The Heirs of Babylon

The dystopian politics of 1984 meet the naval warship backdrop of The Last Ship in fantasy master Glen Cook's reissued first novel, available for the first time in decades. It is 2193, and still the war continues. Two hundred years after nuclear and chemical weapons have nearly annihilated the global population, the last of mankind struggles on in isolated communities. Law and order is carried out by the Political Office, black-clad police who rule through fear and violence, commanding the world's survivors how to think, how to act, and when to obey the call to the Gathering: the ritual massing for war against an unknown and unseen Enemy. Now the call has come, and all nations must pay tribute. Kurt Ranke is a young man eking out an existence in the ruins of former Germany with his pregnant wife. But when the Gathering is called, he boards the decrepit destroyer Jäger--a once-mighty warship now more than two centuries old. Antiquated, broken-down, and running on steam, it wallows through uncharted waters carrying Ranke and a reluctant and ragtag group of soldiers en route to the Final Meeting: a battle from which it's rumored none have ever returned . . .