Unwound Way - Softcover

Adams, Bill

4.05

43 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0345372387 ISBN 13: 9780345372383

Publisher: Del Rey, 1991

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Evan Larkspur dreamed of greater glory than his play writing could ever bring him. But his newfound career as officer on a star-survey mission ended in disaster almost as soon as it had begun. And when he returned home, the only survivor of a freak accident that had flung his ship out of known space, he found that a century had passed -- and though Larkspur the playwright was now famous, Larkspur the explorer was a wanted man.
Buried in his memory was the fate of his ship; hidden on his person was the star-access data that would have been worth several fortunes -- if it were not scrambled beyond repair. The repressive First Column government coveted that data and would not hesitate to strip Larkspur's mind in an attempt to decipher it.
There was nothing a deceased playwright or a vanished explorer could do against the Column. And so Larkspur fled to the fringe worlds, hiding his identity, intent only on survival -- until, on an obscure planet called Newcount Two, he discovered a powerful legacy he never knew he had . . .

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From the Publisher:

Locus called this first novel "tremendously impressive." The Unwound Way is about the very existentially confused ex-playwright and political fugitive Evan Larkspur, who took a Rip-van-Winkle-ish sleep in a bubble universe outside space-time and came back a century later to find his plays (far-future adaptations of Shakespeare) famous, the young and disappeared playwright Larkspur revered, and himself in a total pickle. Because the government thought they knew where he'd been all these years, and wanted to pick his brain--destroying it in the process--for what he'd learned. And also because only Larkspur had the symbolic heft to spearhead a resurgence of the anti-government intellectual cult that he had been part of in his youth--which the government had almost wiped out in
his absence. But Larkspur wasn't sure he was really himself...maybe he was just an amnesiac who woke up one day thinking he was the famous playwright returned.

The Unwound Way is funny in an ironic, dry way, and it has literary allusions woven into the very warp and weft of the plot. It's intellect-tickling adventure sf.

--Ellen Key Harris, Editor, Del Rey Books

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