Uezen: A Science Fiction Novel, by Snowdon King (Ionut Caragea) - Kindle Version
Democles and Z’Davaar, standing for God and the Devil respectively, have agreed to create the first humanoids on Eden. The Edeneans spread their race throughout the galaxy by Light ascension and creating other forms of life. However, when the most important sun in the system turns into a supernova, they start, for the first time in their existence, to fall ill and die.
In order to prevent utter extinction, they build Arka and head for the nearest wormhole, Megarra. But to reach the new destination, they have to face Anuk, who has agreed to obey Z’Davaar’s orders and destroy the other Edeneans, hoping to resurrect his lover, Asiria, who dies during the journey.
It is only the Earthman Lerman Kruger, a survivor of the Earth pandemic, exiled on Nede, a desert planet, that finds the strength to fight, with the support of the Edeneans in that corner of the universe, Uezen and his wife, Mud … The latter create an army of disciples to stop the forces led by Anuk, the dark Edenean who, through the power of drugs and mental influence, conquer planet after planet.
Under the circumstances, Namur, Lerman and Suara’s child, the possessor of Uezen’s consciousness and several matchless paranormal powers, becomes the great hope of Good and Light. But Namur, influenced by his love for Luana, has his weaknesses too and becomes the target of the malefic Anuk’s mental attacks.
During the outer space battle close to Nede, there comes a fissure between the material universe and the nether world. This fissure is brought about by the Earthmen’s encroaching upon the protocol between Democles and Z’Davaar, the former managing, by means of a scientific experiment, to capture the dead people’s souls and create an unprecedented weapon: the soul bomb. Thus the universe is invaded by the creatures of Darkness, the shadows and demons of Obscuris and the Purgatory, that are being chased by the angels led by Ethiel, Democles’s right hand.
What’s going to happen in this two-front battle? Who’s going to win? What are the sacrifices each side has to make? All these answers you’ll find by reading Uezen.
About the author
Snowdon King (b. 1975) is the pen name of Ionut Caragea, a Romanian-born Canadian writer who has been living in Montréal since 2003. He has written thirty books (science fiction, poetry, aphorisms, literary criticism), some of which have been translated into English and French. He is the three-time winner of the Helion, the most important prize in Romanian science fiction. He is a member of Romanian Writers’ Union, and a co-founder and vice-president of the Québec Romanian Writers’ Association.
Critical references:
His most remarkable writing seems to be Uezen, a book that has brought him the Helion Prize. Adrian Botez, Snowdon King’s most insightful critic, sees him as a “neo-modernist” who has found the path to trans-modernism. His style is at its best economical about the means of expression, distinguishing itself through the ease the writer uses his words with, the dialogic dramatism, and the science-fiction idiom, without resorting too much to scientific hermetism. But it is his outlook that points to his link with the trans-modern ethos. The writer doesn’t hesitate to show his optimism about humanity, stating for instance in an interview, “I enjoy the idea that writers can contribute to the making of a better world.” Such statements come more and more rarely from writers who prefer isolating themselves in their deep-seated narcissism. What’s original about Snowdon King’s imaginary is his universe: post-apocalyptic, trans-mundane, wholly transferred to the virtual, a supreme ontological inconsistency. A negative utopia that doesn’t, however, lose its ultimate contact with its matrix. (Professor Theodor Codreanu, PhD)
The author’s fictional world lives in an almost real dimension, with carefully chosen and outlined characters, permanently predisposed to galactic adventures, treasure-hunting, and destiny-fulfillment. He creates universes of galactic origins and densities with planets, stars, comets, spaces, spheres of all kinds, and microprocessors, cryogenic substances, holograms, sophisticated weapons together with the latest scientific and technical terms related to hyper-perfect technologies such as spaceships, cosmic stations, immunization, cyborgs, matrixes, systems, missions, etc. Snowdon King does not describe a sophisticated Universe. The latter’s simplicity tempts us to dream beautifully of a world as beautiful as the one we say we know because it’s the one we live in. Despite what some people say – in order to write SF one needs to have a vast knowledge of higher mathematics and physics, electronics, astronomy, etc., in other words an entire “arsenal” of deeply-rooted sophisticated theoretical knowledge; well, despite these opinions which I find far-fetched, I think that a SF writer should have an imaginative creator’s rich cultural background, be inventive and able to wisely structure the story, always having in view the amplification of the miraculous, and raise to unpredictable, surprising levels the dynamics and dimensions of the facts, characters, and the outer space/cosmos. Undoubtedly, this novel arouses our interest from the very beginning, and keeps it like that until the end, taking us, emotionally and mentally, through a somewhat comfortable story, and through many of the recesses of the reflexive. (Petre Rãu)
In Uezen, Snowdon King builds a world in which one seems to meet the same characters, outlined like crystals, multi-faceted, shown in various situations, and given names according to the story they are “part” of. At the same time the author also outlines a particular mode of finding his own way to Truth, to what it means to live, through an apparently continuous state of interrogation, search/discovery/invention of answers. Everything “enveloped” in the garb of the language characteristic of SF. (Marius Chelaru)
The stories about Uezen are eerie textures, feverish interrogations deciding pretexts, quests, losses and recoveries, particularly evoking a seismograph of the intelligence of finding itself in the definitive temptations on these layers of the memory, because the dynamics of many of Snowdon King’s stories is memory’s dégringolade itself, even the exercise of story-telling having a special prospective strength. Though not a pontiff, the author regulates the mechanisms of a ceremony that imposes the colloquial, the applied transcription of the meanings of integrating the being and non-being in hazard’s granulation. Therefore, man or his meaning, built to the same extent with the thirst for a symbolic space in the topos of the same memory, fragmenting the units of primordial time, also exiled in the lie’s contingent aridity about “what happiness in universal harmony would look like”, as clenched memory. The author avoids embroidered rhetoric’s, his metaphors refuse the escapism of down-watering, and his texts dream, continuously, of the great ocean of the real. The narrator’s favorite place is here, at the very edge of the dream about the world with or without the “heraldry” of man’s being, elegant and devout adoration, the awareness of estrangement and of the fragile dream-reality dichotomy. Decidedly, there is a special air about Snowdon King’s stories, they dis-embellish or (re)animate, demythologize or experiment on propensities, structure the imaginary or wonder Hamlet-like within the anguish. (Professor Ionel Bota, PhD)
Apart from the inevitable "arsenal" (when it comes to authors who want to anchor themselves intensely and laboriously in the creative and imaginative universe of science fiction) of higher physics, electronics, and even sophisticated mathematics (an arsenal well-acquired and, as a rule, carefully systematized on the "rack" of epic construction), we notice not only that the Poet is still there but that he has also amplified his lyrical register almost miraculously and to impressive cosmic-dynamic dimensions... Snowdon King’s prose is fascinating through its almost pathologically beautiful Poetry but “the under age should not read it” because of its deep and logical melancholy which can shake (and even shatter!) many frail beliefs …! Grown-ups, however (the VII! – that is those acting in good faith and re-actionary!), had better meditate on it as if it were a new gospel for it is in its exasperations that this lyrical prose hides questions and warnings which are the ONLY ONES that can lead to a redemption of the Human-Divine Spirit… (Professor Adrian Botez, PhD)
Nota Observator :
Romanul a aparut in SUA la o editura prestigioasa - Wildside Press. Romanul se numeste Uezen si Ionut Caragea l-a scris cu pseudonimul Snowdon King.
Cartea a fost publicata pe hartie, iar acum Amazon a scos si varianta electronica Kindle, care costa doar 2.99 dolari USD.
http://www.amazon.com/Uezen-Science-Fiction-Snowdon-King-ebook/dp/B00OWCFRHS/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&sr=8-1&qid=1330760836
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Observator 11/23/2014 |
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