RADIX by Attanasio, A. A - 1981

New York: William Morrow and Company, 1981. Octavo, pictorial wrappers. First edition. The author's first book and the first book of the Radix Tetrad sequence that "works as a complex meditation on metamorphosis elaborated within a space opera frame, so that densely ambitious moments of poetic aspiration alternate with episodes out of the rag-and-bone shop of pulp magazine fiction; this early use of space opera as frame or arena for baroque exfoliations of story immediately prefigures the similarly exorbitant work of Iain M. Banks and Dan Simmons ... After losing her radiation shield, which guards her against the full nakedness of the universe, Earth begins to mutate savagely, a transformation articulated clearly in RADIX itself through the story of a mutant superman, who undergoes the same transcendental jumpstart that jolts his planet through terrors and dimensions. - John Clute, SFE (online). 1981 Nebula nominee. Anatomy of Wonder (2004) II-55. A fine copy. (#159922)