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Nebula Awards Best Novel (nominee)
Philip K Dick Award Best Book
First published in 1985, this legendary and still distinctive novel may attract new fans, although the postnuclear-war theme has become somewhat dated. Technology has vanished in a barbaric, 22nd-century California run by a Sidney Greenstreet lookalike messiah, Norton Jaybush, who boasts a fancifully colossal "night club of the damned" in Venice and his own Holy City in Irvine. His young hippie followers, aka "Jaybirds," drift in a hallucinatory Philip K. Dick-style dream, while "redeemers" strive to rescue them. The serviceable plot focuses largely on the efforts of the hero, Gregorio Rivas, a musician and former redeemer who lives in "Ellay," to bring back a runaway. The film Mad Max (1980) seems to have inspired many of the images in this rundown world, such as "an old but painstakingly polished Chevrolet body mounted on a flat wooden wagon drawn by two horses." Powers has a nice knack for puns, e.g., a "hemogoblin," a balloonlike monster who sucks blood from its victims, and "fifths," paper money issued by a "Distiller of the Treasury." The antireligious tone of the book, not uncommon in science fiction of the era, is a refreshing change from much of today's blatantly proselytizing SF (see feature, "Other Worlds, Suffused with Religion," Apr. 16). At times Powers's heavy prose style can be trying, but his engaging conceptions will keep most readers turning the pages.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
Genre: Science Fiction
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
Genre: Science Fiction
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Used availability for Tim Powers's Dinner at Deviant's Palace
Hardback Editions
February 2001 : USA Hardback
January 1986 : UK Hardback
July 1985 : Hardback
Paperback Editions
May 1987 : UK Paperback
January 1986 : UK Paperback
June 1985 : USA Mass Market Paperback
January 1985 : USA Mass Market Paperback
Kindle Editions
July 2013 : USA, Australia, Canada, UK Kindle edition
September 2011 : Australia, UK Kindle edition