EMPRISE ... BOOK ONE OF THE TRIGON DISUNITY. New York: Berkley Books, [1985]. Small octavo, pictorial wrappers. First edition. Berkley 0-425-07763-2. First book of the "Trigon Disunity" series. The Fuel Wars have bankrupted once powerful nations, and isolated farming communities fare better than the world's cities where many have died of starvation. In this antiscientific dystopian world, scientists -- considered responsible for the world's misery -- are largely in hiding and are killed when found. After seventeen years of clandestine research, a rogue astronomer with a radiotelescope hidden in the Idaho mountains receives a message from the stars which may improve things on Earth -- if he can get the authorities to accept it as genuine. "The series triumphs through the expansive exuberance of its premise: that an earlier wave of humanity had long ago colonized the galaxy, and that the apparent aliens whose probing has reawakened contemporary humanity's interest in the stars -- and revitalized a decaying planet -- are in fact not forerunners but our own cousins." - John Clute, SFE (online). Sargent, British and American Utopian Literature, 1516-1985, p. 429. A fine copy. (#146439).
Price: $25.00
Berkley edition / June 1985" on copyright page.