Imagine a world where everything is networked, where nanotechnological machines propagate in the air, the people, even the nearly empty space between planets. Imagine tapping into that network, able to alter almost anything in the world or access almost any information.

Now imagine that you don't have that access and others do, and you'll have your finger on one of the central conflicts in Severna Park's new novel, The Annunciate.

The Annunciate tells the story of Eve, Annemarie, and Corey, three fugitives roaming the isolated trinary star system of Threesys -- three is a important number in the book, and shows up in all sorts of places.

Having discovered the secret of a powerful and almost instantly addictive narcotic, Annemarie plans to wage a counter-revolution of her own. By getting the peoples of ThreeSys on hooked on the drug, she plans to bring them back under control before they can finish destroying the Mesh.

It's a near hopeless task, at least until Annmarie and her followers learn another secret.

Another group of Meshed have found the lost planet Paradise. Once the first planet humans settled in ThreeSys, Paradise was smashed out of orbit in a long-ago war, and now this Meshed faction plans to make the planet into a safe haven for their kind.

Annemarie, however, sees Paradise as little more than a base from which she can finally put her plans into motion. Meanwhile, of course, what nobody knows is that there's already something else on Paradise: an alien life form with its own plans for the humans of ThreeSys.

A complicated story
It's a complicated setup for an equally complicated story that mixes speculation on religion and the inequalities of an information society with biological horrors that could have come straight out of Ridley Scott's Alien.

Park holds these disparate elements together by concentrating her attention on Eve, a browbeaten young woman raised by Annemarie who now works as the older woman's assistant.

Although Eve finds herself thoroughly confused by human relations, she is a good observer of events, and Park keeps her growing knowledge and independence on a pace with the reader's increasing understanding of the complex politics of ThreeSys.

Even's eventual coming of age is not a new story, but it's a good structure to wrap the rest of the novel around. It also sets up one of the most disturbing endings I've read since Philip Jose Farmer's "Mother".

That's not the only disturbing thing in the book.

By making unsettling connections between drugs, virtual reality and religious faith. Park reverses the old Marxist axiom about religion being the opiate of the people, then explicitly links the private worlds of drugs and VR. By the end of the book she's mixing all three elements together at once, and it's scary how well they fit together.

The Annunciate is almost compulsively readable, but it's not an easy book. For all that Park distances us from the story -- setting it a long time from now on a planet far, far away -- I always felt dangers much closer to home moving beneath the surface.

Not only are there plenty of drugs and wild-eyed faith in 1999 America, but the gulf between the haves and have-nots of our information society is rapidly widening. Park's SF tropes don't exist, but the things she's based them on are frighteningly real.

In the end, this book made me profoundly uncomfortable. I suspect it'll do the same for most readers -- and if it does, that may make it a must-read.