Up Jim River - Hardcover

Flynn, Michael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0765322846 ISBN 13: 9780765322845

Publisher: Tor Books, 2010

Synopsis

Hugo Award finalist and Robert A. Heinlein Award-winning SF writer Michael Flynn returns to space opera with Up Jim River. There is a river on Dangchao Waypoint, a small world out beyond Die Bold. It is a longish river as such things go, with a multitude of bayous and rapids and waterfalls, and it runs through many a strange and hostile country. Going up it, you can lose everything.

Going up it, you can find anything. The Hound Bridget ban has vanished and her employer, the Kennel (the mysterious superspy agency of the League) has given up the search. But her daughter, the harper Mearana, has not. She enlists the scarred man, Donovan, to aid her in her search. With the reluctant assent and financial aid of the Kennel, they set forth. Bridget ban was following hints of an artifact that would “protect the League from the Confederacy for aye.” Mearana is eager to follow that trail, but Donovan is reluctant, because whatever is at the end of it made a Hound disappear. What it would do to a harper and a drunk is far too easy to imagine.

Donovan’s mind had been shattered by Those of Name, the rulers of the Confederacy, and no fewer than seven quarreling personalities now inhabit his skull. How can he hope to see her through safely? Together, they follow Bridget ban’s trail to the raw worlds of the frontier, edging ever closer to the uncivilized and barbarian planets of the Wild.

About this title

About the Author

Michael Flynn lives in Easton, Pennsylvania.

Reviews

On the harper Mearana’s home planet, up Jim River is a saying indicating a journey ever further into danger and the unknown. Mearana’s mother, Bridget ban, has disappeared on mysterious business. Even the Kennel, her employer and one of the galaxy’s two sources of secret agents, didn’t know what she was looking for or where she went. Mearana is determined, though, to discover her mother’s fate. She manages to convince the scarred man, the Fudir, who was once Donovan but became six or seven personalities after a botched experiment by Those of Name, to join her out of a sense of nostalgia. The worlds inhabited by these people are sufficient reason to read the novel. The extrapolations of linguistic drift and remnants of ancient history that Flynn conjures constitute a fascinating story in themselves. Adding to them a tense and thrilling search from the bar on Jehovah to the very Wild itself, through strange cultures and dangerous ports, just makes the book all the more engaging. A future history with serious punch. --Regina Schroeder

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

ALAP (VILAMBIT)

This is her song, but she will not sing it, and so that task must fall to lesser lips.
There is a river on Dangchao Waypoint, a small world appertaining to Die Bold. It is a longish river as such things go, with a multitude of bayous and rapids and waterfalls, and it runs through many a strange and hostile coun­try. Going up it, you can lose everything. Going up it, you can .nd any­thing.
A truism in the  less- than- United League of the Periphery holds that every story begins on Jehovah or ends on Jehovah. This is one of those that begin there. It is a story of love and loss and  .nding— and other such curses.
What makes the saying a truism is that Jehovah’s  sun— the Eye of Allah— is a major nexus on Electric Avenue, that great network of super ­luminal highways that binds the stars together. More roads converge there than anywhere  else in the South Central sector, and so the probabili­ties favor—or the Fates  pronounce— that sooner or later everyone passes through.
And when they do, they come to the Bar of Jehovah, for unless your pleasures run to such wildness as  hymn- singing—and what can be so wild at that?— there is no other place on the planet so congenial. The  hymn-singing is good and surprisingly affective, but many of those who wash up on Jehovah seek to anesthetize the memory of the past, and not to antici­pate the glories of the future. For many of the patrons, there is no future, and there is not even the memory that there may once have been one.
In a Spiral Arm where “the strong take what they can and the weak suffer what they must,” Jehovah is the pearl without price, she whose worth is measured in rubies; for she is too valuable a prize to be taken. “A hun­dred hands desire it,” the saying runs, “and  ninety- nine will keep the one from seizing it.” And so it is a refuge of sorts for many, and a cash cow for the Elders. And if cash cows remind one of golden calves, that can be over­looked at  round-up time.
And so colorful and cryptic Chettinad merchants rub shoulders with their rivals from the Greater Hanse; the crews of tramp freighters with In­terstellar Cargo; with Gladiola seed ships, and League marshals and colonists and trekkers; with touristas, too: those starsliders who come in on the great Hadley liners for their quick blick and then off again! to stars worth longer visits.
And so also, with the detritus of the Spiral Arm: those who tramp from star to star, one step ahead of a creditor or a spouse or a League marshal; those whose lives and dreams have become to dream their lives away.
One of these is the scarred man. He has a name, or he has many names, but that one will do for now. It is no longer clear, even to him, which of his names are real, or if any of them are. He has sat so long in his niche that he is very nearly a .xture of the Bar, an ornament like the great gilt- worked chandelier mobile that casts an uncertain and  ever- changing light upon a patronage equally changing and uncertain. He has become, for a small and  self- selected group of connoisseurs, something of a tourist attraction himself. He has come because his past is too heavy to bear, and here he may slide down his load and rest. Recently, certain elements of that past have come to press upon him . . .
. . . But this is not his story; or it is not quite his story.
And  lastly— and these are most  rare—come those who are not driven by their past, but drawn by their future. It might seem odd that the path to the future would pass through the Bar of Jehovah; but the path to heaven is said to wind through purgatory.
As, too, the path to hell.

Excerpted from Up Jim River by Michael Flynn.
Copyright © 2010 by Michael Flynn.
Published in November 2010 by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
All rights reserved. This work is protected under copyright laws and reproduction is strictly prohibited. Permission to reproduce the material in any manner or medium must be secured from the Publisher.

Edition details

• Publisher: Tor Books
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0765322846
• ISBN 13: 9780765322845
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336