ISBN0976066009

This is a book to read over and over. The first time I wasn't impressed at all. I've gone through it now 4 times and get more each time. I wish the words weren't so hard but my vocabulary is now better. :)

I tried for days to solve the cipher since I enjoy a good puzzle. Last Labor Day I sent it to Marilyn vos Savant, figuring she would enjoy a good challenge. I know she must get hundreds if not thousands of queries and guess I wasn't surprised I never heard from her or saw the answer in her weekly column in Parade Magazine, which I devour each Sunday. Last week I contacted Avar Press and was told that they had never been contacted by Marilyn for verification of the answer. Oh well... :(

All I can say is puzzle or no, the book has made me into a better person. I have allowed it to make me question certain values that have been drummed into me by our society. Read Xen and see for yourself.

After reading this book, I finally decided once and for all to become a vegetarian!

If you wonder why people continue to wage war, why history repeats itself and why you just discarded your barely touched beverage before boarding a plane, read this book. You'll love the way this novel makes you think. This book is a five plus.

Xen takes place in the distant future, but is not a typical science fiction novel. If you're expecting lots of action and weapons, move along and don't bother. Ditto if you anticipate the undead, "creatures," horror, fantasy, dragons, etc. And again don't waste your money if you're looking for a sweet, gentle romp into the future. That world, the Utopia, is there, but you won't get to it until having faced a horrific look at the depravity of our species.

Xen is a polemic, an allegory, a satire. How else could a modern day novel dare to begin with the line, "it was a dark and stormy night," if not put forth as a translation from a future language? Even the copyright page gives the reader a glimpse at the spoof that will be revealed in the coming pages.

The book consists of ten vignettes that are ultimately tied together, but this isn't at all obvious until one reads the last several. Things are initially even more confusing because most of the chapters are written in second person point of view, even when the character changes! The reader won't get to a repeat character until chapter 5, with the return of the scientist, Pawkey Seneschal, in his second of three stories.

The book actually starts off (if one doesn't count the foreword, the "translator's note,") with a bet over the fate of mankind, orchestrated between Wind and Water. They come back again in the book of History. In this chapter, the unspeakable ways in which we treat each other as well as other creatures are relentlessly drilled home to the reader, in second person point of view much of the time, making it entirely personal. This chapter is the longest by far and never seems to run out of steam, perhaps much like the ongoing anguish and misery of the suffering, past, present, and future. It ends with a commercial that can only be imagined in the world of Xen. This is followed by the book of Adolescent, in which the reader meets a contemporary high school senior in the future Utopia, as she reflects upon part of a college placement requirement.

Three of the remaining books deal with the future minister of earth. Outrageously, the reader meets the most powerful person on Earth and all the colonies on which humans now live in space, while she is about to have sex with her husband. But it isn't until the reader has finished experiencing this encounter, again that second person point of view, that one becomes aware of just who she is. It is Minister Esse who must deal with aliens who have come to Earth, centuries after mankind has already been traveling the stars, to confront humanity with the true origins of their transformation from xenophobia to "tolerance and enlightenment at all levels."

The book delightfully and whimsically comes full circle as Wind and Water settle the bet and you know who gets the last word, now don't you?

Xen is not a book for everyone. One has to read this volume SLOWLY; it cannot be skimmed. (If you want to know what happens, Water wins the bet...duh!) The sentences are often complex and long; many I had to read more than once. Xen should be read by lovers of words, by those who adore visual imagery and have the patience to read each line very carefully, gratified that they are not able to anticipate the endings of most sentences. A Xen reader is comfortable finding that a single a page can contain multiple words that may require a dictionary followed by four letter words or other vulgarity as well as entirely made up words, e.g. pisseria, igged, ISDs. Xen is pure joy for someone who enjoys alliteration: e.g. ..."she succumbed to the somniferous spell of the local gastronomy"..."the vitriol bubbles out of the beaker and even the dogs hide from the bellicose rantings"...and who doesn't mind not knowing what's going to come next: e.g...."you mentally return to the news and current events. There's a helluva lot of crime over and above the every day publicly sanctioned workings of the government at all levels"..."there is still something wrong with this picture you think, cogitating further about the turd in the punchbowl"..."the answer to that is about as veiled as a nipple in a transparent bra you think"...These latter quotes are all from just a few pages. You get the picture.

Finally, there are numerous amazing metaphors, e.g. ..."on a clock with celestial divisions, even we and our mother earth are not immortal"..."you deconstruct the telomeric clock, one gear and spring at a time, until the blueprint of each piece is traced back to the genetic origins"..."the sun had been crisply frying the heavens and the clouds had been boiled out of their ethereal cauldron..." and epic symbolism: e.g. water, wind, fire.

Xen won't be for everyone in other ways. Pawkey Seneschal is introduced as a quintessential racist, sexist intellectual who really has NOTHING good to say about anything or anyone. His thoughts, which we share in the second person point of view, are vile and reprehensible in the extreme. This IS a book about xenophobia. Seneschal is clearly an equal opportunist here insofar as no religion, race, or any other division or subset of mankind is spared his satire, sarcasm, irony, criticism, lampoon, castigation, or denigration. This diatribe becomes more relentless as the book evolves, which made me eventually wonder if he hates everything. And then it hit me. He hates greed, exploitation and over consumption (his utopia is hardly a luddite existence nor is this a veiled and trite entreaty for anything socialistic, which he hates, too). He hates the subjugation of women, the waste of resources, the hypocrisy of so much of religion and government, the instability of marriage, the barriers of language, nationalism, the use of animals as food or for any other "raw materials." Through Seneschal, the author hates the hate that we intrinsically and genetically harbor. In Xen he begs us to recognize that we have more in common with each other than those things which separate us; hence he implores us to move this knowledge to our first thoughts, no longer to be relegated to after or second thoughts. We do, after all, have free will.

My major criticism of Xen is that it will be perceived as too complicated by some readers. There needs to be an expurgated version in order for the basic story to achieve mass market appeal. I'm not sure how many have the patience for a book like this today.

Since I'm no student of literature, despite being an avid reader, I won't even try to compare Solomon to other authors or Xen to other works. I'll leave that up to others who may review this book.

If you "get it," Xen is a book that you will read again and again. It will join the ranks of your favorites and you will buy copies for friends rather than lend yours out. This book is complex and therefore some readers may not understand or even loathe it. But for those who are up for the trip, it's quite a roller-coaster ride.

Xen: A Novel from the Future is an intriguing science fiction tale about a scientist, Pawkey Seneschal, who loathes humanity's evils so much that he unveils a means to forever rid all humanity of its hate, prejudice, and xenophobia. The secret lies within the "Ten Books of Xen", which are intertwined in a mythical tale about the repeated rebirth of Mankind - N + 1 times. Partly a puzzle for the reader to solve, partly a vision of an utopian future just within humanity's grasp, and partly a reexamination of all that is familiar in ordinary life, Xen is a triumph expressing a crucial message counter-culture and would-be world-transformers of all walks of life, from humanitarians and pacifists to feminists and libertarians.