Incarnations of Immortality

About the Incarnations of Immortality series

Death, Time, Fate, War, Nature, Evil, and Good are not just abstractions in this series — they are jobs, held by mortals who take on the office (and its immense, world-shaping power) the way someone might inherit a business. Each novel follows a different ordinary person's recruitment into one of these cosmic offices: a suicidal man becomes the new Death and must learn to collect souls with fairness rather than cruelty; a woman with the second sight of Fate must weave the threads of countless lives; the reluctant new War must decide whether conflict can ever be wielded justly. The offices exist in tension with one another and with Satan, the incumbent Evil, whose long game to seize control of Heaven itself threads through the individual books toward a shared endgame.

Piers Anthony treats each office-holder's transformation as a serious meditation on what that abstraction actually means in practice — Death's book is genuinely about mortality and mercy, Nature's about ecological balance and motherhood, Evil's about temptation and the seductive logic of villainy — while keeping the pace and incident of commercial fantasy adventure. Published between 1983 and 1990, with a later addendum in 2007, the seven core novels can be read as a loose ensemble cast: characters who are protagonists in one book reappear as supporting cast, rivals, or love interests in others, and the series builds toward a shared confrontation between the Incarnations and Satan that reframes everything that came before it.

How to read this series

Publication order, starting with On a Pale Horse (Death's book). The seven core novels form a genuine narrative arc: characters and plot threads carry across books, and the confrontation with Satan that builds through the series pays off across multiple volumes, so reading out of order will spoil major reveals.

Under a Velvet Cloak (2007), following the Incarnation of Night, was published many years after the original seven and functions as a late addendum to the series rather than a numbered entry in the core arc — most readers treat the first seven books (1983-1990) as the complete story and consider Under a Velvet Cloak optional bonus material.