Word: shardik
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Shardik, Adams...
...Shardik, Adams...
...prophesies the future and sets them off on their adventure. Adams has that streak of Pessimism too, he's just more cautious. Even after the "most extraordinary phenomemon" of Watership's success. Adams didn't quit his Civil Service job. He waited until the publishers accepted his second novel. Shardik, and told him that it was "great, that they'd start with 100,000 copies, and all that sort of thing." Adams says, "I thought, well here we go, apparently I was meant to be a novelist, so I retired...
ADAMS DOES HAVE his causes, though. His new novel. Shardik, is a retelling of the divine incarnation story in an attempt to make a moral point. The bear Shardik has such an awesome destructive force that it is perceived as a god of conquest and bloodshed by humans who set up an empire based on the enslavement of the conquered. Brutality is commonplace in this society: slavers drown a little girl, for instance, and hack off a boy's hand. The great bear finally kills the chief slave trader, but undergoes great suffering in doing so, and ends the book...
...Promise of Joy, Drury (5) 5-A. Month of Sundays, Updike (4) 6-The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, Meyer (6) 7-Shardik, Adams 8 -Black Sunday, Harris (10) 9-The Massacre at Fall Creek, West (7) 10-Spindrift, Whitney