The New Springtime (e-book) (used book) | Robert Silverberg | bookbook.eu

Description

When the 700,000-year winter of the death stars ended, tiny primitive tribes, led by prophecies, emerged from their ice caves to claim the ruins of the reborn Earth.

That was the easy part…

Master storyteller Robert Silverberg, winner of five Nebula and three Hugo awards, returns to the world of At Winter’s End and to a thought-provoking and adventure-packed future of endless wonders and terrors. Here savages must revive the legacy of a vanished interstellar civilization. Here each day may bring new heroes, new revelations—and new myths…

Forty years after the Coming Forth, cities of the People have spread across a continent: from Yissou, the walled fortress of brooding King Salaman, to vibrant Dawinno, where Chieftain Taniane presides over a coalition of tribes and the old Chronicler Hresh ponders Great World artifacts. With the cities came the ills of ambition, bureaucracy, and corruption. Then one day the People face a greater threat: an ultimatum from the hjjk-queen…

Since emerging, the insectoid hjjk hordes have believed that they, not the People, should inherit the Earth—and they might be right. Their telepathic, immortal Queen rules a hive-mind millions of years old, the only survivor of the Great World’s godlike races. The hjjk are ancient where the People are young; learned where the People are ignorant; organized where the People are chaotic; many where the People are few.

A human envoy from the Queen makes the offer: peace in exchange for limits to tribal expansion and acceptance of the hjjk vision of security, love, and control. It is a vision of life that is intricate, beautiful, absolute. And inhuman.

The proposal throws Dawinno into turmoil, as does the growing passion between the envoy and Nialli Apuilana, daughter of the city’s chieftain. Savage pride, territorial lust, and xenophobic horror dominate the city, even as new religions worshipping the hjjk spread like fire and in Yissou a glorious plan to unite all the People against the “bugs” gets under way.

If the hjjk-queen is refused, the New Springtime will run with blood. The fledgling tribes will be exterminated, or they will destroy a race infinitely old and wise. But if the hjjk are accepted, the People will have survived the Winter, only to lose their newfound humanity forever. And the only person who can stop genocidal madness from sweeping the Earth is Nialli, Taniane and Hresh’s tenacious daughter, whose people, including her parents, consider her insane…