Cluster

About the Cluster series

In the Cluster universe, a person's life force — their Kirlian aura — can be transferred across interstellar distances into another body, human or alien, letting a single consciousness inhabit wildly different physical forms and even species over the course of one adventure. Flint of Outworld, a young man from a backward human colony, is recruited by a dying interstellar civilization to travel this way through a hundred-world galactic cluster, occupying alien bodies to broker alliances and fight covert wars against the Andromeda galaxy's forces, who are attempting to seize the cluster from within. The premise lets Anthony indulge his fascination with genuinely alien biology and psychology — each new body Flint (and later other Kirlian travelers) inhabits comes with its own sensory experience, reproductive customs, and moral logic, explored with real curiosity rather than treated as set dressing.

Across five novels published between 1977 and 1982, the series widens from Flint's personal mission into a genuinely galaxy-spanning conflict involving multiple protagonists, competing empires, and the Kirlian transfer technology's implications for identity, loyalty, and what it even means to be a single continuous self when your body is interchangeable. It's ambitious, idea-driven 1970s science fiction that treats body-swapping as a serious philosophical premise rather than just a plot device, wrapped around a fast-moving espionage-and-warfare plot.

How to read this series

Publication order, starting with Cluster. The five novels advance a single ongoing galactic conflict, with later books following different Kirlian-aura travelers whose stories connect to and build on events from earlier volumes, so reading in sequence is recommended.

Each book does shift focus to different characters and alien civilizations, giving the series an episodic, exploratory feel even as the larger plot against the Andromeda-galaxy threat advances — so newer readers won't feel completely lost jumping in, but will get more out of starting from the beginning.