Eyas

By Crawford Kilian

Book Overview

A ground-breaking page turner in the realm of speculative science fiction by Crawford Kilian. A nameless newborn is named Eyas by the Seagoddess. She spared his life and gave him understanding, but Earth and sky would eventually shatter as a result of this New Year's Day in the Year of Freedom 242 at Gathering Cove.

• Format: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0345350790
• ISBN13: 9780345350794
• Release Date: February 1989
• Publisher: Del Rey Books
• Length: 354 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Oddly Good

Eyas is a very strange book. One of the strangest things about it is the fact that it's good. It shouldn't be good; Kilian writes from a pretty superficial Canadian/Progressive sensibility (check out his map of North America a million years from now, with the Great White North hugely expanded and most of the US gone). But Eyas has a strange, cumulative power. It starts small, but moves very smoothly into bigger and bigger scale. And the notion of evil Kilian invents is brilliant. I won't give it away, but it's perhaps the best narrative metaphor for the baneful influence of the past you'll encounter anywhere. Kilian transcends his conscious ideology in this book. Its climax is a Jihad as grand as any in Fantasy, and this Greenish author shows himself to be very adept at describing a complex military campaign. Like Eyas at the end of the novel, Kilian, in writing this book, crashed through layer after layer of ideology to make something greater than its maker.

Great book!

The first two thirds of this book were great. It starts with a tribe who live like Indians. They have a naming ritual for infants which occurs at a cove. A giant sea creature surfaces there and names the baby. The baby in question becomes a heroic warrior named Eyas. The only problem I had with this book came at the two thirds mark. There was a jarring change in focus that could have easily ground the book to a halt. Still, I'll probably read this book again.