num_pages: 353
description: Earth is no more. Centuries have passed since its fiery final hour, and the descendants of those who managed to break free have been scattered across the galaxy. One such outpost is an artificial island on the watery world of Hydros—a former penal colony from which there is no escape. But now the island’s native amphibians, repelled by human greed and violence, have sent the unwelcome humans into exile and the castaways are set adrift on the planet’s vast and violent sea.They are bound for a forbidden land mass, shrouded in myth and mystery, on the far side of Hydros, a place called the Face of the Waters. Around them swarms a multitude of exotic alien sealife—all of it lethal. Floating “mouths” and ripping hagfish menace crewmen, fibrous netlike creatures and deadly waterflowers attack the flimsy boat not even halfway to its mystical destination.The owner and commander of the ship is empire-builder Nid Delagard—borderline psychotic, murderer, and visionary—who has set their course for a final point of no return. His fervent ally is Father Quillan of the Church of All Worlds, a priest without followers who sees in the journey one last chance to recover his lost faith. Valben Lawler is the ship’s doctor, a man of science marooned by his cynicism and addicted to drugs and his own anguish. The one woman capable of puncturing Lawler’s shell is passenger Sundira Thane, a woman who has seen many lands and has forsaken them all; she is a sensualist, an explorer of the mind, body, and spirit.Fourteen lost souls on the ship Queen of Hydros sailing against a planet mustering all its forces against them, alone in a treacherous alien sea. The voyage, the shoals of deadly alien ecology, and their very crewmates become antagonists in the quest for the Face of the Waters.
language: English
title: The Face of the Waters
titlecomplete: The Face of the Waters
genres: Fiction, Science Fiction, Adventure, Science Fiction Fantasy, Space, Fantasy, 20th Century
ratings_count: 780
publisher: Bantam Books