Mother of Eden by Chris Beckett

Mother of Eden by Chris Beckett

"We speak of a mother's love, but we forget her power."
Civilization has come to the alien, sunless planet its inhabitants call Eden.
 
Just a few generations ago, the planet's five hundred inhabitants huddled together in the light and warmth of the Forest's lantern trees, afraid to venture out into the cold darkness around them.
 
Now, humanity has spread across Eden, and two kingdoms have emerged. Both are sustained by violence and dominated by men - and both claim to be the favored children of Gela, the woman who came to Eden long ago on a boat that could cross the stars, and became the mother of them all.
When young Starlight Brooking meets a handsome and powerful man from across Worldpool, she believes he will offer an outlet for her ambition and energy. But she has no inkling that she will become a stand-in for Gela herself, and wear Gela's fabled ring on her own finger--or that in this role, powerful and powerless all at once, she will try to change the course of Eden's history.

Chris Beckett became a social worker in the 1980s and spent 18 years working in the field, first as a social worker, then as a manager, and finally as the manager of a children and families social work team. He began his career as a 'generic' social worker, working with a variety of service users including children and families, the elderly, and persons with mental health difficulties and disabilities, but his primary focus was on children and families. He went into academic social work in 2000, first at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge and then at the University of Cambridge. He has written academic publications on a number of themes, including the use of military terminology in social work, the value of realism as an ethical concept, and statistics from Sweden on child abuse in the aftermath of the country's legal ban on physical punishment. Chris has a side career as a writer of literary science fiction. His main research field, however, has been decision-making in court processes involving children, as well as decision-making regarding children in general. (For more information on Chris Beckett's writing, go to www.chris-beckett.com.) He won the Edge Hill Short Fiction Prize and the Arthur C. Clarke Award for his story collection The Turing Test.

For his novel Dark Eden, he received the Arthur C. Clarke Award. He currently works full-time as a writer. Chris believes that 'academic' and 'artistic' writing have more in common than might appear at first glance: in both cases, the author starts with a tangle of ideas that appear to be linked in some way, and strives to impose some shape and organization, in large part by a combination of intuition and trial and error.Chris has three grown children and lives in Cambridge with his wife Maggi.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780804138703
ISBN 10	0804138702
Title	Mother of Eden
Author	Chris Beckett
Series	Dark Eden
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Crown Publishing Group (NY)
Year published	2015-05-12
Number of pages	480
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.