Howard Hendrix thinks big. His new novel, Better Angels, is a wild, everything-and-the-kitchen-sink mix of fungal drugs, altered consciousness, quantum space travel and social commentary. It's hard to follow at times, but somehow he keeps it all on track.

Hendrix says he wrote Better Angels as a prequel to his first two books, Lightpaths and Standing Wave, in order "to help me figure out how exactly it was Jiro Yamaguchi ended up in a Box and Michael Dalke (a/k/a Hugh Manatee) ended up in a Tank, among many other things."

Mind you, I was frequently confused, but this was almost always due to trying to wrap my brain around strange ideas, and not from any sort of muddled writing.

And the ideas are brain-warping. Better Angels follows five major characters over 30 years of journeying through time, space and consciousness.

Jacinta Larkin is an ethnobotanist who has joined a South American Indian tribe of "ghost people" in the hope of using their sacred mushrooms for space travel. Meanwhile, Paul Larkin, her embittered brother, makes a fortune by deriving a drug from the mushroom, only to discover a secret conspiracy.

Mike Dalke is a brain-damaged historian learning to exploit the potential of the internet, while Jiro Yamaguchi battles bona fide paranoia while seeking a place for himself in the world. Rounding out the heavily academic cast, Lydia Fabro is busy trying to preserve her paleontological career in an increasingly fundamentalist America.

All of these characters are wildly different in their viewpoints, goals and ultimate fates. Jacinta, in particular, spends most of the novel in deep space near the heart of the galaxy -- but Hendrix skillfully manipulates the common threads between them to keep his story coherent.

The most important of these connecting threads is KL-235, the consciousness-expanding drug that Paul synthesized from the sacred mushrooms of the "ghost people." One way or another, KL-235 changes the lives of all the characters, whether they use it, abuse it or simply try to explain how it does what it does.

You can't help but think of Philip K. Dick when you mix science fiction and heavy drug use. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a host of Dickian elements -- the increasingly repressive society of the Christian States of America, the nature of godhead and the shifting nature of reality -- crawl through this novel.

Dick + Heinlein
However, Hendrix has more than one SF visionary at hand to draw from. As much Dick as there is in Better Angels, there's nearly as much vintage Heinlein in Hendrix's concern with humanity's need to leave the homeworld to ensure its own long-term survival.

Over and above a nice tip of the cap to Heinlein's The Door Into Summer and other classics of the tradition, the idea of expansion permeates the book. At its heart, once again, is the metaphor of the sacred mushroom which must send out spores if it and its environment are to survive.

This blend of SF concerns is what keeps Better Angels running smoothly on the narrative rails where a more exclusively psychedelic book would get lost in the clouds. Hendrix flies high with strange visions and wordplay, then brings it all under control by applying Heinlein's plot logic and clear prose style.

No matter how weird things get for the characters, no matter how paranoid and disconnected from reality (or sometimes cross-connected to it) they get, Hendrix is always there to give his readers a clear image of their experiences.

By the way, Hendrix's wordplay deserves special mention. There's a constant barrage of punning, not for humor's sake but as a tool to help author and reader alike get at new meanings for old words.

Although this kind of writing needs to be read very slowly and with great care, it makes Better Angels a difficult but extremely rewarding book. In short, Howard Hendrix has written an exceptional novel that I enthusiastically recommend.