Binding is blue cloth with gilt lettering to spine. Dj now protected inside a cover. The distant world of Orthe, on which this brilliantly imaginative first novel is set, is inhabited by a race almost indentical to humans, except that until they reach adolescence they are in a state they call ashiren - without gender. Once the Ortheans built a great civilization, but it was destroyed in a terrible holocaust and now they have deliberately turned away from technology, to ensure that such a disaster never overtakes them again. Their world is littered with spectacular remnants of that vanished past, and in the remote city of Kel Harantish live the people known as Golden Witchbreed, the last direct link with the ancient Ortheans, feared and shunned by the inhabitants of the main continent, the Southland. To Orthe comes Lynne de Lisle Christie, envoy from Earth. She is the first human visitor to be allowed outside the small diplomatic enclave in the Southland city of Tathcaer, and the future of human-Orthean relations depends on her. Many Ortheans identify humans with the Golden Witchbreed and wish to expel them; others see benefits to be reaped from the contact. Very quickly, Christie finds herself at the centre of a conflict which threatens to explode into war, and which puts her own life in great peril. Golden Witchbreed is a novel of epic scope: a story full of colour and adventure, peopled by memorable characters (both human and Orthean), and set on a world imagined in rich detail and brought vividly to life.

Sf Science Fiction