Customer Reviews

Ruins of Isis

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This is a classic Bradley book. Travel to another world called ISIS/CINDERELLA. A world where the woman is the dominant sex and the men are just playthings and slaves - wonderful. It's quite enlightening and i think more men should read it and take a few tips. Anyway it all comes crashing down around them in the end. I wont give it all away and spoil it. READ IT! I loved the book so much i even named my daughter Isis Cinderella after it.

I have to say I started reading MZB via her mainstream novels the Avalon series. But moving onto her other works, 'The Ruins of Isis' ain't that bad. It's about an anthropologist travelling and exploring the Matriachate Isis/Cinderella under the disguise of an archaeologist. There's conflict between her and her husband, the planet's politics, people and an unveiling of those mysteries that hold the city together. Shows insights into anthropology and our society. Defintely recommended.

Scholar Cendri and her husband, Master Scholar Dal, come to the xenophobic planet of Isis/Cinderella. Because this planet has a very strict matriarchal society, Cendri poses as the master scholar while Dal is relegated to the role of her possession and assistant. They are nominally there to study what may be ruins from the race that seeded the galaxy, but while there they find that their own assumptions about gender and power are called heavily into question.

I'd like to stress that this isn't a bad book, and MZB completists will certainly not regret reading it, but the ideas that are sketched out here are developed more fully and with much more grace in both the Darkover and Avalon books. The gender politics come over a little bit too heavy-handed and occasionally make it difficult to focus on the plot.