His multicultural viewpoint may yet give us the best SF novel of all time – Analog

For twenty thousand years, the godlike Inquestors have held sway over the one million worlds of the Dispersal of Man. S.P. Somtow’s limitless imagination has created a universe of breathtaking majesty, amazing beauty, and shattering cruelty. In games of makrugh played in elegant floating palaces, planets are destroyed or saved to preserve the balance of the galaxy. Exotic languages and customs, servocorpses, tachyon bubbles, childsolders with implanted laser-irises, people bins that hold populations of entire planets, delphinoid ships that sail the overcosm, utopias that must be hunted down and destroyed in the name of the High Compassion, thinkhives that connect the galaxy via the space between spaces …

All this must end. And end it does, in what Theodore Sturgeon has described as the greatest magnitude of color and spectacle since Stapledon. For the fortieth anniversary of the publication of the first Inquestor story in Analog, Diplodocus Press is bringing back revised editions of all four of the original Chronicles of the High Inquest – and releasing a fifth volume, Homeworld of the Heart.

he can create a world with less apparent effort than some writers devote to creating a small room … yet these tales are intricately wrought as those handcarved oriental balls within balls – The Washington Post

his dense, poetic prose is as unique as his name – Los Angeles Times

One of SF’s formidable talents! –Publishers Weekly