Stonehenge: Where Atlantis Died
Co-written with Leon Stover.
Note: This first version of the novel was cut at the request of the publishers. The cut material was reinstated and the book expanded and published as Stonehenge: Where Atlantis Died.
"Stonehenge is a mystery, a giant ring of stones that has baffled man for centuries. The latest attempt at its solution has produced a remarkable new novel ... [The authors] maintain that Stonehenge was built as a central meeting place or early day parliament to unify the Celtic tribes that occupied England some 3500 years ago. Its construction was directed, they say, by Mycenaean warriors who mined English tin to fashion the bronze that gave its name to an age. Further, say Stover and Harrison, it was designed by an Egyptian architect. How all this came about is told in novel form, with lots of rattling good action and lively narration. Moreover, their Stonehenge thesis seems to grow out of the action, rather than the other way around...
"Stonehenge is not for the squeamish reader. It is bloody, hard driving, direct, elemental. One of the best aspects of the book is its descriptions of primitive battles which evoke the style of Germanic sagas. In fact, the very blood bath which Stonehenge often seems washed lends verisimilitude ... Stonehenge may well be a controversial novel. It deserves to be a popular one."
"Harry Harrison's and Leon Stover's Stonehenge... squeaks into a review column devoted to SF and fantasy, really, only because Harry is one of our good old boys, and Leon Stover knows his apples when it comes to anthropology, and if you can't review your friends what the hell's it all about anyhow, right, Chollie?
"But if you want the truth, apart from being a pretty thumping good barbarian historical novel, with just teensy touches of peripherally-allied trappings to the world of fantasy like the quivering (but not quite sinking) of Atlantis, the building of the Salisbury Plain enigma and some typical mighty-thews, hack 'n' slobber swordstuff... this book has no business being reviewed here. It is Mythopoeic Society fare, Everests above the usual Thongor At The Mound Of Venus bilge, but a straight historical nonetheless.
"It opens in Mycenae, with the son of Perimedes, the Mycenaen king, whose name is Ason, having been captured by the bad guys, who are, of course, the Atlanteans. Now there's this mine in Celtic Britain from which Perimedes gets tin to make his 'holy bronze,' and it's one of the big deals in Perimede's life. So when Ason's uncle, Lycos, is killed when the head of the head-trophying Yerni attack and pillage the mine, Ason swears vengeance. But the only trouble is, Ason is in a pretty bad way himself. You see, he's trapped in an Atlantean dungeon, and he thinks they're going to kill him any minute, except they come and take him to a sort of Atlantis-style massage parlor where they rub oil into his body and hair (yick!), and then while he's lying there, this slave from Byblos name of Aias, who is a kind of honky Woody Strode, comes up to him and tells him he's going to have to learn how to pugil, because this Atlantean pugilist champ named Themis is set to pound the crap out of him for the delight of Atlas, the head honcho of Atlantis, in the courtyard just yonder dorten. So in about eight minutes (35 lines of type) Aias teaches Ason what he knows and Ason goes out there... and he gets the crap pounded out of him. But then, in the grand tradition of Thomas Hardy coincidence, just as Themis is about to break his bones for the edification of the dandies, a volcano goes off and buildings start falling like Chicken Little's paranoid delusion, and Ason - no Jack Armstrong, he! - picks up a chunk of masonry and drives it through Themis's skull. After which Ason takes on half a dozen armed and armored guards, gets away with the help of this Egyptian named Inteb, who has kind of a groin-itch for Ason and...
"Well, it goes from there, and what with Ar Apa (who sounds like he should be an SF amateur press association but who is in reality an axe-wielding Celt with a taste for brain-smashing, bragging and eating burnt oxen) and Naikeri, who likes to get shtupped in the mud "'Thrusting deep as he would thrust a sword into a man's vitals. Taking her as he would take this island of the Yerni.' Harry, how could you?!), and a cast of thousands... all unwashed, it rollicks on its merry and improbable way, and I don't ever want to hear Harry say a bad word about Soylent Green.
"The back cover is loaded with quotes from people like Carleton S. Coon and Naomi Mitchison and (surprise!) Brian Aldiss about how interesting this book is as a supposition about B.C. times and how Stonehenge got built, but as far as I can tell it's just a pretty good, fast-reading and frivolous bash 'n' broadswords novel full of ancient words you have to look up in the Oxford English.
"I enjoyed the hell out of it, but then, what do I know? I'm a friend of Harry's. But as a friend of Harry's, I'm privy to 'inner circle' information which, because this is the season of Watergate I'll pass on to you.
"Harry and Leon Stover sold this book first in England, at 110,000 words, and had trouble re-selling it here in America, so the British said, 'Let us cut it a little,' to make it more saleable, and Harry reluctantly said okay, and they circumcised the book down to 80,000 words and sold the original plates to Scribner's, who published it at the dwarf size, with all the British spellings and single ' quotation marks, and the damned thing reads so fast it's over before you start reading. About which good old Harry is very pissed.
"But what does he know? He's a friend of Harlan's."