"This unusual, enjoyable second novel by Engh ( Arslan ) is a charming picaresque adventure set on another planet. To this unnamed planet comes the odd-looking man known as the Exile. The Warden, Lethgro, has captured the Exile after his escape from Sollet Castle, and now holds him prisoner on the small sailing ship Mouse. But when an inspector of the Council of Beng is about to board the Mouse , Captain Repnomar, seeing that her friend the Warden does not wish to surrender the Exile to the Council, cuts and runs. And so begins for Lethgro, Repnomar and the Exile (who we have begun to suspect is an Earthman) an around-the-world journey over sea and land, through strange places previously unseen by civilized eye.

A third world dictator conquers and rules a dystopian America in this "wonderful and terrifying" work of political science fiction (Samuel R. Delany). By the time General Arslan brings his army from Turkistan to America, he has already conquered the rest of the world, using strategy and craft rather than bullets and bloodshed. The modern-day Genghis Khan sets up headquarters in tiny Kraftsville, Illinois, and when he asserts his power by violently assaulting an eighth-grade girl and boy—onstage, before a cheering audience of his soldiers—the townspeople know that no one is safe. Forced to open his home to the despot, Franklin Bond, the school principal whose students were publicly violated, finds himself strangely drawn to the world's new master and privy to his quirks and mental machinations. In fact, only one other person in town will have a closer connection to Arslan during the long, hard era of his reign: Hunt Morgan, the boy...