The Mount - Softcover

Carol Emshwiller (sfwa.org/members/emshwiller) is the author of many acclaimed novels and story collections, including Carmen Dog, The Start of the End of It All (winner of the World Fantasy Award),Report to the Men’s Club and Other Stories, I Live with You and You Dont’ Know It, and The Mount (winner of the Philip K. Dick Award and a Nebula Award finalist). She teaches in the NYU Continuing Education program, and divides her time between homes in New York City and California.

Like Emshwiller's startlingly perceptive short fiction and her previous novel, Carmen Dog (1990), where women begin to degenerate into animals and animals start evolving upward into womanhood, this novel turns our supposed certainties into beautiful and terrible insights. Writing in skeletal prose from the adolescent point of view of Charley, a boy who dreams of becoming a famous racer (ridden by his alien Little Master, the reptilian? avian? marsupial? Future-Ruler-of-Us-All), Emshwiller picks up human history several generations after a successful Hoot invasion has turned most of humanity into "mounts," bred for speed and beauty and trained with whips and savage bits to do their masters' will. In the mountains, though, a few wild humans lurk, led by Charley's father, plotting to rise up against the Hoots and take back the world they lost. Glimpses of arresting sorrow meld here with teenage dreams and hopes and anguish, shaped subtly with a poet's sure touch into finely crafted characterizations of human-as-not-quite-animal, Hoot-as-not-quite-monster, coming together through heartbreak and abandonment of previously hard-held prejudices. Brilliantly conceived and painfully acute in its delineation of the complex relationships between masters and slaves, pets and owners, the served and the serving, this poetic, funny and above all humane novel deserves to be read and cherished as a fundamental fable for our material-minded times.
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