Shrine of Stars: The Third Book of Confluence (Confluence Trilogy) [Hardcover]

Paul J. Mcauley (Author)

Book Description

Series: Confluence Trilogy | Publication Date: September 5, 2000

In Child of the River and Ancients of Days -- brilliant, visionary works of science fiction -- award-winning author Paul J. McAuley carefully exposed the intricately beautiful weave of Confluence, a war-torn and dying man-made world seeded with ten thousand genetically manipulated bloodlines. Now a terrible destiny is illuminated -- and the massive scope of the vanished Preservers' ancient dream is finally revealed -- in the concluding chapter of a masterful epic of god-playing, fate, and future,

Years before the birth of Yama -- the last descendant of the revered Builders who constructed the artificial world of Confluence -- humans appeared from out of the depths of time and space to tip its fragile balance. These were the Ancients of Days, ancestors of the long-absent Preservers themselves, carried forward across eons by the relativistic paradox of interstellar light-speed travel. What the Ancients of Days brought to Confluence was heresy and doubt, setting bloodline against bloodline, machine against machine, and igniting the terrible flames of civil war that still ravage the world.

Alone among all the living things that populate Confluence, Yama holds the power to end this war. Whichever side controls him controls the myriad machines of the world, Held captive and helpless, infected by the cruel consciousness of a great feral machine allied with the heretic cause, Yama is being forged into a weapon of terrible power and consequence.

Yet the unique fire that burns within him will not be extinguished, and, as Yama struggles to reclaim his soul, he realizes that the path he'd thought he was traveling freely may have been mapped since before his birth. And at the end of all things, should he accept his destiny or exert his free will?

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Shrine of Stars finishes up one of the most important trilogies in science fiction and fantasy since Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun series. In his column in Science Fiction Weekly, SF critic John Clute calls Paul McAuley's Confluence trilogy a novel in three parts, comprising Child of the River, Ancients of Days, and Shrine of Stars, and best read all at once. Indeed, the narrative is seamless in this far-future tale of a man's birth, death, and rebirth as the savior of Confluence, an artificial world created by his bloodline on behalf of the almighty, departed Preservers.

At the beginning of Shrine of Stars, the hierodule Tibor and the reformed thief Pandaras begin searching for their master, Yamamanama, who has been captured by the sinister Dr. Dismas. A feral machine possesses Dismas with the intent of using Yama's newly ripened powers to alter the course of the worldwide war in favor of the nihilistic heretics. Dismas infects Yama with the offspring of his own paramour, and the young man finds himself unable to control machines, call to his friends, or stop Dismas and the military monster Enobarbus from bending him to their will. It falls to faithful Pandaras to find and rescue his strangely altered master, setting in motion a course of events that will mean the end of Confluence and the beginning of the Preservers' plan for the rest of time. As ever, McAuley's sentences flow beautifully together, linking ideas like a string of fabulous and strange pearls.

Yama is both savior and destroyer in McAuley's story, and the agent of irrefutable change echoing the role of Severian in Wolfe's New Sun books. As John Clute so adeptly points out, where McAuley diverges from these past masterpieces is in his big finish. Shrine of Stars removes Yama from the confines of Confluence and puts him fully in charge of the vast forces of cosmology. By embracing his ultimate humanity, Yama rejects both the notion that the only way to achieve independence is through selfishness, and the possibility that the Preservers have named his destiny. Instead, he names his own. --Therese Littleton

From Library Journal

Captured by his archenemy, Dr. Dismas, the remarkable young man known as Yama fights a dual battle against an internal and an external enemy in order to achieve his true destiny. Set in a far future in which humans have abandoned the known worlds, leaving behind them a plethora of created races, McAuley's conclusion to his galactic trilogy, "The Books of Confluence," reveals the cyclic nature of the universe and the infinite variety of creation. Richly detailed and lyrically told, this volume belongs in most sf collections.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Eos; 1St Edition edition (September 5, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0380975173
• ISBN-13: 978-0380975174
• Product Dimensions: 7.1 x 5.5 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,916,963 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Paul McAuley's first novel won the Philip K. Dick Award, and he has gone on to win almost all of the major awards in the field. For many years a research biologist, he now writes full-time. McAuley's novel The Quiet War made several "best of the year" lists, including SF Site's Reader's Choice Top 10 SF and Fantasy Books of 2009. He lives in London. Visit him online at unlikelyworlds.blogspot.com .

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant capstone to an outstanding far-future epic, December 14, 2000

By 

Richard R. Horton (Webster Groves, MO United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Shrine of Stars: The Third Book of Confluence (Confluence Trilogy) (Hardcover)

Shrine of Stars concludes Paul J. McAuley's Confluence trilogy in very impressive fashion. These books have not quite got the notice I think they deserve, for a couple of reasons. Most important might be that the trilogy concludes with its strongest volume, for the best reasons.

In the first volume, Child of the River, McAuley sketched a strange world with many wonders, and introduced an intriguing main character, Yamamanama (fortunately called Yama by most of the characters). This world, Confluence, is an artificial construct, built thousands of years ago at the behest of the Preservers (apparently descendants of Earth humans), by their servants the "Builders". The Preservers then populated the world with thousands of "bloodlines", apparently "uplifted" animals, as well as the "indigenous" races, apparently aliens of some variety. In the first volume all this is presented as mythic history, and the book has the feel of fantasy. Yama, it is hinted, is the last remnant of the bloodline of the Builders. He sets out on a journey up the huge River of Confluence to the capitol city, Ys, while a long war rages on between the Heretics and the established authority of Confluence. Over the first two books, Yama journeys to Ys, then back down the river to his home. He becomes involved in the war, and meets many of the bloodlines of Confluence, as well as remnants of humans from long before Confluence, and he learns much about his own, very considerable, powers.

Many mysteries are introduced in the first two volumes, and they are slowly dispelled. But in Shrine of Stars, McAuley actually delivers on the implied promise of the first two books: the nature of Confluence, and the nature of Yama, and the answers to the mysteries of the first two books, are all revealed in logical and satisfying ways. In the end the three books are clearly, unambiguously, far future Science Fiction, in a way that for example such models as Jack Vance's The Dying Earth and Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun aren't, quite. This is both good and bad, but it seems to be entirely McAuley's intention. That is, the remaining mysteries, and the religious symbolism, of Wolfe's great tetralogy are a feature certainly intended by the author: and in many ways they enhance the book. It may be that that is the reason I still consider Wolfe's series better than The Book of Confluence, or it may be simply that as good a writer as McAuley is, and he's quite good, Wolfe is still better. But at any rate such comparisons, though inevitable, aren't quite fair to McAuley's work: in the end, he has written an individual work, with its own plan, its own intentions, and I think he succeeds marvelously.

Shrine of Stars, thus, follows Yama and Pandaras after they are separated, as Yama begins to be possessed by a machine implanted in his body, and as Pandaras tries to find Yama, unwillingly bringing Prefect Corin back on Yama's trail. After many trials, Yama comes to full understanding of himself, and of his fate. There are very explicit religious echoes (including a plan for Yama to be executed on a structure of wood), but even as McAuley emphasizes these echoes, he provides rational and consistent explanations for them all. Finally Yama must make a journey off Confluence to another planet, and he must come to a solution to the problem of the future of the bloodlines of Confluence that deals with the apparent coming destruction of Confluence. His solution is satisfying, and McAuley neatly wraps up the series with an ending that is perhaps reminiscent of Charles Harness, only a bit more logical. This is one of the better extended works of SF in the last years of this century, in many ways a fine capstone for a long history of "far future" SF.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing finish to a great trilogy, September 21, 2002

By 

Virgil "Virgil" (Chapel Hill, NC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Shrine of Stars:: The Third Book of Confluence (Confluence Trilogy) (Mass Market Paperback)

I was a great fan of the first two novels in this trilogy of Confluence. The third and final novel in McAuley's telling of the Confluence is a mixed bag with a beginning similarly well written, but an ending that is unsatisfying to the reader.

McAuley seems to compress far too much in Shrine of Stars, rather than let the story build it's way to a finale, he jams so many scenarios and near misses that the reader becomes a little jaded towards the end. Time after time the antagonist(s) reappear after you think they have been eliminated. The effect is that you're never surprised that another antagonist shows up again (in fact the question becomes: which one will appear next?).

But most importantly McAuley lets the reader down. After almost three books where Yama looks for his human bloodline, the results are disappointing and not really worthy of the buildup the author coaxes the reader to expect.

One wants to know more about humanity: what happened, why and so on. Instead the meeting becomes another mini-adventure in a trilogy of mini-adventures that ends in disaster for humans. And still there's no really fulfilling explaination of the past. After three novels what a disappointment! The ultimate end is of an unsatisfying "loop of time" variety.

There is a part in Shrine of Stars where Dimas tells Yama that he can tell him all about the history of humanity, why Confluence exists and what exactly happened. Yama's reply is that he doesn't want to know.

Yama might not want to know, but the reader does.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Capstone of McAuley's Far future epic, May 15, 2001

By 

Jvstin "Paul Weimer" (Circle Pines, MN United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

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This review is from: Shrine of Stars: The Third Book of Confluence (Confluence Trilogy) (Hardcover)

At the end of book two, we've left Yama, our hero, at the mercy of his heretic enemy Dr. Dismas, and seemingly without hope of escape, even as his faithful friend Pandaras struggles to find and free him. So begins the final volume of Confluence. The Great River continues to dry up, the factions of Heretic and Prefect Corin's Department continue their war...and Yama slowly changes from the pawn that he was, to a far greater importance on the "board". McAuley does a credible job tying up most of the loose ends and brings Yama's story full circle. We learn at last the nature of Confluence, and get a look at why the Preservers built it, and what its ultimate fate should be.

Its a bit of a criticism on an otherwise magnificent work, but I think the last half of the book relies TOO much on tropes from Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun novels, especially URTH OF THE NEW SUN.

By the end of the book, however, this reviewer was more than satisfied with the arc of Yama's story. Even with mining the same terrain as Wolfe, the Confluence series is a far easier read--more SF, less allegory.

One last editorial bit. I bought the first and subsequent books of Confluence in hardcover since they were published in that "small, $14 edition" that made getting a hardcover practical. I wish more publishers would publish books this way. Confluence was a definite keeper and I look forward to re-reading it more than once.