The Fifth Sacred Thing (Maya Greenwood): 1 - Softcover

Starhawk

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0553373803 ISBN 13: 9780553373806

Publisher: Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, 1994

Synopsis

Imagine a world without poverty, hunger, or hatred, where a rich culture honors its diverse mix of races, religions, and heritages, and the Four Sacred Things that sustain all life - earth, air, fire, and water - are valued unconditionally. Now imagine the opposite: a nightmare world in which an authoritarian regime polices an apartheid state, access to food and water is restricted to those who obey the corrupt official religion, women are property of their husbands or the state, and children are bred for prostitution and war. The best and worst of our possible futures are poised to clash in twenty-first-century California, and the outcome rests on the wisdom and courage of one clan caught in the conflict. Ninety-eight-year-old Maya has helped shape the ecumenical culture of the North by reviving and re-creating an earth-based spiritual tradition. Madrone, the granddaughter of Maya's longtime lovers, is a healer trying to thwart recurring epidemics that she suspects are biological warfare waged by the tyrannical South. Bird, Maya's grandson, returns from ten years in a Southern prison with warnings of impending invasion and an urgent request for help from the resistance in the hills. When Madrone travels south to aid the rebels and search for a cure to the deadly viruses, she finds herself fighting for her own life alongside battle-weary guerrillas and beautiful pirates. Meanwhile, in the North debates rage about how to repel the invaders. "All war is first waged in the imagination, first conducted to limit our dreams and visions, " Maya says, and warns that by killing their enemies, they may themselves become transformed by vioience and destroy all they have built. Bird champions heralternative vision and becomes a leader of the faction calling for nonviolent resistance. When he is captured and pressured to cooperate with the enemy, the fate of the North hangs in the balance. Richly imagined and beautifully written, The Fifth Sacred Thing is a powerful novel o

About this title

Review:

"This is wisdom wrapped in drama."--Tom Hayden, California state senator

"Starhawk makes the jump to fiction quite smoothly with this memorable first novel."--Locus

"Totally captivating . . . a vision of the paradigm shift that is essential for our very survival as a species on this planet."--Elinor Gadon, author of The Once and Future Goddess

"This strong debut fits well against feminist futuristic, utopic, and dystopic works by the likes of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Ursula LeGuin, and Margaret Atwood."--Library Journal

From the Back Cover:

It is San Francisco, 2048. Priestess Maya Greenwood lives in a tight-knit community run on ecological principles, without poverty, hunger, or hatred, where a rich culture honours its diverse mix of races, religions and sexual orientations, and the Four Sacred Things that sustain life – earth, air, fire and water – are valued above all. The Fifth is Spirit.

In this, Starhawk’s first novel, Maya Greenwood suddenly finds her idyllic world threatened by invasion from the militaristic state to the north: a nightmare place where a totalitarian regime polices a corrupt apartheid state. How can her community, which doesn’t believe in violence, defend themselves?

California is poised to become a battleground between two clashing cultures, and the outcome rests on the wisdom and courage of the community, and particularly in the strength and vision of the extraordinary Priestess Maya. In the tradition of Margaret Atwood’s 'The Handmaid’s Tale', Starhawk’s visionary novel creates a complex fictional reality about love and war, freedom and slavery, and the future of the living planet.

About this edition

• Publisher: Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0553373803
• ISBN 13: 9780553373806
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 496