Sword of the Spirits
Open-knowledge reference entry
The Sword of the Spirits is a trilogy of young adult novels by English writer Sam Youd under his pseudonym John Christopher. The stories are set in the South of England, mostly in Hampshire, in a post-apocalyptic future where, due to a worldwide ecological catastrophe, life has reverted to a militaristic, medieval setting of walled cities and perpetual warfare. Christians are a despised minority, as spiritual matters are in the hands of a priestly class of monastic "Seers" who interpret the will of the "Spirits". There are signs of the past existence of the modern world in the ruins of great cities and "high roads" which dot the harsh landscape, but the Seers have made the technology of the "ancients" anathema, and anyone dabbling in "Science" is immediately put to death.
The catastrophe has also resulted in a greatly increased number of birth defects. People with dwarfism constitute a separate caste to "true" men and fulfill the mythical role of forging weaponry, along with other metal work. People called "polymufs", who have other disfiguring mutations, are the lowest caste, as menial workers and wage slaves, regardless of whether they are actually physically or mentally disabled.
The Prince in Waiting
The Prince in Waiting was published 19 October 1970.In the novel, 13-year-old Luke is the son of a captain, one of the semi-hereditary caste of officers of the army of his home city of Winchester. Luke has had an uneventful childhood and looks forward to his fifteenth year, when he will begin training for his own military career. By a twist of fate he becomes the toast of the city when he leads his team to victory in the annual mock combat tournament.
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This entry incorporates text from “Sword of the Spirits” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.