Skip to main content

story identification - Series of novels with immortal man and tribes with horses / telepathic cats in post-apocalyptic US


My memory of this is sketchy and I hope I don't jumble it too much. I read two or three books (possibly more exist) in a series in the late 1990s. The whole thing was mainly SF with a dose of fantasy.


The main character is a man who is immortal. He doesn't age and can recover from even the most horrific wounds. I'm not sure if there where other immortals (I seem to recall a woman and another man). As far as I can recall, immortals were infertile and couldn't have children.


He lives among a tribe of nomadic people who roam the prairies of post-apocalyptic North America on horseback (society like Native American prairie tribes). Among their tribes (there is more than one) also live huge (lion-sized?) cats who are telepathic and have near-human level intelligence. The immortal man is a leader among the nomads and, I seem to recall, he is instrumental in getting the tribes together in a larger alliance and gradually moving them East to the coast.



On the east coast, some cities remain (Pittsburgh I clearly recall) who have a medieval feudal society with a militia and knight-based military. (I clearly remember that military ranks among them had Greek-derived names, which was quite strange.)


There was also a small group of people who had retained pre-apocalypse technology (radios, trucks, helicopters, firearms), possibly survivors or descendants of the military or of some scientists. These people were antagonistic to the immortal and try to kill or capture him. The immortal had some narrow escapes. They mainly work in secret and avoid letting their presence be known among the tribes.



Answer



Kind of sounds like the Horseclans series by Robert Adams. (1975-)



Horseclans is a science fiction series by Robert Adams, set in a North America that had been thrown back to a medieval level by a full-scale nuclear war.


The books mainly concern the doings of the "Horseclans", a nomadic people originating from the "Sea of Grass"—the Great Plains from present-day southern Canada to central Texas, and from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains, post-apocalyptically. The Horseclansmen were portrayed as fierce, noble and often gifted with telepathy, which came in handy for their dealings with their horses and "cats"—sabertoothed tigers that had been revived by scientific means in the years before the nuclear war.


Some people, including the Horseclans' founder and mentor-figure, Milo Morai, were "Undying"—effectively immortal or at least unaging and almost impossible to kill by means other than suffocation, drowning and decapitation. The Undying were also sterile, which was a source of anguish for some of them.



References:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Adams_(science_fiction_writer)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseclans


enter image description here


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

harry potter - Do the Kwikspell courses work?

In Harry Potter we are introduced to Kwikspell course in The Chamber of Secrets (and never hear about it again). We see Filch taking courses, presumably by mail. The descriptions of Kwikspell make me think it is for people who are weak in magic (kind of like how Neville was supposed to be when he was younger), but had magic in them nonetheless. However, Ron's comments later in the chapter make it sound like it is mainly for Squibs to learn magic. However, it is strongly implied through out all the books that Squibs are essentially Muggles, and will never be able to do magic. How then is a Kwikspell course supposed to work? Do we have any information to know if it works at all? Is it a scam? An answer from any level of canon is welcome. Answer Kwikspell courses are (probably) useful to some wizards, but not to squibs. The Kwikspell course literature comes with two testimonials. Madam Z. Nettles of Topsham writes: ‘I had no memory for incantations and my potions were a family joke...

futurama - How much time is lost in 'Time Keeps on Slippin''

In time Keeps on Slippin' , Farnsworth creates a basketball team which he matures by abusing Chronitons. This leads to time skipping forward by random, but ever increasing amounts. How much time was skipped in this way? Answer Unfortunately, I don't think a good estimate can be made for this, for two reasons: Many of the time skips move forward by an indeterminate amount of time. At one point, the Professor mentions localized regions of space skipping forward much more than others. We then see two young boys on the street below complaining about having to pay social security, only to suddenly become senior citizens and start complaining about wanting their money. Thus, each individual could have experienced a different amount of time skippage.

star wars - What "exactly" happens when someone turns to the Dark Side?

When I saw the original Star Wars saga as a kid, the concept of the Dark Side imprinted in me was quite simple. You did a bad thing, so you're a bad person so you go to the Dark Side and keep doing bad things. Now, obviously this doesn't hold true in reality. In my mind it is perfectly reasonable for Luke to kill the Emperor and Vader and then just flee the Death Star and rejoin the Alliance. After all they are at war, those are enemy officers that have captured him and are taunting him by threatening with death of all loved ones and the whole operation was intended to kill the Emperor anyway. The same would hold true for Anakin. He could have killed Mace Windu to save the Chancellor and Padme but that doesn't mean he's going to then go mad and kill all Jedis including children. It doesn't add up from a merely psychological point of view. He had a set of objectives and that made him want to keep the Chancellor alive (quite valid by the way, Mace Windu is quite clums...

star trek - Warning regarding forward saucer section in Nemesis?

In Star Trek: Nemesis , just before the Enterprise rams into the Scimitar, Picard sends a text message from his captain's chair arm pad to Troi — who is manning the helm in lieu of the crewman who was just blown out through what was once the view screen — indicating that she should put full impulse on standby. (Literally, if you watch the scene closely, Troi's console prefaces the order with "TXT MSG" !) My question is: Did Picard also somehow warn crew members in the forward saucer section about what was about to happen? The ramming of the Scimitar was a heat of the moment decision. Considering that he also resorted to calling the auto-destruct sequence shortly after (which ended up being offline), he probably was of the mindset that any losses would be acceptable in order to hault Shinzon's march to Earth. Still, I'm curious. Answer The original script indicates that he called for the crew to " brace for impact ". Whether that call (or the comma...