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Read The Nonborn King (1984)

The Nonborn King (1984)

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4.14 of 5 Votes: 3
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ISBN
0345314212 (ISBN13: 9780345314215)
Language
English
Publisher
del rey

The Nonborn King (1984) - Plot & Excerpts

‘The dominion of the Tanu has been broken. In the aftermath of cataclysm, Aiken Drum seizes his hour to grasp control of the Pliocene world.There are those, human and Tanu, who rally to him – and those who fear and hate him. The Grand Master, Elizabeth... the mad Felice... the goblin hordes of the Firvulag all thrust into a violent and stormy struggle for irresistible power.’Blurb from the 1983 Pan paperback editionIn the third volume of May’s ‘Saga of The Exiles’ we join our heroes in the aftermath of the flooding of the Mediterranean basin which decimated the Tanu and upset the power balance within The Many Coloured Land.Aiken Drum, the diminutive trickster, is quick to seize control of the situation and of the Tanu throne, taking as his bride, Mercy Rosmar, widowed since the flood in which her husband Nodon Battlemaster disappeared, his body never found.Meanwhile in Pliocene Florida we join – for the first time – the exiled Rebel operants, led by Marc Remillard, disgraced Grandmaster of the Galactic Concilium.Man has been attempting to discover a world where a race has developed a Coadunate Mind in order that he and his children can be rescued by them, after which they plan to stage a coup.The rest of the rebels do not share Marc’s faith on the search and his children are secretly planning to travel to Europe in order to create a device at the Time Gate capable of taking them back to Twenty-Second Century Earth.Elsewhere, further evidence is discovered that suggests that the Tanu and Firvulag, through interbreeding with humanity, will become the progenitors of the Human Race itself.Old taboos are breaking down. Sugoll, leader of the mutated Howlers has resettled his people in a less radioactive area and, on the advice of a Tanu geneticist, allowed a thousand of his single women (gross mutations who cloak themselves in psi-generated visions of voluptuous beauty) to mate with itinerant humans who literally have no place to go following the ransacking of a Tanu city by the Firvulag.Many of the traditionalists are predicting the coming of the Nightfall War, which signals the end of the world.Nodon, it transpires, was not dead, but was washed ashore in Africa and tended by a crazed human/Firvulag hybrid, who manages to seduce her paralysed patient and becomes pregnant.Like Peter F Hamilton, May is a consummate juggler of the multi-character storylines and simultaneously manages to seamlessly weld what is in effect a fantasy setting (providing a scientific rationale for the gnomes, trolls, ogres, elves and fairies of legend) with the people and the scientific marvels of the Twenty-Second Century. There is also a fair amount of humour, which cleverly serves to accentuate some of the horrors which all three races perpetuate upon themselves and each other.One could argue that this is perhaps the weakest of the four books and perhaps suffers from a surfeit of characters and political machinations. On the other hand one cannot fault the characterisation since even the minor characters appear as fully rounded characters with histories and tales of their own.I suspect these novels, along with the superb ‘Intervention’ which tells the tale of the emergence of human metapsychic abilities and the perhaps weaker trilogy which takes us through the Metapsychic Rebellion, will be reassessed as an exemplary body of work, ingenious in its concept and construction.

What do You think about The Nonborn King (1984)?

Originally published on my blog here in September 1998.The third of May's Saga of the Exiles follows on from the climactic events of Golden Torc, which ended with the Atlantic flooding in past Gibraltar to begin the creation of the modern Mediterranean. The three communities, Tanu, human and Firvulag, are all seeking to rebuild in various ways, the different factions among them trying to use the chaos - coming more from the deaths of a large proportion of the Tanu ruling class than from the other damage done - to seize power and influence events.The major factions are the main body of the Tanu, led by the extraordinary human Aiken Drum (a test-tube baby, the non-born king of the title); the traditionalist Tanu, looking for a return to the old ways of before the arrival of the humans; the Firvulag, who escaped from the catastrophe relatively unscathed but in uneasy alliance with Drum; the Howlers, deformed Firvulag who have finally discovered that the radioactive stone around their country is causing their problem and desiring re-integration with the main body of Firvulag society; a peace faction, led by the human operant Elizabeth; and the remnants of the Lowlives, human rebels against the Tanu, who have discovered that the aliens are poisoned by iron.Into the political bickering of these well-established factions erupts a new force. Marc Remeillard is familiar to those who have read May's later published (though earlier conceived) novels, Intervention and the Galactic Milieu trilogy. I don't remember his introduction into the story being confusing the first time I read The Non-Born King, without the benefit of reading the later books, but I can easily see that it might cause a great deal of difficulty for a reader. The story is that after the rebellion's failure (detailed in the Galactic Milieu trilogy), a band of the metapsychics involved escaped through the time gate, lead by Remeillard, who was the main instigator of the rebellion. (Hence, to the people of the Milieu he is known as Abaddon, or the Adversary.) This group settled in Pleistocene Florida, where they have been searching for the early civilizations of the other species who make up the Galactic Milieu. The disorganisation of Tanu society has now convinced some of the younger members of the group that they can take advantage of the confusion to take over the time gate and construct a mechanism to enable them to return to the future.As The Many-Coloured Land was a preparation for the dramatic events of The Golden Torc, this novel is a scene setter for the climax of the series in The Adversary. The plot is less exciting, though the alien politics are interesting. The focus of the book is on establishing new characters and deepening our understanding of old ones. This process does reveal some limitations in May's ability to create characters that differ in depth as well as on the surface; many of the alien characters are extremely sketchy.
—Simon Mcleish

This series would make a wonderful graphic novel—it has lots of prehistoric beasties, action-packed battle scenes, dramatic psychic powers, and lots of opinionated & quirky characters. Humans from our future have become part of the Galactic Milieu, a kind of Federation of those races with psychic powers of various sorts. But not everyone has what it takes to fit into this system and others are unhappy with the direction that their society is moving. Some of the most disgruntled take a one-way trip through a time portal into the Pliocene era. You can imagine the sort of people who would not fit in to this future—those who really don’t care to conform. And the Milieu has made a ruling that no one with advanced psychic powers is able to take advantage of the time gate. What could possibly go wrong?Upon arriving in the Pliocene, these non-psychic humans find themselves taken into custody by an alien race, the Tanu, who also fled their own world in order to do things their own way. By using neck-torcs of various colours they are able to wield psi powers too. The human “deliveries” from the time portal have meant that the Tanu have a distinct advantage over their traditional enemies, the Firvulag (deformed gnomish people who have similar powers without the hardware).The political machinations are convoluted and, humans being what they are, there are many deviations from the Tanu tradition & system of honour. (As Tana French says in her novel In The Woods, “Humans are feral and ruthless.”) None demonstrate this as clearly as Aiken Drum, the self-proclaimed Nonborn King—created in a laboratory, without family, but with blinding ambition and late-developing psychic talents, Drum attempts to take over the Pliocene world. He faces opposition from all three races, none of whom fancy being ruled by a psychopathic upstart human.As with the previous two books, female characters continue to play major roles in the action, if not in the warfare, and strong women of various races cause Aiken Drum some major headaches and sleepless nights. Add to the mix one last group of future asylum seekers (who attempted to overthrow the Milieu and ended up retreating to the past) and the whole situation becomes precarious. There are few pauses in the action and lots of exploration of inter-race relations. I definitely want to read the fourth book, The Adversary, and also to find May’s other books sets in this universe, Jack the Bodiless, Diamond Mask, and Magnificat.
—Wanda

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