Book Review: 'The Day Star' by Mark Geston
2 / 5 Stars
‘The Day Star’ is DAW Book No. 6 and was released in 1972; the cover art, and several fine pen-and-ink illustrations in the book’s interior, were done by George Barr.
The plot is more fantasy / fable than SF. In the Earth of the far future, a young man named Thel wanders the streets of a city named ‘R’, a city gripped by entropy. His companions in this joyless town are the ghost of an ancestor, named Pagent; and a wizard named Marne.
The world is in prolonged decline due to a calamity that befell the most remarkable city in history: Ferrin.
Ferrin’s citizenry had succeeded in creating an artificial star, the Day Star of the book’s title, a star capable of slowing time and prolonging human life. When the star unexpectedly decayed, entropy was freed to invade the Earth and render life miserable for all the peoples in the territories and cities outside Ferrin.
When Thel and Pagent recover a fragment of the Day Star, they decide to embark on a journey to Ferrin, in the hopes of aiding in the effort to re-construct the Star and restore the world to its former glory. En route they encounter various dangers and perils, for Chaos seeks to impede the advent of a second Day Star.
Despite being only 126 pages in length, ‘Day Star’ is a ponderous read. Author Geston was intent on emulating the highly stylized, poetically-tinged diction of Ray Bradbury, and as a result negotiating paragraphs, much less entire pages, is an exercise in patience. There is much use of metaphors and similes: the Sun Retreats, Winds Shriek, Rockets Dangle Obscenely (from the Bellies of Aircraft), the Wind Leaves Solitary Grains of Memory Behind in its Passing, etc.
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