The Great Wheel - Hardcover

MacLeod, Ian R.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0151002932 ISBN 13: 9780151002931

Publisher: Harcourt, 1997

Synopsis

Living on the Borderer town in what had once been northern Africa, Father John, a priest who has lost his faith but continues to help and befriend the people he encounters, investigates a cluster of myeloid leukemia deaths, falls in love, and struggles to make peace with the pain of loss. A first novel.

About this title

About the Author

an R. MacLeod (born 1956) is a British science fiction and fantasy writer. He was born in Solihull near Birmingham. He studied law and worked as a civil servant before going freelance in early 1990es soon after he started publishing stories, attracting critical praise and awards nominations. He is the author of the novels The Light Ages and The House of Storms, which are set in an alternate universe nineteenth century England, where aether, a substance that can be controlled by the mind, has ossified English society into guilds and has retarded technological progress. MacLeod's debut novel, The Great Wheel, was published in 1997, and won the Locus Award for Best First novel. MacLeod's novella The Summer Isles (Asimov's Science Fiction Oct/Nov 1998) won the Sidewise Award for Alternate History for and the World Fantasy Award. It is an alternate history where Britain, having been defeated in the World War I, develops its own form of fascism in 1930s. The narrator is a closeted homosexual Oxford historian who had known the leader in youth. It was written as a novel, which however could not sell; MacLeod published the cut version, with the full-length version only being published in a limited edition in 2005. This novel version also won the Sidewise Award for Alternate History, thus becoming the only story to win the same award twice in two differing formats, novel and novella. MacLeod won the World Fantasy Award again in for his 2000 novelette The Chop Girl. His shorter fiction has been collected in Voyages by Starlight, Breathmoss and Other Exhalations and Past Magic.

Reviews

By about 2170, the Endless City occupies the entire coast of North Africa; its Borderers live in poverty and squalor under a perpetual cloud generated by global warming and climate control. Though Father John Alston (``Fatoo''), of the Pandera presbytery, has lost much of his faith, he continues to offer the Borderers spiritual comfort and such medical aid as much as he is able (his own implants keep him safe from Borderer ailments, but the reverse isn't true). The Borderers chew a leaf, koiyl, similar to coca, that John suspects may cause cancer. Helped by Laurie Kalmar, a European-educated Borderer computer-net expert, he finds that the leaf from one particular source is dangerously radioactive. After he and Laurie become lovers, John visits home--where his once- genius brother, Hal, having monkeyed with his implants, has lain in a deathly coma for 20 years--and decides to leave the priesthood. Upon his return to the Endless City, his relationship with Laurie collapses; he tracks down the distribution of the deadly koiyl, which he begins to use himself, falls ill, returns home, recovers, allows Hal to die and, recognizing that his life is a spiritual journey, recovers his faith. Despite the highly unlikely extrapolation from now to then, especially the improbably secular North Africans: a thoughtful, sometimes wrenching, noteworthy debut. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Set in a future in which humankind is served by a multitude of sophisticated machines, MacLeod's accomplished first novel describes a world much different from ours yet instantly recognizable in all important ways. Father John, sent to what was once Northern Africa, labors gamely to heal the sick and bring the word of Christ into the lives of the pagan Borderers, natives forced to live outside the boundaries of European civilization. Noting that a large number of the natives are dying of the same disease, myeloid leukemia, he starts to investigate a native plant that the people use as an intoxicant. Although banning the koyil leaf would seem to be a logical solution to reducing the large number of deaths, Father John encounters realpolitik, which dictates that moral decisions are secondary to maintaining the status quo. Father John's life is complicated by nagging doubts about the validity of his faith and his attraction to a Borderer woman. MacLeod's somewhat bleak vision of the future is energized by his evocative writing and his ability to create realistic characters who struggle mightily with questions of belief, love, life, and death.
-?Nancy Pearl, Washington Ctr. for the Book, Seattle
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Harcourt
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0151002932
• ISBN 13: 9780151002931
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 458