The Ship of Ishtar
LC Class | 26004777 |
The Ship of Ishtar is a
Plot introduction
The archaeologist hero, Kenton, receives a mysterious ancient Babylonian artifact, which he discovers contains an incredibly detailed model of a ship. A dizzy spell casts Kenton onto the deck of the ship, which becomes a full-sized vessel sailing an eternal sea. At one end is Sharane the assistant priestess of
The novel is not only a rousing fantasy adventure story, but a philosophical exploration of the relationship between material reality and the abstract concepts through which humans struggle to understand it. The reason the ship has been frozen in time is that Zarpanit the head priestess of Ishtar and Alusar the head priest of Nergal fell in love, and were in the midst of making love when their
"The author uses evocative language and intense images to convey a sense of the marvelous and mysterious. It is Kenton's fate to intervene in the frozen cosmic struggle between Ishtar and Nergal, to fall in love with Sharane, and to gain Klaneth as his mortal enemy. The book builds tension through the device of letting Kenton's tie to the ship periodically become so weak that he falls back, unwilling, to his New York home. Kenton's tenuous psychic connection to the ship represents the reader's involvement in the fantasy. At any moment the ship may fade from reality, and both Kenton and the reader will be imprisoned in the mundane world of the everyday."
Publication history
- Six installments in Argosy All-Storymagazine, November 8 - December 13, 1924.
- 1926, US, G. P. Putnam's Sons
- 1949, US, Borden OCLC 543508
- 1975, France, J'ai lu OCLC 77463966, French translation
- 1977, Germany, Pabel OCLC 74362695, German translation
- 1991, Spain, Valdemar OCLC 433813856, Spanish translation
- 1993, Russia, Severo-zapad OCLC 31706100, Russian translation
References
- ISBN 9780674207257.
External links
- The Ship of Ishtar title listing at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
- The Ship of Ishtar at Project Gutenberg Australia
- The Ship of Ishtar public domain audiobook at LibriVox