They're ancient, they're enigmatic, they're alien and they're here. Eight million of them. The Shian arrive on Earth in 2001, not as conquerors, but as settlers and refugees, seeking a world to colonize. In exchange for access to their highly advanced technology, they are given the right to stay here and now live alongside humanity, outwardly similar but inwardly deeply different, a challenge to all mankind's established notions of society, family, gender, sex and law.
In Ireland a Shian community eighty thousand strong is brought in as a massive experiment in social engineering, a way of breaking the historic pattern of a bipolarized society. The consequences are far-reaching and unpredictable.
The community remains aloof from that country's enduring legacy of division and violence ... then a prominent Shian family is brutally murdered, down to the last child, and human and alien cultures find themselves on a collision course.
Between then stands Andy Gillespie, ex-con and aspirant to the mysteries of the Shian law, the unlikely hero in a hunt for a serial killer that takes his through strange sub-cultures, corrupt religious sects and sinister political organizations, with the police and paramilitaries hot on his heels.
Andy Gillespie is determined to win justice for the Shian - but Shian justice always comes as a price...
Cover blurb of Gollancz edition
In this novel, Ian takes us to a Northern Ireland where the alien Shian have landed a few years ago. They are trying to live peacefully among the humans, but conflict is constantly near. The new situation with humans and aliens is also held up as a mirror against the situation with protestants and catholics on Northern Ireland.
Ian has previously written a couple of short stories featuring the Shian.
Editions
- Gollancz (hardcover)
- 1996
- 286 pages. £16.99. Cover by Mike Posen.
ISBN 0-575-06075-1.
- Vista (paperback)
- 1997
- 286 pages. £5.99. Cover by Mike Posen.
ISBN 0-575-60059-4.
Translations
- German Narrenopfer, translated by Jakob Leutner.
- 1998
- Heyne SF & F, 5981. 445 pages, ISBN 3-453-14867-3. Cover art by doMANSKI.
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