Mindworlds
-
- $11.99
-
- $11.99
Publisher Description
How can you stop a conspiracy of telepaths? The alien Lyhhrt are powerful enough to read the human mind; if they find you know too much, they can erase your memory, or simply stop your heart. The normally peaceful Lyhhrt society has been splintered by technological change, the bitter legacy of their exploitation by the Zamos crime family. Now a few renegade Lyhhrt, driven mad by isolation from their group mind, seem to be planning terrible crimes--or are they again being used as deadly tools in someone else's scheme?
When the illicit corporation created by Zamos collapsed, it disrupted the lives of heroes as well as villains. With gambling dens shut down, gladiator Ned Gaddes has nowhere to fight. Beautiful Lorrice had hoped to sell her ESP talents to Zamos, but was forced to sell her body instead. And on the planet Khagodis, scholarly Hasso will be forced to leave his archives and unravel the shadowy web that has entangled their fate with the Lyhhrt's.
The struggle that ensues provides the ultimate test of their resources - Ned's savvy toughness, Lorrice's psychic insight, and the fact that even a gentle Khagodi like Hasso could go head-to-head with a dinosaur. Like the best science fiction, Mindworlds is simultaneously exciting and thought provoking. Gotlieb offers a satisfyingly complex look at the ambiguous consequences of toppling even the most evil of empires, and the sacrifices that ordinary people must make to prevent the vacuum of power from being filled by equally corrupt forces.
Ursula K. Le Guin found Gotlieb's earlier novel Flesh and Gold "dazzling," lit up by "sex, violence, intricate plotting, light-speed pacing, an amazing variety of aliens, touches of Philip K. Dick's sardonic humor and Cordwainer Smith's obstinate idealism." Its sequel, Violent Stars, was described in Maclean's as "above all a poet's novel.... Gotlieb's language lifts her book from exotic thriller to literary achievement." Mindworlds offers a resounding climax to the story that began in these celebrated novels.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
One part space opera of the old planetary-romance school and one part hard-boiled thriller, this final volume of Gotlieb's SF trilogy (after Flesh and Gold and Violent Stars) showcases the Canadian poet's ability to use the constraints of these subgenres like rhyme schemes to structure her varied and rich material. To accommodate the large cast of characters both new and old, the narrative follows three strands. The pugilist Ned Gattes and the telepath and former prostitute Lorrice are both looking for work now that the arenas and brothels once run by the defunct interstellar crime syndicate, the Zamos Corporation, are closed on their planet. They find themselves, along with the alien legal scholar Hasso, caught up in a conspiracy of gangsters and foreign agents trying to fill the vacuum left by the fall of the evil Zamos empire. While the parallels to post-Communist Russia offer food for thought, the multiple points of view never satisfyingly converge. The ubiquitous ESP powers allow for some lyrical and evocative flights of mental imagery, as well as intriguing difficulties for the crime solvers that, alas, remain underexploited. (Since evidence obtained by mind reading is not legally admissible, characters may know whodunit, but be unable to prove it.) Likewise, the author never fully explores the possibilities for paranoia implicit in a conspiracy that can read your thoughts. Fans may be disappointed that the novel, which works better as space opera than thriller, doesn't transcend either genre as well as the previous two books in the series. FYI:An SF literary award has been named for Gotlieb's first novel,Sunburst.