall and goes to investigate. She ought to be his enemy, since his tribe think of themselves as allied, with the Humen on the side of the Earth. But Ferren’s curiosity and pity outweigh every rule of his upbringing. Trying to save her, he drops food and trickles water into her mouth while she lies unconscious in the grass. She survives – as no angel has ever survived in terrestrial conditions before – but she’s no longer a being of pure and perfect spirit.

The unique relationship between Ferren and Miriael will change the course of history. At first Ferren is fearful of her powers, while Miriael despises him as a low and disgusting life-form. But Miriael, for all her superiority and righteousness, is at least better than the vicious, bullying Humen, and gradually the two of them form a strange kind of friendship.

Then Ferren is exiled by his tribe, journeys to the Humen Camp in search of his sister and discovers what really happens to tribespeople taken by the Humen for ‘military service’. As an ultimate battle between the armies of Heaven and the armies of Earth brews over his tribe’s settlement, he returns and rejoins Miriael. Together they must build a shelter to protect themselves and the tribe from all the stupendous psychic and spiritual forces unleashed in terra-celestial warfare.