The Eyes

The Eyes was a series of science fiction novels written in the 1970s by Richard Gordon under the pen name Stuart Gordon. The series is set in a post-apocalyptic world where the same nature was torn and mutated. The origin of the catastrophe is at first uncertain, due to the passing of centuries and to the sheer scale of destruction it unleashed upon the land. In book two some characters speculate that the original cause might be a large-scale nuclear war or a cometary impact, while in book three it is finally revelaled that the cataclysm originated from a failed attempt to tap energy from a parallel universe to warm-up the Earth, which at the time was facing a deadly cooling of its climate. This contact with a parallel universe generated too much energy for the Earth to absorb safely, leading to a major activation of all tectonic faults, with geological, oceanic and atmospheric disasters hitting the globe and the extra background radiation causing widespread mutations in humans aa well as other living beings. Following a fateful planetary conjunction happening at the same time of the upheavals, Earth's axis shifted and the duration of the year increased to 370 days. Destruction was so complete that the epoch of the disaster was called 'The Great Forgetting' and only a handful of survivors were spared. Over centuries, they settled in a belt of marginally fertile lands in an island-continent not far from the location of the failed experimental energy bridge, while the rest of the explored world is barren and inhabitable. The plot revolves around a mutant child with god-like powers called the Divine Mutant, the reincarnation of a former mutant king born one thousand years before, which is itself the reincarnation of the lead scientist who created the energy bridge two thousend years in the past. The Mutant follows his chaotic, plague-like 'Dream', determined to spread madness and confusion in the slowly rebuilding world. Unbeknowst to him, the Mutant himself is manipulated by the Unmen, colored, revolving, crystal-like prismatic beings who inhabit the parallel universe, who whish to take back the energy they lost on Earth. The Unmen's sinister plot requires the mass-reaping of human life-force (to be collected through deadly winds of black shadow cast upon the lands), which is made available to the Unmen by infecting people with the madness of the Dream.