Shiva 3000

by Jan Lars Jensen

As children play in the sultry streets, their elders sit deep within the shade. In markets, women haggle with the merchants over aromatic cardamon and precious saffron, or bolts of cloth and phials of scent. All around them rise temples where the faithful burn rich incense and make offerings to the gods bounty and wrath. Yet this is not the India of a bygone era, but a magical period in the distant future when demons and dieties again roam the earth...

Here is the story of two strangers setting out across the vast subcontinent in quest of separate destinies. One is Rakesh, a young man relentlessly driven by his self-appointed duty to kill the heroic Baboon Warrior. The other, Vasant, is the royal engineer who had been mysteriously abducted and set adrift in a ruderless airship. As these unlikely companions commence their quarrelsome journey across a turbulent landscape, their fate grows even more uncertain when the Sovereign in faraway Delhi is slain... murdered, it is hinted, by the First Wife.

On the way they encounter the awesome Jagannath rolling over cities on its unstoppable chariot... the serpentine Naga lurking in her underground caverns... monks residing in a carved-out mountain fortress... a white-feathered army of demon cranes who have reduced life to the eternal harmony of numbers...

This is a marvellously colourful dreamscape filled with animated god-machines, balloons of purple silk floating over the forest, six-armed invaders plummeting from the sky - an epic tale of multitudinous characters and creatures summoned from a rich and diverse imagination.

ISBN 0-333-78081-7