'The Song of Rockall' by George B. Hill

[TO BUY, please see links at the bottom of this summary.]

'That was the scene which was remembered. They faced each other, the land-man and the merman... From the wing Shart stretched forward into the cockpit. But the red button was still out of reach. He unclipped his trident and stabbed out firmly with its haft. The button shattered with a red flash; but it performed its function. There was a coughing whine and a whoosh from the nose of the subjet. Shart fell backwards off the wing in surprise. A slim, yellow shape sped from a tube and whirred away across the cavern. All eyes turned to the missile...'

Two races separated for millennia meet in this myth-type science fiction from a faith worldview. The action varies from dramatic and solemn to amusing in this story set around, over and under the Atlantic Ocean and our planet’s most isolated rock, lonely Rockall.

[There is a map, and a detailed non-fiction introduction describing the real Rockall, which the reader may choose to read or ignore.]

Shart of Atlantis is a seabird-riding merman from a lost race that shrank and vanished more than 3000 years ago. He flies over half an ocean to Rockall to find the rock's ancient Singer, whose mystic Song rules the waves themselves. But at Rockall Shart finds David, a top naval pilot from a mind-controlled, post-apocalypse world, who is on a mission in a secret warplane called a subjet. The powerful mantle worn by Shart, one of those that has protected his people millennia, strangely fails to hide him from David, as they nearly kill each other.

Shart’s fast-flying steed, a great shearwater, carries him back to the undersea city of his people the Pelagori with a dreadful command from the Singer. Yet what new twin perils has Shart’s ambitious and proud sister Vanarn awoken in his absence; and could the terrible Leviathan really return? In David’s superpower of Eurofed, few dare oppose the power of the all-seeing ‘frame’, their electronic master. Yet among these is Màiri, David’s fiery Gaelic wife, who has joined a subversive group called the Themers. David, a child of the age of frames, mocks the beliefs of his wife. Yet, haunted by the Song he himself has begun to hear, he finds she now disbelieves him, too.

The enigmatic Commander Spenser sends David to a perilous meeting with Shart's stern people, while Màiri and their son Ben face equal danger. What will happen if the dark foes of all drive them back to tiny Rockall, where both Themers and the Lords of Atlantis could find even the Singer itself needs amazing help? And what – after all – connects the Theme and the eternal Song of Rockall?

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