The Sixth Feeling meets Planet of the Apes in a moving science fiction novel set so far in the future, humanity is fully gone and forgotten in Lawrence M. Schoen’s Barsk: The Elephant’s Graveyard

An historian who speaks using the inactive is ensnared by the past. A kid who seems no discomfort and who shouldn’t exist sees the near future. Between them are truths that may shake worlds.

Inside a distant future, no remnants of human beings stay, but their successors thrive through the entire galaxy. These are the offspring about Barsk: The Elephants’ Graveyard of humanity’s genius-animals uplifted into walking, speaking, sentient beings. The Fant are one such species: anthropomorphic elephants ostracized by various other races, and way back when exiled to the rainy ghetto world of Barsk. There, they develop medicines where all species right now depend. Probably the most coveted of these drugs is definitely koph, which allows a small amount of users to connect to the lately deceased and learn their secrets.

To break the Fant’s control of koph, an offworld darkness group attempts to push the Fant to surrender their knowledge. Jorl, a Fant Speaker with the lifeless, is normally compelled to question his deceased best friend, who years ago mysteriously committed suicide. By doing this, Jorl unearths a secret the powers that be would prefer to keep buried forever. In the meantime, his inactive friend’s kid, a actually challenged young Fant named Pizlo, is driven by disturbing visions to take his 1st unsteady steps toward an uncertain long term.