The Ankh (The Ankh Trilogy Book 1)

The Ankh Trilogy is the story of a young oarsman on a clanboat on a remote planet called Islandia, a colony world that has been separated from earth for more than four hundred years. Islandia is a water world filled with tens of thousands of small islands, none large enough to establish an earth-like civilization. In order to survive, the colonists have retreated to a simpler life style centered on island villages and family clanboats. Life was predictable for Jonny Oarboy he encountered an Ares, an Autonomous-Robotic Explorer Scout. This AI scout was an advanced avatar for the Ankh, a society of mental scholars who traveled the galaxy studying the many life forms created by the mighty IS, the source of all that exist. After a chance encounter, the Ares, soon to be named Talo by the young man takes on the role of teacher to the insatiably curious oarsman, whose primary question was always, €œHow do things work?€
This bond and dedication to learning led Jonny Oarboy to become Jonathon McKinnah, founder of the movement to return humans to their rightful domain, interstellar space. Jonathon and the woman he loves, Marcia and a band of faithful followers set out to reopen the labs at Gruenwald and began the long and tedious process of reeducating the humans on Islandia about their heritage of human space exploration.
The first book of the trilogy, Islandia, the Lost Colony, detailed those extraordinary first steps from a primitive clan boat and village society to their first flight on an FTL space craft developed with the aid of the seemingly omniscient Talo. After overcoming the objections of the Ankh over the use of the FTL drive, Jonathon€s next goal was to return to the mother world, the mystical Earth. This journey and the near-death encounter with the powers that ruled earth is detailed in the second book of the trilogy, Earth, Flight of The Clanship. His near disastrous encounter with a ravenous Earth led Jonathon to form the Constitutional Confederations of Planets, an organization of Earth€s other colony worlds. The book closes with the humans€ first encounter with the Muhyba, an alien hive society bent on conquering or destroying the young Confederation. The story of the war with the Muhyba and the maturing of the Constitutional Confederations of Planets is the subject of the third book in the series, Newhope, The Muhyba War.