When Dystopia Gives Rise To Hope

On a moonlit Vermont night in the year 2055, Doctor Zhampa DiOrio harnesses himself to a cart like a draft animal and heads for the Red Lady Mountain monastery in Tibet. No matter that civilization has unraveled. No matter that the journey, if he survives it, will take years. No matter that he doesn’t understand the power of the Tibetan relics he carries strapped to his back. Returning them, he is fulfilling the vow he made to his mentor, Rinpo, the abbot of the monastery who fled a hundred years earlier to keep his lineage’s most important scepters from Mao Tse Tung’s genocidal army. Zhampa endures the seasons, the distance, and the violence of others with the help of a hardened warrior, a wild-hearted hunter, and his step-daughter, Celeste, herself a skilled healer. As in every previous time, death comes without warning. The certainty of this drives their determination to deliver the tools that will give rise to a future free of war, bringing an end, finally, to the Dark Age. Pope has conceived a dazzling story that extracts hope from the most dismal of landscapes and events. Readers will recognize these conditions as the consequences of cultural confusion and neglect of the Earth over humanity’s last two centuries.

A Hero’s Journey in an Unraveled World