Favorable Review: or, Making the Mos Eisley cantina look like a Drill Team

Joseph Moore of Yardsale of the Mind had weighed and measured the merits of THE HERMETIC MILLENNIA, and, by some kindly accident or quirk of inattention of his part, overlooks the flaws in the work and praised the merits.

His review is here: http://yardsaleofthemind.wordpress.com/2014/09/01/book-review-hermetic-millennia-status-report/

He says, in part:

Whoa.

I will assume you’ve read the first book here, so, if not, there are minor spoilers ahead.

Menelaus Montrose survives his duel with Blackie – sorry for the spoiler, there, but c’mon – and has retreated to the lair of cryonic tombs spread around the globe  he was building in Count to a Trillion. The Hyades aliens are coming in 10,500 years to enslave the earth. Montrose, true American cowboy and superlative genius that he is, figures humanity must stand and fight. The Hermeticists  merely want to engineer races of men worthy of being enslaved, for the Monument says that an enslaved race will eventually be freed if it turns out to have made it worth the trouble of travelling for 10 millennia to enslave.

In the same way as in that first book, the story is told mostly inside-out: As on his round-trip to V-886 Centari, Menelaus has been sleeping the centuries away, and so every new awakening is a mystery story where he has to catch up on what’s been happening.

Pellucid, his global AI,  hidden and distributed deep in the earth, has algorithms for waking him up: when events have reached a point where his personal touch is requires to set them straight. The Hermeticists, lead by Blackie Del Azarchel, have retreated to the far side of the moon, where they brood and plan and manipulate the races of man to their purposes. Through the centuries, Menelaus must awaken once in a while and have a classic Western showdown with a Hermeticist. So far, so good.

But something has gone very, very wrong.

Only 400 years remain until the enslaving aliens are to arrive, and the earth is a mess: an ice age has gripped the planet, and, except for some bald blue grave robbers who have inexplicably gotten past Montrose’s layers and layers of defenses to rob the tombs, no one seems to be around.  By some miracle,  no one recognizes him – he’s pretending to be a Beta Chimera, one of the past races of men. It is only a matter of time before he and the other Thaws are of no use to the robbers – and Motrose has to figure out what to do and how to do it before they are all murdered.

The chief ‘whoa’ of this book: Montrose has a standing offer to all the intelligent life on earth: come to the Tombs, and ride out the manipulations of the Hermeticists, to be thawed at some future date. This offer has resulted in the Tombs containing a collection of humanoid life forms that make the bar crowd at Mos Eisley look like a drill team. Each form, from Giants to Sylphs to Nymphs to Chimerae to Witches to Savants to Hormagaunts and so on, is the result of one or another of the Hermeticist’s attempts to control human development, and reflect the plans, biases and flaws of their creators. Each subspecies has its own languages and customs, and hatreds based on what prior species they conquered and what subsequent subspecies supplanted them. The Thaws awakened by the tomb robbers are a mix of these races. Montrose has managed to become the main translator for the Blue Men, who are apparently in charge of the tomb raiding. Thus, he gets to interview the various races, and we hear their stories. Wright is both playful and humorous as well as serious and scary in his incorporation of ideas current now and his extrapolation to where those ideas might lead, if the whole world were to commit to them.

In order to save them, Montrose has got to get them to pull together. He is honor bound to protect anyone who voluntarily entered the Tombs. Co-conspirators are recruited and schemes are hatched….

Of course, after the manner of its kind, we have another cliff hanger. And I only have to wait a week or three to see how it comes out.

So, go read Count to a Trillion and Hermetic Millennia! What are you waiting for?