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Fantasy. Fiction. HTML: Paradise Lost In the future there is no want, no war, no disease nor ill-timed death. The world is a paradise�??and then, in a moment, it ends. The council that controls the Net falls out and goes to war. Everywhere people who have never known a moment of want or pain are left wondering how to survive. But scattered across the face of the earth are communities which have returned to the natural life of soil and small farm. In the village of Raven's Mill, Edmund Talbot, master smith and unassuming historian, finds that all the problems of the world are falling in his lap. Refugees are flooding in, bandits are roaming the woods, and his former lover and his only daughter struggle through the Fallen landscape. Enemies, new and old, gather like jackals around a wounded lion. But what the jackals do not know is that while old he may be, this lion is far from death. And hidden in the past is a mystery that has waited until this time to be revealed. You cross Edmund Talbot at your peril, for a smith is not all he once was. . . . At the publisher's request, this title is sold without DRM (Digital Rights Management).… (more)
User reviews
The rest of the novel deals with a community of people who had been reenactors and actually had physical resources to survive--and later, thrive--in this not-so-brave, not-so-new world. Much emphasis on the nobility of the warrior, who places self between danger and community, as is not uncommon in Ringo's work. Once you get past some of the more aggressively right-wing rhetoric, an enjoyable escapist tale.
I didn't get past the child-rearing passage. I think that Mr Ringo may be himself useless at child rearing but he would be surprised at the amount of men that can and do do it successfully - and don't find it as tedious as I find
(Sorry, I know this is fiction but it just got me).
Then again, when the next book comes out I'll be on the look out for it. And I may go back and look for some of his other works. So, overall I couldn't have found it too bad.
With a monitoring Mother computer to keep everyone safe and a thirteen member council to monitor Mother, everything should be serene and peaceful.... Except suddenly it isn't. The Council takes sides and goes to war, dragging the peaceful world along. For a population with no power except that commanded by the Council, no roads, no food supplies, and no survival skills to speak of, life is suddenly very, very difficult. The only hope? Small and scattered groups of reenactors.
This is the story - mainly - of Raven't Mill, a tiny dot on the surface of the Earth, and of Duke Edmund, Daneh, Rachel, Herzer and Bast. If they can't hold out, humanity as we know it is pretty much doomed.