A dragon herder embarks on a quest to bring his beloved back from the dead in this Nebula Award–winning science fiction adventure.

The surface story tells of the problems a member of an alien race, Lo Lobey, has assimilating the mythology of earth, where his kind have settled among the leftover artifacts of humanity. The deeper tale concerns, however, the way those who are "different" must deal with the dominant cultural ideology. The tale follows Lobey's mythic quest for his lost love, Friza. In luminous and hallucinated language, it explores what new myths might emerge from the detritus of the human world as those who are "different" try to seize history and the day.

Featuring a foreword by Neil Gaiman.

"When Delany describes to us what he has seen, what he can compute, adduce, intuit or smell in the underbrush, our reaction is to sit bolt upright and cry out, "Of course, I have that very wound myself!" The ability to produce this reaction in people is one of the commonly accepted and apparently valid appurtenances of genius. . . . I look forward to the explosion reading this will create within you." —A. J. Budrys, Galaxy Magazine