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(1950- ) US author whose sf/fantasy sequence – the Mountain Made of Light comprising The Mountain Made of Light (1992), Fire and Ice (1992) and The Summit (1994) – interestingly revises long-outmoded Lost Race conventions. Though it is primarily set in the 1920s, and though fantasy elements increasingly dominate in later volumes, the trilogy is of sf as a demonstration of the extent to which seemingly dead forms can, on re-thinking, serve contemporary needs. The sequence is set in the Andes, and the lost race in question is Native American. But the old Lost World novel – which normally articulated late nineteenth-century Western civilization's uneasy claims to racial and political hegemony over the planet – would have necessarily treated the lost race – because it was not of ancient white stock – as inherently superstitious. Myers's version is far more complex, and interestingly picks up on the world-well-lost tone of James Hilton's Lost Horizon (1933), in which lost worlds are seen as a repository of wisdom the West has lost or never known. In the first volume, a young anthropologist, psychically damaged by his experiences in World War One, finds his own lost world, named Xirrixir, in the Andes; and before the end of the sequence – after climbing the Mountain Made of Life where a mysterious City awaits him – gains Transcendence. Storyteller (2008) is an eloquent Young Adult fantasy [JC]
born Denver, Colorado: 1 April 1950
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Mountain Made of Light
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Entry from The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (2011-current) edited by John Clute and David Langford.
Accessed 01:33 am on 13 January 2025.
<https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/myers_edward>