Shrine Of Stars: Bk.3 (Confluence) - Hardcover

McAuley, Paul

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0575064293 ISBN 13: 9780575064294

Publisher: Gollancz, 1999

Synopsis

The final volume of this lusciously scenic quest for the past, which blends exoticism with dogmatic bureaucracy in a world crowded with wonders.

Ten million years in the future, humans have evolved into the God-like Preservers and have fled the Universe, but are still worshipped by those servant races they raised to intelligence and gifted the vast artificial world of Confluence. Yama, the Child of the River, has stumbled into the middle of a civil war. While the dispossessed peoples of Confluence hope that Yama may renew their world, he must discover the strength to fight not only his enemies without, but the enemy within.

About this title

Review:

Paul McAuley's Confluence trilogy seemed in its first volume, Child of the River, to be taking the reader through radically new spins on some fairly standard fantasy tropes: the hero Yama was found as an infant, floating in a container on a vast and mysterious river, acquired a magic sword and set out, reluctantly on his travels. He acquires a shrewd rat-boy squire and a wolfish barbarian warrior mistress, Tamora; gradually we realise that his exotic world is more rational than it seems. In the sequel, Ancients of Days, he discovers strange powers, and is pursued through a vast city, and down the river, by an inexorable enemy. Now, in Shrine of Stars, Tamora is dead, his squire is left behind, and Yama is a prisoner, not just of the sinister Doctor Dimas, but inside his own body:

"It was as if Yama's self was an island or castle of light surrounded by a restless flood of darkness both malevolent and sentient. Not only was it rising, but it was constantly sending out stealthy filaments and tentacles, constantly probing for weaknesses. Yama felt that if he gave way to it for a moment...then he would dissolve at once, like a flake of salt dropped in the Great River."

The Confluence trilogy is not fantasy at all, but sense-of-wonder science fiction revisited; McAuley gives us standard SF obsessions of the90s like nanotechnology, cosmology and the uplift of new intelligent species, but presents them not as ideas, but as lived sensuous realities. Shrine of Stars is the perfect end to a trilogy, a third volume that forces us to rethink, and reread, earlier volumes. --Roz Kaveney

Review:

"[A] marvelously sustained cosmogonic romance of the far future..."--John Clute, Hugo Award-winning writer, editor, critic, and science fiction scholar"A flavorful stew...the spectacle becomes colossal and the action reaches fever pitch."--"Washington Post Book World"A powerful epic that could be one of the most important in recent SF."--"Locus"Some books you read, and upon finishing realize that while it may have been good, you probably won't read it again. Others you know you will. Then there are the books which you not only instantly know you will read again, but will get more out of them the second time. "The Book of Confluence" belongs to this last category."--"The New York Review of Science Fiction"

About this edition

• Publisher: Gollancz
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0575064293
• ISBN 13: 9780575064294
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 352