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In this witty romp of a planetary romance, Lydia Duluth joins a motley crew of intergalactic travelers to explore the long lost homeworld of the Atch, who have a mysterious history they'd like to keep buried on the planet they left behind. But the expedition goes alarmingly awry when a rogue AI, determined to keep the planet and its system quarantined, destroys the stargate, and the expedition is stranded on the planet. The travelers soon encounter the native Atch and discover the Tomb of the Fathers -- and what can happen when childcare becomes the dominant issue for a species.
Reviews:
"Lydia Duluth -- interstellar traveler, holovid location scout, and star of several of Arnason's short stories -- explores the purported lost home world of the matriarchal, lizardlike Atch in this stand-alone adventure. She's joined by her occasional lover Olaf Reykjavik; Vagina 'Gina' Dentata, a modified pseudo-ape; Precious Bin, a male Atch; and several artificial intelligences (one of which resides in her head). Lydia discovers warlike female Atch descendants who have killed off the males and now reproduce by cloning, but when she and her team try to leave, they're trapped by a slightly barmy AI intent on keeping the violent Atch from traveling in space. Fans of Arnason's dry wit, entertaining character interactions, and complex, imaginative futures will be delighted by this tale and the promise of a forthcoming Lydia Duluth collection."
-- Publishers Weekly, April 12, 2010
Here's a clever and quite original planetary adventure. A crew of humans and aliens is conducting research on a planet supposedly abandoned by its intelligent residents when a malfunctioning AI decides to strand them there. In short order they begin to uncover secrets about the decline of the alien civilization, which mixes the serious and the humorous in about equal measure, and yes there's considerable social commentary mixed in with the laughs and surprises. It's quite short -- not much more than a novella -- so the satire doesn't get too long winded, and there's an active plot as well. Have a few laughs and look at human behavior from a slightly different viewpoint."
-- Don D'Ammassa,Critical Mass, June 8, 2010
"In the interests of self-disclosure, I suppose I should admit that I have been mad for the fiction of Eleanor Arnason since I first came across it back in the nineties. What I found in that first story, 'Knapsack Poems,' and in all the rest of her work, which I rapidly sought out, is that quality which first drew me to science fiction, and that which continues to draws me back to science fiction above all other forms of literature: the ability to imagine the world in some other way...
"... Lydia Duluth, the point of view character in this novel, is a continuing character for Arnason; further, this type of story, a collection of varied characters on a journey through a landscape alien to most of them, is one she has told before, most successfully in Woman of the Iron People (1991). But despite some similarities between these two narratives (Lydia/Lixia for our POV characters; also, the human male in the mix, Olaf, is much like Derek from WoIP, as Bin, the Atch, is similar to Voice of the Waterfall from WoIP), Tomb of the Fathers is fresh enough and, more importantly, Arnason's writing and her ideas strong enough, to carry the novel...
"... Too often, lately, science fiction writers have been telling us all we can reasonably hope for is a rebuilt past. Here in these books, as in all her fiction, Eleanor Arnason offers dreams of better ways.
-- Kelly Jennings, Strange Horizons, Aug 18, 2010
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