Necromancer

Necromancer is a science fiction novel by the American writer Gordon R. Dickson, published in 1962 and the prequel to his earlier novel Dorsai!.

The Chantry Guild is the book's invention and its argument, since its members believe that destruction is a creative act and that the technologies keeping the present form of humanity in place have to be removed before a new one can emerge. Formain is drawn into it by a book, Destruct, written by the guild's leader, and by the teaching of a man called Necromancer, and his education in the guild's philosophy is the substance of the novel rather than a set of action scenes. Dickson gives the guild a working system of what it calls alternate laws, which are closer to a discipline of the will than to machinery, and the book's interest is in the kind of person who would find that argument persuasive. It was issued under the title No Room for Man for about a decade before returning to its original name, and it was written before the novels that made Dickson famous for the Dorsai and the Childe Cycle.