Lantern Road is a rousing far-future adventure, a love story, and a literary work brimming with beautiful if disturbing imagery. It has been compared to some of the best work of Ursula LeGuin, Octavia Butler, and Cordwainer Smith.
Shift to a terrifying, aching-heartedly far distant future, in an alien realm that resembles Medieval Japan.
Old Earth has long ago been forgotten—is even thought perhaps to have never existed. The title refers to the Imperial Highway that circles the world’s great island in eternal night. Full of foot traffic with swinging, hurrying lanterns of all colors, it evokes the galaxies above. It is a wealthy, but violent and cruel world, the galaxy’s storehouse of fungal medicines and perfumes. As inward and backward as it is, cut off from the outside, it is a commercial powerhouse in a universe as hostile as it is beautiful.
A human slave, Jory, and his alien mistress, the beautiful Ramy of Oba, are discovered in a forbidden tryst. They face death together by the classic twin short-swords, inscribed with nursery rhymes doubling as suicide poems, that are gifted to lovers in this dark, faraway world run by a samurai-like warrior cult. At the same time, the laquered and moonlit court of Lord Ramyon is replete with centuries of poetry for every occasion. Life and death are poetic. There are even poignant, linked nursery rhymes engraved in the shiny blades of paired suicide-swords for lovers.
What will become of the doomed lovers? Will their Lantern Road be one of death, or will they find their way to the stars?
What will become of the doomed lovers?
Will their Lantern Road be one of death, or will they find their way to the stars?
Description:
Lantern Road is a rousing far-future adventure, a love story, and a literary work brimming with beautiful if disturbing imagery. It has been compared to some of the best work of Ursula LeGuin, Octavia Butler, and Cordwainer Smith.
Shift to a terrifying, aching-heartedly far distant future, in an alien realm that resembles Medieval Japan.
Old Earth has long ago been forgotten—is even thought perhaps to have never existed. The title refers to the Imperial Highway that circles the world’s great island in eternal night. Full of foot traffic with swinging, hurrying lanterns of all colors, it evokes the galaxies above. It is a wealthy, but violent and cruel world, the galaxy’s storehouse of fungal medicines and perfumes. As inward and backward as it is, cut off from the outside, it is a commercial powerhouse in a universe as hostile as it is beautiful.
A human slave, Jory, and his alien mistress, the beautiful Ramy of Oba, are discovered in a forbidden tryst. They face death together by the classic twin short-swords, inscribed with nursery rhymes doubling as suicide poems, that are gifted to lovers in this dark, faraway world run by a samurai-like warrior cult. At the same time, the laquered and moonlit court of Lord Ramyon is replete with centuries of poetry for every occasion. Life and death are poetic. There are even poignant, linked nursery rhymes engraved in the shiny blades of paired suicide-swords for lovers.
What will become of the doomed lovers? Will their Lantern Road be one of death, or will they find their way to the stars?
What will become of the doomed lovers?
Will their Lantern Road be one of death, or will they find their way to the stars?