The Burning City
The Burning City is a fantasy novel of social and political allegory by American writers Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. It is set in an analogue of Southern California in an imaginary past shortly after the sinking of Atlantis about 14,000 years ago in the twilight of a civilization then struggling and now vanished for lack of a crucial natural, and essentially non-renewable resource upon which almost all of its economy and technology depended. The vanishing resource is not oil but "mana", something vital to the technology of magic and the metabolism of the supernatural. As  mana becomes scarce gods sleep and finally die, unicorns get smaller and finally turn into hornless ponies, and magic becomes less and less effective and finally vanishes. The book was published in 2000, and was followed by a sequel, "Burning Tower" in 2005. It is part of the same timeline as "The Magic Goes Away". Plot summary. The first and last parts of the novel are set in Tep's Town, on the site of modern Los Angeles. The town consists of three classes: the Lords, the ruling class, who live in a separate area of the town; the kinless , essentially a slave class forbidden to carry weapons, descendants of a people conquered by the allied ancestors of the Lords and the Lordkin; and the Lordkin, proud, uneducated, undisciplined and indolent knife fighters organised into street gangs, who live by "gathering" whatever they wish from the kinless. The Lords supervise the kinless and placate the Lordkin. The kinless are unarmed and untrained in the use of weapons, and cannot resist the Lordkin. Some leave the town, but the surrounding vegetation is malevolent. The town is the base of a fire god, Yangin-Atep, who possesses the Lordkin every few  years to burn the town down and rape any kinless woman they can catch. The main character, Whandall, is an 11-year-old Lordkin boy severely beaten unto scarring and broken bones by Lordsmen (police) for associating with a Lord girl and illegally entering the segregated Lord's Hills. As an adult he becomes a product of his culture — a thief, a rapist, and a murderer, but, strangely, not without regret, not without honor, and not without the reader's sympathy. He teams up with an ex-Atlantis wizard and some kinless and they escape from the city. Beyond the  city they find traders and Whandall founds a successful trading empire. Eventually, he returns to the city to establish a trade route there, and defeats Yangin-Atep. In the epilogue the authors add further information to the timeline of the described reality: long after the described events, the savage people who became the "so-called Native Americans" appear on the stage and wipe out the existing civilization, including horses (and presumably cats and wheels) in their conquest of the Americas. Allegory. According to the afterword published with the book, Larry Niven originally developed the story in order to channel his  feelings of frustration relating to the 1992 Los Angeles riots. In keeping with the spirit of the allegory Niven and Pournelle drop into the text several anagrams and other oblique references that bring to mind modern people, places and events. Some examples: