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Fantasy. Fiction. HTML:In West of Eden and Winter in Eden, master novelist Harry Harrison broke new ground with his most ambitious project ever. He brought to vivid life the world as it might have been, where dinosaurs survived, where their intelligent descendents, the Yilane, challenged humans for mastery of the Earth, and where the human Kerrick, a young hunter of the Tanu tribe, grew among the dinosaurs and rose to become their most feared enemy. Now, in Return to Eden, Harrison brings the epic trilogy to a stunning conclusion. After Kerrick rescues his people from the warlike Yilane, they find a safe haven on an island and there begin to rebuild their shattered lives. But with fierce predators stalking the forests, how long can these unarmed human outcasts hope to survive? And, of course, Kerrick cannot forget Vainte, his implacable Yilane enemy. She's been cast out from her kind, under sentence of death, but how long will her banishment last? For her strange attraction to Kerrick has turned into a hatred even more powerful than her instincts - an obsession that compels her to hunt down Kerrick and kill him...… (more)
User reviews
Series hero Kerrick wants his son to learn the Yilanè language so there will be more than one human who can
Enge, the leader of the Daughters of Life, tries to ensure the religious order’s survival. They are the first such in Yilan history but despised and feared and termed the Daughters of Death for their refusal to drop dead as is the custom when ordered by the leader of a Yilanè city. Founded on something like Buddhist principles and the first to exhibit to others of their kind, they are threatened not only by some members’ too rigid adherence to monastic contemplation but an inability to procreate with the intelligent, but not Yilanè-enough race inhabiting the area around their city.
And the greater question is which race will end up with the Earth – the sophisticated bioengineers -- but caste-bound -- Yilanè or tool using humans who, unlike the Yilanè, universally use language.
Kerrick, the only person in this world with intimate knowledge of both races, is the classic caught-between-two-worlds figure. Even at the story’s end, his ambivalence is never entirely vanquished. Harrison ends his series on a complete enough resolution even though the final climactic scenes are a bit too reliant on coincidence in order for Harrison to end this fast paced volume, the shortest of the series.
Again, this novel’s original hardcover version features interesting and integral line drawings by Bill Sanderson. And, again, while an introduction makes it possible to read just this volume, I’d recommend reading the series from the beginning to get the full nuance, grandeur, and emotion of Kerrick’s life from small boy to wise old man.