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The Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author of Tales of Nevèrÿon "continues to surprise and delight" with this thought-provoking epic fantasy (The New York Times). One of the few in Nevèrÿon who can read and write, pryn has saddled a wild dragon and taken off from a mountain ledge. Self-described as an adventurer, warrior, and thief, in her journey pryn will meet plotting merchants, sinister aristocrats, half-mad villagers, and a storyteller who claims to have invented writing itself. The land of Nevèrÿon is mired in a civil war over slavery, and pryn will also find herself--for a while--fighting alongside Gorgik the Liberator, from whom she will learn the cunning she needs as she journeys further and further south in search of a sunken city; for at history's dawn, some dangers even dragons cannot protect you from. The second volume in Samuel R. Delany's Return to Nevèrÿon cycle, Neveryóna is the longer of its two full-length novels. (The other is The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals.) An intriguing meditation on the power of language, the rise of cities, and the dawn of myth, markets, and money, it is a truly wonder-filled adventure. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Samuel R. Delany including rare images from his early career. … (more)
User reviews
What other author seemlessly weaves quotations and ideas from Hannah Arendt, Susan Sontag and Jane Jacobs, a character with a slavery fetish and dragons? The answer is no other author.
In the book's first appendix, Delany carries forward the scholarly conceit he had established for the "Culhar' Fragment" that is supposed to be the ancient basis for these stories. This time he adds to his fictional scholars the participation of an actual academic Charles Hoequist Jr., who wrote a response to the appendix of the first volume. Hoequist telegraphs that he is "in on the joke" by means of a passing reference to the Necronomicon in his first letter!
There is also a second appendix, where Delaney is unusually open and detailed (for a novelist) regarding not only his sources but the particular uses he has put them to. I would never have guessed that the book took its principal structure from a film, given how very concerned it is with text and inscription, and how it explicitly and repeatedly references the "linguistic turn" in twentieth-century philosophy.