A Place Beyond Man - Softcover

Cary Neeper

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0440169313 ISBN 13: 9780440169314

Publisher: Dell Publishing Co., Inc., 1977

Synopsis

This is the 1975 edition, which was re-released in June 2011 as an Authors Guild Backinprint.com Edition entitled A Place Beyond Man--The Archives of Varok, the first in the series coming soon.

About this title

From the Author:

This first novel was written as an experiment when my youngest daughter Shawne was two years old. When Charles Scribner's Sons offered to publish it, I received an encouraging letter from the editor, Harris Dienstfrey, who suggested I make several changes to the plot. I could see that he understood what I was trying to do, so I happily made the changes. Then came the letter outlining twenty more problems to fix. Each one required going through the entire manuscript. I learned a lot and was grateful for all the help. Some years later, after studying fiction and writing five stories using the same alternate solar system inhabited by the intriguing, friendly, interfering aliens--ellls, varoks, and others--I revised the original, corrected the typos, and created my web site. Now, since the original version is once again available, I am finishing the development of the entire series, which is updated to include the effects of an understanding of complexity, as well as the maturing awareness of our environmental crises.

From the Inside Flap:

A Place Beyond Man is a vivid reation of two non-human species, each with its own language, history, and way of absorbing experiences, each fully intelligent: the amphibious ellls, who experience the world through their feelings, and the human-like varoks, who experience the world through their reason.

How does the human species react when it meets an intelligence comparable to its own? A Place Beyond Man is the story of the tangled emotional involvement of one human being with both an elll and a varok--Tandra Grey, the human microbiologist who discovers that she is not as free from human parochialism as she had thought; Conn the joyous elll who brings Tandra to the Elll-Varok moon base to learn whether the three species can physically co-exist; and Oram, the master varok, a somber figure who, like all varoks, can be destroyed by emotion. All three are shaken by the unreasoning resentments and fears--the awe and disgust--that block them from each other.

It is also the story of an earth heedlessly wasting itself in a relentless exhaustion of its own resources--and in the refusal of earth's human inhabitants to understand that they alone are not the only species with a claim to its wellbeing.

A Place Beyond Man is a story of inter-species contact against a backdrop of an earth trying unsuccessfully to move to a steady state economy.

About this edition

• Publisher: Dell Publishing Co., Inc.
• Publication date: 1977
• ISBN 10: 0440169313
• ISBN 13: 9780440169314
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 268
• Illustrator: Boris Vallejo