- Mass Market Paperback: 480 pages
- Publisher: Ace (MM); Reissue edition (Mar 28 2006)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0441142672
- ISBN-13: 978-0441142675
- Product Dimensions: 17.7 x 10.7 x 3.3 cm
- Shipping Weight: 295 g
- Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #154,687 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
Review
Concluding Varley's seething, monumental trilogy of Titan (1979) and Wizard (1980) - about "Gaea," a vast, sentient, wheel-like rotating structure in orbit about Saturn. With several of her subsidiary brains incapacitated, Gaea is now quite mad; and, in her latest physical incarnation as a fifty-foot-tall clone of Marilyn Monroe (where most of her remaining power is concentrated), she's obsessed with crushing ex-Wizard and former ally Cirocco Jones - and with making an epic movie of the resulting showdown! (Meanwhile, the structure of Gaea is bulging with refugees from the nuclear war that, with Gaea's connivance, has ravaged the Earth.) So the suitably enormous, complicated plot here involves the step-by-step efforts of Cirocco and her allies (including ex-Chief Engineer Gaby Plauget, killed in an earlier episode, now literally a ghost in the machine; and the saintly, centaur-like race of Titanides) to defeat the apparently unkillable, all-but-omnipotent Gaea before she wipes out what's left of humanity. Grand-scale entertainment - violent, witty, irreverent, tirelessly inventive: even if the narrative is rather distant, this'll have readers guessing and gasping right up to the end. (Kirkus Reviews)
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Book Description
With "Titan" and "Wizard, Demon" Varley has enthralled a generation of readers with adventure, humor, horror, and dazzling imagination. The Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author of "Steel Beach" and "The Golden Globe" is at his best here--in the epic conclusion of his masterpiece, the story of the alien Gaea. Note: "Titan" and "Wizard", the first two novels of this trilogy have also been reissued.
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First Sentence
Soon after Cirocco's arrival at the treehouse, a party of seven-three Titanides and four humans-crested the last hill to look down at the bend of the river Briareus. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
Soon after Cirocco's arrival at the treehouse, a party of seven-three Titanides and four humans-crested the last hill to look down at the bend of the river Briareus. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Most helpful customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Demon by John Varley,
By H.W. "supernatural enthusiast" (Montreal, Quebec) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Demon (Mass Market Paperback)
Another one in the series of three from John Varley. This one in particular is my favourite.I just reread it in 2 days.
3.0 out of 5 stars
A satisfying conclusion to this imaginative trilogy,
By Rob Shimmin (Urbana, IL United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Demon (Mass Market Paperback)
Demon, the conclusion of the Gaean trilogy, is in my opinion the most satisfying of the three. In the first two books, I frequently got the feeling that Varley had bitten off more than he could chew, character-wise, and so filled in the gap with gratuitous sex scenes and fetishistically detailed descriptions of alien genitalia and reproductive modes. In constrast, Demon confines itself to being an epic adventure and does very well in this role.Demon is more "stylistic" than the others. It is set up as a triple feature from the pre-cineplex days of motion pictures, broken into pieces like "Newsreel," "Short Subjects," "Feature One," etc... This affectation works well given Demon's subject matter. Gaea's godhood has finally driven her completely insane, and she has decided that all the world should be a film of her devising, that she is the arch-villain, and that it can only end with a hero coming to kill her. In his descriptions of the insane deity, Varley uses all his considerable resources of imagination and humor. She has taken the incarnate form of a fifty-foot tall Marilyn Monroe and constructed an enormous movie studio / theatre / theme park called Pandemonium, where she and her lieutenants, mostly undead reconstructions of humanity's major religious figures (Martin Luther, Buddha, L. Ron Hubbard), await the coming of a hero and commit various atrocities. Varley spares none of his imagination in constructing Cirocco's allies for this final conflict, either. The best-constructed of these is Snitch, a small reptilian imp surgically extracted from Cirocco's own brain and a direct link to the mind of Gaea. Many of the characters from the first two novels also return, although in a changed form. For example, Gaby has become a ghost in Gaea's brain, Chris is in the process of turning into a Titanide, and Nasu the anaconda has grown to several kilometers in length. In short, in the long tradition of epic heroism, Demon places an array of unlikely characters against a self-proclaimed Pure Evil, and in the end, they triumph. It stretches a bit long in places, and many of the inter-character interactions are more than a little thin, but that isn't the point. This is a book about being a hero, and a fairly good one at that.
5.0 out of 5 stars
A bizzarre yet deeply satisfying conclusion.,
By "dieselbreeze" (Seattle, WA United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Demon (Mass Market Paperback)
Strange in the extreme is the conclusion of John Varley's Gaea trilogy. You had better read the other books first or you will probably be too bewildered to get beyond the opening scenes!The story is worth every page, and Cirrocco Jones is one of my favorite heroes in any fiction. She is flawed but commanding and capable, exceedingly determined, charismatic, inspiring and frightening all at the same time. Very much like Ripley from the Alien movies. Hordes of familiar characters return, having grown and changed in surprising ways from their last appearance in Wizard or Titan. You will marvel at their differences! Conflict is the operative word in Demon, as this book finishes the saga in a blaze of glory. Although Gaea has lost some of her charm as a virgin territory, having been overrun with refugees from Earth, Titanides still sing and this time Cirrocco's made them into a force to be reckoned with. Oh, and Gaea's got a new makeover and an entourage that will send you into paroxysms of laughter. Pandaemonium is brilliant! Please do yourself a favor, and read all of these books. Demon is just the diamond cap on the golden pyramid.
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