HOUR OF THE GATE [Import] [Paperback]

ALAN DEAN FOSTER (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 300 pages
• Publisher: ORBIT; New Ed edition (1984)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1857231449
• ISBN-13: 978-1857231441
• Product Dimensions: 6.8 x 4.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,585,000 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Alan Dean Foster's work to date includes excursions into hard science-fiction, fantasy, horror, detective, western, historical, and contemporary fiction. He has also written numerous non-fiction articles on film, science, and scuba diving, as well as having produced the novel versions of many films, including such well-known productions as "Star Wars", the first three "Alien" films, "Alien Nation", and "The Chronicles of Riddick". Other works include scripts for talking records, radio, computer games, and the story for the first "Star Trek" movie. His novel "Shadowkeep" was the first ever book adapation of an original computer game. In addition to publication in English his work has been translated into more than fifty languages and has won awards in Spain and Russia. His novel "Cyber Way" won the Southwest Book Award for Fiction in 1990, the first work of science-fiction ever to do so.

Foster's sometimes humorous, occasionally poignant, but always entertaining short fiction has appeared in all the major SF magazines as well as in original anthologies and several "Best of the Year" compendiums. His published oeuvre includes more than 100 books.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Adventures Abound, The best of the Spellsinger series, June 26, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: Spellsinger: The Hour of the Gate - Book #2 (Spellsinger Book Two) (Mass Market Paperback)

Beyond doubt the best of Foster's Spellsinger Series. It brings together some of the most memorable characters you could hope to meet in any Science fiction or fantasy novel and mixes them all together in a story that takes your breath away.

Magic and mayhem,fire-breathing marxist dragons and a voyage into the very mouth of hell itself lead you gently (!) toward a finaly that culminates with an almighty war.

Journey along with Jon-Tom, Mudge, Talea and others as they are forced to take a journey from which they may not return!

Despite being part of the Spellsinger series, this novel could quite possibly be a book unto it own. Enough action and adventure to fill any palatte, this is one book you MUST read.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Best of the series, June 5, 2005

By 

Cynthia Cooper "Cyn" (Somerville, MA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Spellsinger: The Hour of the Gate - Book #2 (Spellsinger Book Two) (Mass Market Paperback)

This isn't so much the second Spellsinger book as the second half of the first one -- it starts minutes after the first book ends, and presents the second half of the quest.

While Spellsinger was about the experience of ordinary life in the Wizards' World, Hour of the Gate shows us the extraordinary -- having crossed the Warmlands on their quest to prevent the Plated Folk from conquering the world, the heroes now set off through legendary lands in search of allies in the coming war. What they find is by turns awe-inspiring and terrifying, and Foster shows a great talent for minimal descriptions that evoke strong images.

As before, we're primarily seeing Clothahump's mighty deeds through Jon-Tom's eyes, and as such there isn't much actual spellsinging. Nevertheless, this book strongly captures the power and majesty that fantasy worlds can have.

As I noted in my review of Spellsinger, though, this is the last time that Foster takes his world seriously. As the series progresses, it shifts from being dark fantasy with a light touch to, by the end, the level of a knock-knock joke. If you're a completist who must read every book in a series, you may not want to get started on this one -- it's too depressing seeing where it goes.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Best of the series, March 3, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: Spellsinger: The Hour of the Gate - Book #2 (Spellsinger Book Two) (Mass Market Paperback)

The duology of the first two books in the Spellsinger series, "Spellsinger" and "Hour of the Gate", by far eclipses the rest of the series. This book, with its stirring love stories, fantastic sights, wonderful characters, and epochal war, deserves to be counted as one of the classics of science fiction. And how many books count as their main characters a Brooklyn bat and a talking otter