http://yoyogodreviews.blogspot.com/2006/08/old-book.html ( )

"IN THE ULTIMATE CITY

He knew his name, Kyon. He wore the garb of a gardener - therefore he was a gardener. But that was all he knew. The city was a maze of wonders and terrors. The people were strangers; condescending and perhaps spiteful. Kyon had to do something, to go somewhere, but none would tell him. And it was important!

"It's a different sort of science fiction novel than one would expect of Lin Carter. Master of fantasy, master of other worlds, now discover Lin Carter, master of ominous projection, of future conjecture.

"Urbs, the ultimate city, was on the scales of history. It would be up to Kyon whether all it represented, the flowering of science, would be...

"FOUND WANTING."

Maybe Lin Carter should have stopped writing Edgar Rice Burroughs pastiches sooner. IMO 'Found Wanting' is his best book, and unfortunately one of his last. Only 'Madricardo' and 'Callipygia' would follow before his untimely death in February 1988, the same month his last book appeared.

The story is somewhat of an allegory - although Carter once professed he was not a fan of that form - with echoes of David Lindsay's 'A Voyage To Arcturus', George MacDonald's 'dreamworld' fantasies and Fletcher Pratt & L. Sprague de Camp's 'Land Of Unreason'.

Kyon's personal journey through the supercity of Urbs, at once his home as well as a strange land, is to find the secret of the supercity, its mysterious ruler the Ophide and his malevolent agents and the city's strange caste-like society, which lives a life of indolence for those at the top, benign servitude for those in the middle and bitterness for those at the bottom. ( )