Picture of author.

Sterling E. Lanier (1927–2007)

Autor(a) de Hiero's Journey

21+ Works 1,150 Membros 15 Reviews 2 Favorited

About the Author

Séries

Obras de Sterling E. Lanier

Associated Works

The Oxford Book of Fantasy Stories (1994) — Contribuinte — 190 cópias
Analog 1 (1963) — Contribuinte — 155 cópias
Sherlock Holmes Through Time and Space (1984) — Contribuinte — 149 cópias
Alfred Hitchcock Presents: A Month of Mystery (1968) — Contribuinte — 120 cópias
Sorcerers! (1986) — Contribuinte — 98 cópias
A Treasury of American Horror Stories (1985) — Contribuinte — 94 cópias
Isaac Asimov's Magical Worlds of Fantasy, Volume 9: Atlantis (1988) — Contribuinte — 73 cópias
Realms of Darkness (1985) — Contribuinte — 44 cópias
Horses! (1994) — Contribuinte — 40 cópias
Seaserpents! (1989) — Contribuinte — 37 cópias
Shangri-La (1982) — Contribuinte, algumas edições29 cópias
Worlds of If Science Fiction 152, January/February 1971 (Vol. 20, No. 9) (1971) — Contribuinte, algumas edições11 cópias

Etiquetado

Conhecimento Comum

Nome de batismo
Lanier, Sterling Edmund
Data de nascimento
1927-12-18
Data de falecimento
2007-06-28
Sexo
male
Nacionalidade
USA
Local de nascimento
New York, New York, USA
Local de falecimento
Sarasota, Florida, USA
Locais de residência
Maryland, USA
Educação
Harvard University (1951)
Ocupação
research historian
editor
sculptor
novelist

Membros

Resenhas

This book was okay, it had a few problematic bits and some interesting ideas in it. However, it was long and seemed overwritten. Uninteresting characters had conversations that went on for pages where they could have been edited way down. The book (actually an omnibus of two novels) was very Tolkienesque.
The main character, Hiero Desteen, spent a lot of time wandering around the world. This too seemed to take too long and introduced in several places creatures and monsters that resulted in nothing. Another weakness was that the author kept introducing new types of mutants instead of trying to build on a few. I wanted to know more about the Howlers and especially the Gliths. The two Gliths, one in each novel, are summarily killed and the Howlers are essentially orcs.
There were good ideas in here though such as the House, a titanic skyscraper-sized psychic mutant fungus colony that had the drive to grow over the entire face of the world. The Unclean, a brotherhood of psychic mutants controlling the other mutant types, trying to seek this thing out and then getting lead back into this thing was a plot point that I thought was clever.
The problematic elements were, fortunately, few but still unwelcome. The first was the age of the heroin and love-interest who is described as a girl which does not stop the protagonist from bedding her. In the second novel, her age is specified as seventeen. Another troublesome incident occurs when the girl-love-interest essentially prostitutes Hiero out to a bird-woman-mutant (a people that seemed to be at least somewhat modeled after elves) for a necklace which is glossed over as he found her strangely attractive anyway. He had been drugged during the encounter. The last was simply a sexist crack at a "pretty" military officer on the eve of battle.
The problematic bits aside, the book was okay. The battles were sometimes good but not that exciting, I've read better. The two novels, especially the first, could stand to be shorter and more to the point as the plots are not that complex. My final complaint is that the second novel leaves a major revelation about the main character wide open. It seems these two novels were a part of a trilogy but the third book never materialized, at least here anyway.
Would I recommend this book? Not really unless you were really hurting for some far-flung post-apocalypse swords and psionics adventure fiction. Otherwise, I think the reader might get bogged down in endless world-building tangents and dull conversations.
… (mais)
 
Marcado
Ranjr | Jul 13, 2023 |
A post apocalyptic adventure novel about a priest-warrior from northwest Canada sent to the south to find out about computers. Because of his ability to read minds and project thoughts, he accumulates friends and engages in enemies. A common plot of humanities people fighting technical people, who use machines to increase their psychic powers. Actually, this is a good read and suitable for front porch or beach reading times.
 
Marcado
hadden | outras 6 resenhas | Jul 11, 2020 |
I loved the first Hiero book (Hiero's Journey), so I bought this in hardcover, but I was very disappointed. I like my heroes to be heroic, but in this one, Hiero,who was truly heroic in in the first book, is deprived of his mental powers and left wandering a desert. As the title implies, he does have faithful friends who help him, but it is till frustrating. Also, as in some other sequels, the beginning feels it necessary to undo the prospective happy ending of the first book, which I also dislike.… (mais)
 
Marcado
antiquary | outras 2 resenhas | Feb 9, 2017 |
I found a battered old pocket paperback of Hiero's Journey by Sterling Lanier on the sale shelves for donated and withdrawn books at the public library. I wouldn't have given the ugly orange thing a second glance if I hadn't remembered it being listed in Appendix N of the original Dungeonmaster's Guide. So I spent my four bits and satisfied my curiosity.

The thing really is written in the episodic adventure style that is captured by pen-and-paper fantasy roleplaying, but the genre isn't sword and sorcery. Instead, it's a far-future post-apocalyptic scenario of the kind set out for play in the old Gamma World game. The foregone apocalypse is called "The Death," and evidently included nuclear and biological warfare. While there is a lot of physical fighting in the story, at least an equal share of attention is given to psychic powers and conflicts, with telepathy, divination, and various forms of mind-control practiced both by and against the protagonists.

There is an impressive diversity of new fauna (and suitably displaced flora) in this imagined future, many of which have their own psychic abilities. The heroes include a domesticated moose ("morse") of relatively high intelligence and what amounts to a talking bear, although the speech is all telepathy.

The Hiero of the title is a "Secondary Priest-Exorcist, Primary Rover and Senior Killman" who has been sent to find a fabled "computer" in a dead city beyond the Inland Sea (the former Great Lakes of North America). Hiero and the fellow denizens of his home abbey in the Metz Confederacy are of First Nations descent, while his eventual love interest and adventuring comrade Luchare is a black princess from Dalwah to the southeast. The only characters that are specified as white men are villains in the story, both savages and techno-magi of the Dark Brotherhood, but ideological racism is conspicuous by its absence from the story, unless you count the mutated sub-human races of the "Unclean."

The narrative voice rarely, but repeatedly, engages in a too-knowing relation of details in terms of the "ancient" knowledge of a 20th-century reader. For those who like this sort of thing, there is a lot more of it in a largely superfluous glossary appended to the novel. The pace of the book accelerates towards the end, and there is palatable narrative closure, despite the fact that the author went on to write a couple of sequels.
… (mais)
3 vote
Marcado
paradoxosalpha | outras 6 resenhas | Jan 22, 2016 |

Listas

Prêmios

You May Also Like

Associated Authors

Estatísticas

Obras
21
Also by
18
Membros
1,150
Popularidade
#22,332
Avaliação
½ 3.7
Resenhas
15
ISBNs
32
Idiomas
5
Favorito
2

Tabelas & Gráficos