![]() First edition cover | |
Author | Richard Adams |
---|---|
Country | United Kingdom |
Language | English |
Series | Beklan Empire |
Genre | Fantasy, Romance |
Publisher | Viking Press |
Publication date | 1984 |
Media type | Print (hardback & paperback) |
ISBN | 0-14-006476-1 |
OCLC | 13397594 |
Preceded by | Shardik |
Maia is a fantasy novel by Richard Adams, published in 1984. It is set in the Beklan Empire, the fictional world of Adams's 1974 novel Shardik , to which it stands as a loose prequel, taking place a few years earlier.
Maia, at 15, lives in the Beklan Empire's province of Tonilda with her mother, Morca, her three younger sisters, and her stepfather, Tharrin. Their small, poor farm is on the edge of Lake Serrelind, and Maia tends to shirk her chores by swimming in the lake.
Tharrin secretly seduces Maia. When Morca discovers the affair, she sells Maia to a slave dealer Lalloc. Maia is almost raped by one of his employees, but is saved by Occula, a black slave girl. Maia and Occula become very good friends and even lovers. They are sent to the city of Bekla.
Occula relates her past: her father, a jewel-merchant, brought her across the desert to Bekla. They were received by the noblewoman Fornis. She had Occula's father murdered and his emeralds incorporated into the Sacred Queen's crown. Occula was sold as a slave.
Adams outlines Bekla's political situation in several chapters that bypass Maia. The "Leopard" faction led by the High Baron Durakkon, Fornis (now the Sacred Queen), the Lord General Kembri, and the High Counsellor Sencho came to power by ceding Suba, a western province, to the neighbouring kingdom of Terekenalt. They legalised slavery, and the capital's finances are now heavily based on taxation of it. Pockets of rebellion have sprung up around the empire.
Sencho buys both Maia and Occula as "bed-slaves". Terebinthia, the woman in charge of Sencho's household, supervises and trains them. At intervals, a peddler named Zirek visits and exchanges cryptic conversations with Occula.
Beautiful and fun-loving, Maia shows promise of going far, and finds some professional satisfaction in providing Sencho's decadent pleasures. To her surprise, she even enjoys the spectacle when a fellow bed-slave, the tempestuous Meris, is whipped and sold for dereliction of duty.
Terebinthia rents out the girls to other rich and powerful men. Using this means of contact, Lord General Kembri secretly enlists Maia and Occula as agents and charges Maia with gaining the trust of Bayub-Otal, the dispossessed heir to Suba and a potential ally of the rebels. Bayub-Otal is the son of the baron of a neighbouring province and a dancer nicknamed "Nokomis" ("dragonfly").
When Sencho becomes drastically ill, he comes to depend almost solely on Occula's intense caretaking. During a garden party, Occula lures Sencho out of sight and signals her rebel confederates, Zirek and Meris, to stab Sencho to death.
Maia and Occula are imprisoned on suspicion of colluding in Sencho's murder. Queen Fornis takes Maia into her household. As Maia fails to satisfy her sexual needs, Fornis gives her to Kembri; Maia seizes on this chance to interest the queen in Occula, hoping to save her friend from execution.
Kembri sends Maia to Bayub-Otal with a cover story of having escaped. Bayub-Otal takes her with him as he secretly makes his way back to Suba. Maia learns that one reason for his extraordinary standoffish respect for her is that she looks (and dances) like his dead mother, Nokomis, who is still revered throughout the province. Bayub-Otal hopes to use the resemblance to rally Suban patriotism on behalf of an alliance with Terekenalt.
At the rallying site, Maia falls passionately in love with the handsome young Zen-Kurel, an officer of Terekenalt. Zen-Kurel accepts her invitation to bed, but leaves quickly to take part in a surprise attack scheduled for that very night. The River Valderra, the boundary between the two countries, is thought to be uncrossably swift and rocky, but the Terekenalters plan to ford it with heavy ropes and strong men, thus surprising the detachment of Tonildan soldiers guarding the other side.
In hopes of saving her fellow Tonildans' lives as well as her lover's, Maia swims the river. Despite serious wounds, she warns the Beklan commander and thwarts the invasion.
Maia returns to Bekla, freed and celebrated. She gains an informal title as the "Serrelinda" after Lake Serrelind. Hoping to reunite with Zen-Kurel, she takes no lovers, despite expectations that she will find a rich husband or become an expensive courtesan. Her popularity and single status bring her under threat from Fornis; since the Sacred Queen is chosen periodically by popular acclaim, Maia is an obvious rival despite not wanting the crown.
Maia sees her stepfather, Tharrin, dragged into Bekla as a rebel informant. He is condemned to be sacrificed. Maia does her best to free him, and he reveals to her that her real mother was not Morca but a pregnant girl who had fled to Morca's cottage and died there in childbirth; Maia deduces she is the daughter of Nokomis' younger sister and therefore a Suban.
Fornis causes Tharrin's death. Maia makes a desperate attempt to kill Fornis, but is thwarted by Occula, who was indeed inducted into the queen's household. Occula intends to take revenge on Fornis when the time is right; meanwhile she is performing the sort of sado-masochistic services of which Maia had been incapable.
As civil war breaks out in Bekla, Maia learns that Bayub-Otal and Zen-Kurel have been brought there as prisoners. In danger of Fornis' murderous fury, Maia frees the two men, and with them and Zirek and Meris (who have been hiding since assassinating Sencho), she flees Bekla.
The former prisoners are bitterly angry at Maia for betraying them at the Valderra, which she had idealistically considered an attempt to save their lives. Nevertheless, they agree to return with her to Suba or Terekenalt.
Maia and her companions travel for a time with rebel freebooters. Meris, always a troublemaker, gets herself killed by one of them. Maia gradually regains Zen-Kurel's and Bayub-Otal's trust by her sincere efforts to help them. After an arduous boat escape from the Beklan Empire to Terekenalt, Bayub-Otal is killed and Maia receives a marriage proposal from the man she loves most.
Two years later, Maia (with her little son) visits the capital of her new country and by chance meets Occula. Occula describes how she killed Fornis, aided by supernatural forces, and how the rebels overthrew the Leopards' regime.
The story ends with Maia refusing Occula's plea to go back to Bekla; she would rather help Zen-Kurel and his father manage their farm.
Much as Adams had invented words of the Lapine language for the rabbits of Watership Down , he employs some "Beklan" vocabulary for honorifics, natural objects, and sexual terms; the last "allows adults to leave the book within reach of children." [1] Some are also used in Shardik.
The New York Times reviewer considered the book far better than Shardik, especially in prose style. She called it "a sexy, swashbuckling, and hugely long romp," and said it resembled his previous novels in "its mood of personal exorcism and self-indulgence." She praised Adams's inventive fantasy world and said the plot was "just so much 'Star Wars' and lots of fun." However, she said that what appeared to be an attempt at feminist sensibility was marred by "something basically wrongheaded about his female characters," noting that Occula, despite her spirituality, ends up being satisfied as a rich man's mistress, and that Maia, despite the reader's expectation that she will have some kind of apotheosis, ends up on a farm something like where she started. "What is it," she asks, "that Mr. Adams wishes us to make of it all?" [2]
The New Yorker quipped that though Maia's career as a Playboy Bunny was reminiscent of Watership Down , she seemed more like a fish, and her swimming "changes the course of much more than her career". It said "Mr. Adams's artistry distinguishes his work from those didactic fantasies which border on science fiction"; instead the aim was entertainment, as shown in the elaborate settings, and the reader has no reason to put the book down. [1]
Princess Leia Organa is a fictional character in the Star Wars franchise, portrayed in films by Carrie Fisher. Introduced in the original Star Wars film in 1977, Leia is princess of the planet Alderaan, a member of the Imperial Senate and an agent of the Rebel Alliance. She thwarts the sinister Sith lord Darth Vader and helps bring about the destruction of the Empire's cataclysmic superweapon, the Death Star. In The Empire Strikes Back (1980), Leia commands a Rebel base and evades Vader as she falls in love with the smuggler Han Solo. In Return of the Jedi (1983), Leia helps in the operation to rescue Han from the crime lord Jabba the Hutt and is revealed to be Vader's daughter and the twin sister of Luke Skywalker.
The Belgariad is a five-book fantasy epic written by David Eddings, following the journey of protagonist Garion and his companions, first to recover a sacred stone, and later to use it against antagonist Torak. It was a bestseller from the first book in the series. It has been called both the "last gasp" of traditional fantasy and "one of the founding megasagas" of modern fantasy.
Watership Down is an adventure novel by English author Richard Adams, published by Rex Collings Ltd of London in 1972. Set in southern England, around Hampshire, the story features a small group of rabbits. Although they live in their natural wild environment, with burrows, they are anthropomorphised, possessing their own culture, language, proverbs, poetry, and mythology. Evoking epic themes, the novel follows the rabbits as they escape the destruction of their warren and seek a place to establish a new home, encountering perils and temptations along the way.
Lapine is a fictional language created by author Richard Adams for his 1972 novel Watership Down, where it is spoken by rabbit characters. The language was again used in Adams' 1996 sequel, Tales from Watership Down, and has appeared in both the film and television adaptations. The fragments of language presented by Adams consist of a few dozen distinct words, and are chiefly used for the naming of rabbits, their mythological characters, and objects in their world. The name "Lapine" comes from the French word for rabbit, lapin, and can also be used to describe rabbit society.
Nokomis is the name of Nanabozho's grandmother in the Ojibwe traditional stories and was the name of Hiawatha's grandmother in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem, The Song of Hiawatha, which is a re-telling of the Nanabozho stories. Nokomis is an important character in the poem, mentioned in the familiar lines:
Shardik is a 1974 fantasy novel by Richard Adams. Shardik is his second novel, and first of two novels set in the fictional Beklan Empire. The events revolve around the discovery, capture and military and symbolic uses made of an incredibly large bear, called Lord Shardik by those who subscribe to a set of religious beliefs in the novel.
Jedi Prince is a series of science-fiction young-reader novels set in the Star Wars universe, written by Paul and Hollace Davids. They were published by Bantam Skylark between 1992 and 1993. The series takes place about a year after Return of the Jedi, between the events of the books The Truce at Bakura (1993) and Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor (2008).
Kull the Conqueror is a 1997 fantasy film about the Robert E. Howard character Kull starring Kevin Sorbo. It is a film adaptation of Howard's Conan novel The Hour of the Dragon, with the protagonist changed to the author's other barbarian hero Kull. The storyline also bears similarities to two other Howard stories, the Kull story "By This Axe I Rule!" and the Conan story "The Phoenix on the Sword", which was a rewritten version of "By This Axe I Rule!"
The Snow Queen is a 1980 science fiction novel by American writer Joan D. Vinge. It won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1981, and was also nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1981.
Hart's Hope (1983) is a fantasy novel by Orson Scott Card, written in second person.
The Han Solo Trilogy is a trilogy of now non-canon (Legends) science-fiction novels set in the Star Wars galaxy. It follows Han Solo's origins and life before the events depicted in the original Star Wars trilogy (1977-1983). The trilogy was written by Ann C. Crispin, and released in June 1997, October 1997, and March 1998, respectively. The author stated that "Per Lucasfilm's request, I did not cover Han's time in the Imperial Academy, or his first meeting with Chewbacca"; these events were eventually depicted in the 2018 film Solo: A Star Wars Story.
Summoner 2 is an action role-playing game developed by Volition and published by THQ as the sequel to Summoner. It was originally released for PlayStation 2 in 2002 and was re-released for the GameCube in 2003 with some visual changes as Summoner: A Goddess Reborn. The game features improved visuals and a more real-time, action-oriented combat system from the original.
Watership Down is a British-Canadian animated fantasy children's television series, adapted from the 1972 novel of the same name by Richard Adams. It is the second adaptation of the novel, following the 1978 film. A co-production of Alltime Entertainment of the United Kingdom and Decode Entertainment of Canada, the series was produced by Martin Rosen, the director of the 1978 feature film adaptation. The series is produced with the participation of the Canadian Television Fund, the Canadian Film or Video Production Tax Credit and the Ontario Film and Television Tax Credit from the Government of Ontario.
Journey to the River Sea is an adventure novel written by Eva Ibbotson, published by MacMillan in 2001. It is set mainly in Manaus, Brazil, early in the 20th century and conveys the author's vision of the Amazon River.
Personal Demon, a fantasy novel published in 2008, is the eighth book in the Women of the Otherworld series written by Canadian author Kelley Armstrong. It is the first novel in the series to have more than one narrator and the first to include a male narrator.
Eternal Filena is a fantasy light novel series by Takeshi Shudo which was serialized in Japan in Animage, illustrated by Akemi Takada. The series has been collected into nine volumes published by Tokuma Shoten. An OVA series based on the novels was released from 1992 to 1993. The novel series was also adapted into a role-playing video game released by Tokuma Shoten for the Super Famicom in 1995. It was only released commercially in Japan.
Wookiees are fictional humanoid aliens in the Star Wars universe, native to the forest planet Kashyyyk. They are distinguished from humans by their gigantism, hirsutism, and physical strength. The most prominent Wookiee is Chewbacca, co-pilot of the Millennium Falcon alongside his best friend, Han Solo.
Soldier of the Mist is a 1986 historical fantasy novel by American writer Gene Wolfe, published by Gollancz in the UK and then Tor Books in the US. It has two sequels: Soldier of Arete (1989) and Soldier of Sidon (2006). Soldier of the Mist and Soldier of Arete have been collected as Latro in the Mist.
Radio Rebel is a 2012 teen comedy television film based on a novel titled Shrinking Violet. The movie premiered on Disney Channel in the United States on February 17, 2012 and YTV in Canada on March 9, 2012. The movie was produced by MarVista Entertainment and Two 4 Money Media, in association with YTV and Disney Channel. The movie was directed by Peter Howitt, written by Erik Patterson & Jessica Scott. It stars Debby Ryan, Merritt Patterson, Adam DiMarco, Sarena Parmar and Nancy Robertson. The film follows a shy girl (Ryan) who goes undercover with a radio persona that allows her to express her true feelings. Her identity is put at risk when her school principal (Robertson) threatens to expel the young girl following a life of mischief.
The Rise of Sivagami is an Indian historical fiction novel written by Anand Neelakantan. It acts as a prequel to the film Baahubali: The Beginning. It was originally released in English on 7 March 2017, with Telugu, Malayalam, Hindi and Tamil versions released in April 2017.