PAVANE

Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1968. First U. S. edition. Lower corners bit bruised, two tiny nicks to upper front edge, a very good copy in a very good dust jacket with mild wear to corner tips and spine ends, a series of small scratches and nicks to upper front panel at and above the title lettering. (28111). Octavo, cloth. This edition adds "The White Boat" which is not included in the U.K. edition. "Papal domination of Europe has slowed progress and a dystopian medievalism has lasted into the twentieth century" - Sargent, British and American Utopian Literature, 1516-1985, pp. 313-4. "... a striking work of the imagination." - Burgess, Ninety-nine Novels: The Best in English since 1939, p. 104. With his second book, Roberts came fully into his own as a writer. PAVANE superbly depicts an alternate history in which -- Elizabeth I having been assassinated, the Spanish Armada victorious and no Protestant rise of capitalism in the offing -- a technologically backward England survives under the sway of the Catholic Church Militant. The individual stories are moody, eloquent, elegiac and thoroughly convincing." - John Clute, SFE (online) Anatomy of Wonder (1995) 4-362. Pringle: Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels #58.