The Green Gods

Book excerpt: Les Dieux Verts [The Green Gods] (1961) tells of the romance of Prince Aran and Atlena during the Emerald Age of the Earth, in the far future, when Man's Empire is on the decline and the world is ruled by the eponymous "Green Gods," powerful entities which arose from the vegetal kingdom. The works of Rosny Award-winner Nathalie Henneberg (1917-1977) stand alone in the French SF landscape of the 1960s. Her use of the language, betraying Germanic and Russian influences, was unusually well-suited to creating larger-than-life heroic characters and epic, mythological romances. Her skills at creating intricately detailed baroque universes was second to none. This new edition translated by Hugo Award winnmer C.J. Cherryh also includes four Henneberg stories translated by SF Grand Master Damon Knight and an introduction by French SF scholar Charles Moreau. C.J. Cherryh, is a Hugo Award winning science fiction and fantasy author who has written more than 60 books since the mid-1970s, many set in her Alliance-Union universe.