- Paperback: 432 pages
- Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK (Jun 1 2001)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0743409116
- ISBN-13: 978-0743409117
- Product Dimensions: 17.8 x 10.8 x 3 cm
- Shipping Weight: 240 g
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #2,162,047 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Amazon.co.uk
Eugene Byrne's second SF novel Things Unborn is as eccentric and offbeat as his first, ThiGMOO--but in different ways. Here it's 2008, on a timeline where Britain is still recovering from 1962's world nuclear war and subsequent "Feudal Wars", both helped and hindered by crowds of the returned dead.
No one knows why people who died prematurely through history are coming back as "retreads". Britain learns to cope, though, and civil servants gently explain to new arrivals--in Latin or Anglo-Saxon if required: "You are not in Heaven or Hell."
London is a seething melting-pot of past, present and future. The Metropolitan Police (including DI Scipio Africanus, a black former slave who first died in 1720) stake out the Marble Arch area where those hanged at Tyburn tend to return, as it were, to the scene of the crime. The rakehell Earl of Rochester writes BBC comedies like Carry on Courting, in collaboration with Marlowe and Chatterton. Richard III, though under the thumb of Parliament, is king again--and saving the truth about the Princes in the Tower for his memoirs. It's all profoundly silly, yet developed with tongue-in-cheek plausibility.
Alas, there's a fanatical underground of (mostly) retreads from more devout days, the Sons of John Bull, who long to smash Britain's "Liberal Settlement" and end the godless practice of religious tolerance. Sympathetic police have their hands full as theft, terrorism and assassination plots rage through London's brothels, cock-pits and abandoned Underground tunnels. It all ends appropriately, and it's all great fun. --David Langford
Product Description
In 1962, the USA and Russia went to nuclear war over Cuba...after millions of deaths, people started returning. Not just those killed in the Atom War, but peole who had died centuries previously. And they were always reborn in the place where they died, at the age of their death. In Britain, there were struggles for power between Catholics and Protestants, another Monmouth Rebellion. Now, in 2008, Richard III rules the country - although he holds no real power. And Protestant fanatics would see him, his government and their "Liberal Settlement" destroyed. A handful of policemen and their allies must hunt down the conspirators.
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Customer Reviews
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Most helpful customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Another little low cost gem of a book!,
By Kali "bengaligirl" (United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Things Unborn (Paperback)
This is a crackingly good SF book with wonderful characters like Police Inspector Africanus, once a slave from the 18th Century, now a British Bobby on an unusual Beat in an alternative 21st Century Britain.The plot is slightly complex but this is nothing to get worried about, this is a SF book for the intelligent, and it is a very exciting read so worth making your brain cells do a little bit of extra work in my opinion! This is an alternative world, born from the ashes of a devestating Nuclear War in the early 1960s that wiped out millions upon millions of people in various parts of the world, mostly in Britain, the USA, Russia and China, all places that were affected at one point by radiation fall out. After this war was over, people started to be "reborn" people througout the centuries who had died before their time, young children but not babies and infants and very few people over the age of 55, are appearing near or where they died many years ago. They are nicknamed Retreads and depleted Societies have accepted them with open arms, teaching them to live in a world often very different from the one they left behind. Of course it is not all Utopia, far from it, a fight for power ensued in the 1970s between the Fundamentalist Nationalists who want to put the reborn Duke of Monmouth on the throne and the Democratic Coalition of all Creeds led by a reborn Lawrence of Arabia. The Democratic Coalition won, and the Duke of Monmouth was once again executed and for the last 30 or so years peace has reigned in Britain. But a conspiracy is afoot, and the Fundamentalists are gathering momentum as they head toward a revolution in which Britain will be forced back into her Hard Core Protestant days, with anyone who is different suffering the fate of those that do not follow the "true way." But all is not lost, Inspector Africanus and his motley crew of Police officers, consisting of a retread Spitfire Pilot called Guy who has only recently resurrected back to life, a slightly jaded female WPC who is trying to figure out her place in the world, and a jolly Irish giant nicknamed Uncle Seamus who might not be all that he seems. Add to this boiling pot some wonderful characters like Lickpenny Nan, the Rakish Earl of Rochester, a mysterious young man called Henry Seymour and the delightful Digby family, one of whom is Guy's ancestor, a retread like himself and you have a delicious sense of being in and out of various centuries as you rub shoulders with high brow Victorians, decadent Georgians, over sentimental Edwardians not to mention the darker side of the retread experience, those who were once criminals with violent and terrifying pasts. |The main thrust of this book is about the plot to overthrow the Democracy and those now in power since the defining war of the 1970s but there is a surfeit of information about Retread life past and present and this interweaves itself in and out of this dark and often humorous SF thriller making it a compulsive read from beginning to end. I might add that this would make an EXCELLENT film and I am surprised that it wasn't a Best Seller but each to their own I guess! If you get a chance to read this book then do so, you won't be disappointed, I certainly wasn't!
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta) Amazon.com:
5.0 out of 5 stars (1 customer review)
5.0 out of 5 stars
Another little low cost gem of a book!,
By Kali "bengaligirl" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Things Unborn (Paperback)
This is a crackingly good SF book with wonderful characters like Police Inspector Africanus, once a slave from the 18th Century, now a British Bobby on an unusual Beat in an alternative 21st Century Britain.The plot is slightly complex but this is nothing to get worried about, this is a SF book for the intelligent, and it is a very exciting read so worth making your brain cells do a little bit of extra work in my opinion! This is an alternative world, born from the ashes of a devestating Nuclear War in the early 1960s that wiped out millions upon millions of people in various parts of the world, mostly in Britain, the USA, Russia and China, all places that were affected at one point by radiation fall out. After this war was over, people started to be "reborn" people througout the centuries who had died before their time, young children but not babies and infants and very few people over the age of 55, are appearing near or where they died many years ago. They are nicknamed Retreads and depleted Societies have accepted them with open arms, teaching them to live in a world often very different from the one they left behind. Of course it is not all Utopia, far from it, a fight for power ensued in the 1970s between the Fundamentalist Nationalists who want to put the reborn Duke of Monmouth on the throne and the Democratic Coalition of all Creeds led by a reborn Lawrence of Arabia. The Democratic Coalition won, and the Duke of Monmouth was once again executed and for the last 30 or so years peace has reigned in Britain. But a conspiracy is afoot, and the Fundamentalists are gathering momentum as they head toward a revolution in which Britain will be forced back into her Hard Core Protestant days, with anyone who is different suffering the fate of those that do not follow the "true way." But all is not lost, Inspector Africanus and his motley crew of Police officers, consisting of a retread Spitfire Pilot called Guy who has only recently resurrected back to life, a slightly jaded female WPC who is trying to figure out her place in the world, and a jolly Irish giant nicknamed Uncle Seamus who might not be all that he seems. Add to this boiling pot some wonderful characters like Lickpenny Nan, the Rakish Earl of Rochester, a mysterious young man called Henry Seymour and the delightful Digby family, one of whom is Guy's ancestor, a retread like himself and you have a delicious sense of being in and out of various centuries as you rub shoulders with high brow Victorians, decadent Georgians, over sentimental Edwardians not to mention the darker side of the retread experience, those who were once criminals with violent and terrifying pasts. |The main thrust of this book is about the plot to overthrow the Democracy and those now in power since the defining war of the 1970s but there is a surfeit of information about Retread life past and present and this interweaves itself in and out of this dark and often humorous SF thriller making it a compulsive read from beginning to end. I might add that this would make an EXCELLENT film and I am surprised that it wasn't a Best Seller but each to their own I guess! If you get a chance to read this book then do so, you won't be disappointed, I certainly wasn't! |
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