The Arms of Hercules
Book of the Gods Volume III
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4.5 • 4 Ratings
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
Hercules tells the story of his twelve works of wonder against the backdrop of the ongoing deadly battle between the gods and the giants.
Fred Saberhagen, New York Times bestselling author of the Berserker Series, continues to put his own twist on Greek mythology, continuing the series that kicked off with The Face of Apollo and Ariadne’s Web with Book III, The Arms of Hercules.
Hercules is the son of the nearly omnipotent Zeus, King of the Gods, and of a human mother whose beauty sparked lust in the great god. The arms of Hercules look no more muscular than those of many other men—but his father was the greatest god in the entire world. Hercules, the son of Zeus, has crushed monsters, giants and legendary warriors in combat.
Until one challenge remains: The harrowing underworld, the one place where strength does not matter. Pitted against the greatest monsters that classical literature and Saberhagen’s vivid imagination could create, Hercules’s struggle comes to life in his fight to the death, against Death itself.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Mutant livestock such as mastodroms and cameloids roam a land very like Greece, where Saberhagen places a mild retelling (with obligatory debunking from the hero's viewpoint) of the Hercules legends. Our hero here has admittedly superhuman strength--being an acknowledged son of Zeus--but is humble about his prowess, leadership skills and even appearance. His famous first task, the killing of the Nemean lion, occurs in the course of a normal chore assigned to troublesome youths: guarding remote herds. Other tasks he stumbles into by even greater chance, while more are assigned by Hermes, the messenger of the gods. But Hercules regards the codified list of his 12 Labors as ranging from misinterpretation to complete fabrication by his fans. Saberhagen, the veteran author of some three dozen novels, including a series featuring Count Dracula and the SF Berserker books, sticks fairly close to familiar territory, offering a classical fantasy with centaurs and rare but convincing appearances by the gods. He drops a few unsatisfying hints that magic and divinity are based on an unexplained technology (one word, "odylic," describing this mysterious technology, dates from 1850: briefly, this seems to be a clue, but goes nowhere). This tale will satisfy those who like hero stories, but the book, third in a series (The Face of Apollo; Ariadne's Web), lacks the frisson possible to SF with plausible explanations, as well as the power of some other retellings.
