Calenture

by Storm Constantine

Book Overview

Casmeer is the only living soul left in Thermidore, high atop the mountains of Overhang. So it has been for hundred of years. Immortal historian and chronicler, Casmeer is the self-appointed keeper of... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0747245533
• ISBN13: 9780747245537
• Release Date: January 1994
• Publisher: Headline Book Publishing, Limi
• Length: 565 Pages
• Weight: 0.69 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.8" x 7.0" x 4.4"

Customer Reviews

Perfect.

The plot description didn't entice me (a lonely old man imagines flying cities in the plains below), but the reviews convinced me to try it. Wow... I cried at the end of Calenture the way I sometimes cry at the opera - overwhelmed by the sheer beauty of it. Must-read literary, imaginative fantasy.

Not Your Everyday Storm Constantine...

I'm less than 100 pages from the end and still can't tell where it's going to land exactly. I've been a fan of Constantine's Wraethu works for a few years now. I thought this might include a similar vein, and have been happily surprised by the new territory charted by this bold exploration of the imagination on many levels. If you haven't sampled Constantine's work before I can guarantee you'll be surprised one way or another.

Buy it!

Storm Constantine's 'Calenture' must be the most underrated (or should that be overlooked?) fantasy novel of the last decade. I'm thrilled it has been republished, and hope it remains in print for years to come. Gushing finished, it's time to get pedantic and annoying. Stark House Press's presentation of this gem is very disappointing: small, slightly faded-looking print which makes the pages look almost Xeroxed; the original frontispiece (a line drawing of a flying city) was omitted; woeful typesetting-the font does not lend itself to the tone of the book all, and the indentation on each paragraph is unusually wide and distracting. And, of course, it's one of those horrid large format paperbacks (economical, I guess, which is understandable). For me, having cherished the original for so many years, such sloppy presentation is a travesty. New 'Calenture' readers probably won't care about such tripe as this, and would rightly think I need to get a life, but I would urge those who have purchased this copy seek out a first edition or first edition paperback (Headline, 1994), both of which I believe are available through Constantine's back catalogue at Immanion Press via www.stormconstantine.com, for the true 'Calenture' experience!

Delicious Weirdness

Oh, weirdness incarnate! I love this woman! Sheesh... and I thought Wraeththu was an experience!Calenture is like nothing else and like a whole lot of things: an exotic dream, a drugged-up trip, a philosopher's dissertation in the key of "I think, therefore I am," a rabbit hole complete with its Alice, times three. It's existential, it's entertaining, it's just plain odd. Wonderful. And it has the greatest conclusion I've ever read. It's both absolutely predictable and absolutely unexpected and entirely satisfying. It brings everything into focus like the snap of Storm's magical fingers.The plot... Well, there's a man named Casmeer, who lives in a city in the mountains, far from any other settlements, if such exist. It's sort of an island of civilization. The civilization has a little problem: every person in the city has crystallized - turned into crystal statues. All except Casmeer, who's been living all alone for over four hundred years, protecting what remains of the others from being dismembered by bird-monkeys that like shiny things.Casmeer's been writing a history of the city and its people. He has been entertaining himself in this fashion, but he is starting to feel the weight of the years and wants to try something new. He starts writing a fiction, trying to guess at what life is like elsewhere. There is a flatland surrounded by the mountains. The flatlands are inhabited by floating, crawling, flying cities. Each city is its own world, dramatically weird. Casmeer invents two characters, Ays and Finnigin, and sends them on rather pointless journeys to find mysterious somethings. A mysterious stranger follows them and helps them along - or not. The stranger is Casmeer's fictional representation of himself, but then so are Ays and Finnigin. The story alternates between Casmeer's diary and the fictional stories of Ays and Finnigin. The lines between reality and creativity blur. A collection of the most ridiculously random events accumulates with no point in sight and the more you read, the more you see some weird sort of sense in it all. You know, for a fact, that it's all going somewhere. It's like the proverbial big picture floating just beyond your range of vision. Then - BOOM! A conclusion that brings things together in the most mind-boggling way. It's amazing!This book is a journey and an experience and I cannot recommend it enough to anyone. It would be cruel to deprive yourself of this. It's too unique.

Formulaic fantasy, this is not

Stock up the larder before you read this book. Shut off the phone. Seriously---you're going to need some quiet time for this.This is not to say that I didn't like Storm Constantine's "Calenture." I actually thought it was brilliant, and fascinating. But boy, was it a hard read.This is because a) it's a story within a story that goes back out to the external story, b) it takes place in a world that might be an hallucination, and c) it's just plain weird.There are two stories in this book. The first is the very simple one of a man named Casmeer, who is basically the last man alive in his neck of the woods. Said neck of the woods is a fantastic city called Thermidore, which was once the pinnacle of civilization. At the height of that civilization, however, the alchemists of the city came up with what they believed to be the formula for an immortality serum. Whoops---turns out that after 50 years or so, people who have consumed this serum begin to slowly turn into crystal statues. Several hundred years later, only Casmeer is left. He doesn't know why, but he seems to be the only person on whom the serum actually worked the way it was supposed to. He leads a lonely life, tending the empty city and trying to protect the statues of his fellow citizens from strange creatures called plumosites who magpie-ishly try to steal bits of the shiny statues. One day, however, he comes up with a new way to pass the time. He starts by wondering what happens to the shining pieces of the statues when the plumosites take them away. From this kernel of an idea, he decides to write a novel set in a world where all cities are mobile, either creeping along on crawlers or strange mechanisms, or even flying through the air. A mysterious race of gypsy-like people called terranauts guides the movement of the cities by laying down trails of---gasp---magical shiny stones, which seem to be oddly alive...Surprise! This is the second story in the book, which takes up the bulk of the volume. Casmeer's story is relegated to footnotes at the end of each chapter, from here on. The second story focuses on two characters, Ays and Finnigin.Ays is a beautiful, proud young priest/mercy killer (yes, mercy killer; that's his job) who lives in a flying city called Min. He's quite content with his life until one day one of his patients asks him a number of disturbing questions that cause him to wonder about his past and identity in ways he never has before. Where did he come from? Who was his mother? Unable to regain the serenity he once enjoyed, he decides to leave Min, to discover his true origins.Meanwhile, the story also follows Finnigin, a young terranaut. All terranauts must leave their home-tribe and go on a journey to prove their adulthood, so Finnigin sets out to do this, hoping to discover the secret of the shiny stones while he's at it.The story follows each young man's adventures as they travel through this world---first separately, and then together. Each of the cities is its ow