Day of Wrath

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Humans and beasts alike were licking their wounds after the bloodiest battle in cosmic history. They had been pawns-puppets whose strings had been pulled by a cruel master: Heljanita the Toymaker.

Heljanita had used what he considered to be the deadliest weapon-a ten thousand year distortion of time. His purpose: to obliterate a world he'd hated.

But his new world was a powder-keg. For two of his victims, stranded in time, were determined to fight back.

Time, as before, was manipulated, twisted, bent and perverted ... up to a point.

Cover art by Kelly Freas

Published by Ace in December 1971.

Dedicated to Christine

'I made you,'said Heljanita calmly. 'I made everything that you are, with the help of the crooked wheel. I needed a man to win me the Beast War; a man to smash the Humans and at the same time to make sure that the Beasts did not win.

'So I found a man who was nobody; a man nobody wanted to know, and who wanted to know nobody. I turned a pathetic nonentity into a deadly weapon... You were the Beast War, Lord Chaos.'

Faced with this truth about himself, Mark Chaos had to rnake a decision. He held the balance between Heljanita and Darkscar, between chaos and absolute order. And Mark Chaos had to choose, while the whole Universe - past, present, future - tottered towards disaster ...

Cover illustration by Patrick Woodroffe

Published by Quartet in May 1974.
ISBN:0-704-31135-6

Translated into Portuguese as O Dia em que o Tempo Parou

Review by Ian Braidwood

Cast of Characters:
Darkscar of Despair, Heljanita the toymaker, Mark Chaos, Despair, Yvaine of Despair, The Mother, Cain Rayshade, Comarre, Pia, Heli, Danial Skywolf, Judson Deathdancer, Moonglow of Amia, Dawnstar of Home, Adam December, and lots and lots of toys.

I'm going to have to read the Iliad and Odyssey, simply to help sort the Stableford from the Homer.

You might think that would be easy - just subtract the spaceships - but you'd be wrong. I suspect that Brian has put a whole new twist into these stories, adding his own distinctive flavour. They are so typical of Brian in some ways, so untypical in others.

The spaceships are one element, which is obviously unhomeric. Here and in The Days of Glory, the opposing fleets battle in the shape of arrow heads, toruses and tubes as the ships maintain formation like soldiers on a parade ground.

However, this is very unusual for Brian as well; even in The Hooded Swan or Daedalus series, the craft themselves rarely feature. Brian is about as interested in spaceships as I am in buses, so we're in the situation where the most obviously unhomeric element is also the most obviously unstablefordian one. Chew on that if you like.

What I cannot believe though, is that Odysseus is anything like Mark Chaos, because Mark is a very typical Stableford protagonist: ambivalent, indecisive and generally very unheroic. So what's going on? How come a series designed to appeal to boys' own fantasies has such a strong antipathy to boys' own sensibilities?

Day of Wrath is not as impersonal as Days of Glory, nor as involved as In the Kingdom of the Beasts. It does however, carry over much of its flavour from the second novel, so it's not a bad read at all.

The Brian Stableford Website