Homeworld of the Heart: The Fifth Novel in the Inquestor Series
A personal message from the author:
My “Inquestor Series” was one of the more noted science fiction series of the 1980s, but I disappeared from the field (and the western world) for over two decades in order to become artistic director of the opera in Bangkok. This year, after years of being prodded by readers, I’m revisiting the series and doing several more novels, of which this is the first.
Although I’ve won the World Fantasy Award (and been nominated five times) and had two Hugo nominations as well as winning the John W. Campbell Award, all that was long ago. In returning to science fiction, I know I have to seduce a new generation. The Inquestor series is known for being “big” — Ted Sturgeon said “you deal with the greatest magnitude of concept since Stapledon” and Orson Scott Card said, “he can create a world with less effort than some writers devote to a small room.”
But “Homeworld of the Heart” isn’t “big” in the way the previous four books were. It opens a different doorway into that universe, starting with one child in a small village. It’s a different window but it sets up the series in a whole new way — you shouldn’t have to read the other books first.
I want to thank those readers who waited thirty years for a new beginning. I hope this universe of staggering beauty and brutality, many of whose tropes became building blocks in the science fiction that followed it, will appeal to the coming generation as well.
— S.P. Somtow
Orson Scott Card said of this series, “he can create a world with less apparent effort than some writers devote to creating a small room …” and in Homeworld of the Heart Somtow revisits and vastly expands the teeming landscape of the Inquestor series.