“Go, get the others,” Amahast said. “Quickly. See, there, on the other side of the bay, there are more of these. We must kill them all.”
A movement caught his eye and he drew back his spear thinking the creature not yet dead. It was moving its tail.
No! The tail itself was not moving, but something was writhing obscenely beneath the skin at its base. There was a slit there, an opening of some kind. A pouch in the base of the beast’s thick tail. With the point of his spear Amahast tore it open, then struggled against the desire to retch at the sight of the pallid creatures that tumbled out onto the sand.
Wrinkled, blind, tiny imitations of the adults. Their young, they must be. Roaring with anger he trampled them underfoot.
“Destroyed, all of them, destroyed.” He mumbled the words over and over and Kerrick fled away among the trees.
“WEST OF EDEN is surely Harry Harrison’s best novel since MAKE ROOM! MAKE ROOM! and probably the best sf novel ever done on the confrontation of human and saurian intelligence. The biological extrapolation manages to be utterly extreme and utterly convincing at the same time, and the saurian civilization is done in the finest traditions of hard science fiction.”
—Norman Spinrad
“Having entered into the full-time occupation hereinafter known as reading WEST OF EDEN, one’s first thought is: ‘This is the longest novel ever written.’ Wrong. SILAS MARNER is the longest novel ever written; no one has ever finished reading it. One’s second thought, however, will be: ‘This is the best novel ever written.’ Wrong again. HUCKLEBERRY FINN is the best novel ever written. Or maybe GRAVITY’S RAINBOW. But I digress. When you complete the reading of WEST OF EDEN, you will be left with two thoughts, and they are as follows: ‘This is one of the best novels I’ve ever read,’ and ‘I wish it had gone on forever!’ How many of us have had that said about our books?”
—Harlan Ellison
“In WEST OF EDEN, Mr. Harrison has given us a gripping adventure story of prehistoric men and women facing fearful odds which has all the bitter intensity of his Deathworld books, touched with humor, and should appeal to readers who have enjoyed Jean Auel’s THE CLAN OF THE CAVE BEAR and THE VALLEY OF HORSES.”
—Fritz Leiber
Read WEST OF EDEN, on sale now.
WHEELWORLD
Copyright © 2012 by Harry Harrison.
All rights reserved.
For information, address Tom Doherty Associates,
175 Fifth Avenue,
New York, N.Y. 10010
eISBN 9781466822849
First eBook Edition : June 2012
Wheelworld Page 19
