A great series from a fantastic author, one that was not readily available as a set until recently but thankfully is now! A beautiful and richly detailed world, I can’t recommend these novels enough!

Chronicles of the High Inquest:
The Throne of Madness (Inquestor Book 2)

Kelver had been chosen by a heretic to be the chosen one who would bring down a galactic empire that had lasted twenty thousand years and controlled a million worlds. He was sent to Uran s’Varek, the vast artificial sphere build around the black hole at the heart of the galaxy, to be trained in the ways of the High Inquest, the godlike elite who ruled the known universe.

Instead, he fell in love with the beautiful, cruel White Inquestrix Siriss, and the violet-eyed boy Arryk — was entranced by the singing city of Shentrazjit — wept at the sepulcher of worlds — made love in a desert of powdered chocolate — and was finally possessed by the Throne of Madness, whose unimaginable power came from the deaths of stars.

The Inquestor Series, a dazzling future history of a galactic empire of shattering beauty and brutality, was iconic science fiction of the 1980s by World Fantasy Award and Campbell Award winner S.P. Somtow, who created worlds, languages, cultures and spectacle. In the words of Analog magazine, “He may yet give us the greatest science fiction novel of all time.”

Forty years on, the series has come to life again, with additional novels, revised editions and new introductions and ancillary materials. Somtow’s far-flung galactic civilization is a creation to rival Silverberg’s Majipoor or Herbert’s Dune.

It is a universe with its own language and exotic customs, vividly etched characters and rich history that spans thousands of worlds and tens of thousands of years.

The godlike Inquestors of the High Inquest had forsaken all that made them human. But one young Inquestor rediscovered the power of compassion and hastened the end of their ancient, starflung empire….

“In a prose that evokes the spirited imagination of the
symbolist painters and poets, Somtow postulates a complex universe of immense scope … upholds the author’s place as one of SF’s formidable talents.”
– Publishers Weekly

About the Author

S.P. Somtow, Once referred to by the International Herald Tribune as ‘the most well-known expatriate Thai in the world,’ Somtow Sucharitkul is no longer an expatriate, since he has returned to Thailand after five decades of wandering the world. He is best known as an award-winning novelist and a composer of operas.

Born in Bangkok, Somtow grew up in Europe and was educated at Eton and Cambridge. His first career was in music and in the 1970s, his first return to Asia, he acquired a reputation as a revolutionary composer, the first to combine Thai and Western instruments in radical new sonorities. Conditions in the arts in the region at the time proved so traumatic for the young composer that he suffered a major burnout, emigrated to the United States, and reinvented himself as a novelist.

His earliest novels were in the science fiction field and he soon won the John W. Campbell for Best New Writer as well as being nominated for and winning numerous other awards in the field. But science fiction was not able to contain him and he began to cross into other genres. In his 1984 novel Vampire Junction, he injected a new literary inventiveness into the horror genre, in the words of Robert Bloch, author of Psycho, ‘skillfully combining the styles of Stephen King, William Burroughs, and the author of the Revelation to John.’ Vampire Junction was voted one of the forty all-time greatest horror books by the Horror Writers’ Association, joining established classics like Frankenstein and Dracula. He has also published children’s books, a historical novel, and about a hundred works of short fiction.

In the 1990s Somtow became increasingly identified as a uniquely Asian writer with novels such as the semi-autobiographical Jasmine Nights and a series of stories noted for a peculiarly Asian brand of magic realism, such as Dragon’s Fin Soup, which is currently being made into a film directed by Takashi Miike. He recently won the World Fantasy Award, the highest accolade given in the world of fantastic literature, for his novella The Bird Catcher. His seventy-plus books have sold about two million copies world-wide. He has been nominated for or won over forty awards in the fields of science fiction, fantasy, and horror.

After becoming a Buddhist monk for a period in 2001, Somtow decided to refocus his attention on the country of his birth, founding Bangkok’s first international opera company and returning to music, where he again reinvented himself, this time as a neo-Asian neo-Romantic composer. The Norwegian government commissioned his song cycle Songs Before Dawn for the 100th Anniversary of the Nobel Peace Prize, and he composed at the request of the government of Thailand his Requiem: In Memoriam 9/11 which was dedicated to the victims of the 9/11 tragedy.

According to London’s Opera magazine, ‘in just five years, Somtow has made Bangkok into the operatic hub of Southeast Asia.’ His operas on Thai themes, Madana and Mae Naak, have been well received by international critics.

Somtow has recently been awarded the 2017 Europa Cultural Achievement Award for his work in bridging eastern and western cultures. In 2020 he returned to science fiction after a twenty-year absence with “Homeworld of the Heart”, a fifth novel in the Inquestor series.

To support S.P. Somtow’s work, visit his patreon account at patreon.com/spsomtow.