“The White Otters of Childhood”. Michael Bishop (1973)

One of the greatest of all science fiction novels is
A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ (1959) by Walter M.
M
ILLER Jr., in which the world is devastated by a
nuclear war, slowly rebuilds, then experiences a
second holocaust after another 1,500 years.
Michael B
ISHOP added this unofficial sequel, set
many generations after the second conflict. Our
strain of humanity is now a minority on the planet,
confined to a string of islands, while a further
evolved race, the Parfects, spreads across the rest
of the planet. Markcrier Rains is an old-style
human, recently returned from a prolonged and
dispiriting stay among the Parfects. Rains marries
the girl lusted after by Fearing Serenos, the ruthless but crafty dictator of the old human civilization, and the two are concerned about what form
his inevitable retribution will take.
His revenge comes only after a gap of several
years. Rains is dispatched on a mission of state and
returns to discover that Serenos has raped and
beaten his wife. When she later dies during childbirth, he vows vengeance; he is abetted by his father in law, who is the dictator’s private physician
and who has in the past surgically altered enemies
of his master, turning them into bizarre variations
of lower animals. They successfully abduct Serenos
and inform his inner circle that their leader has
died, after which Rains himself becomes effectively
the unofficial head of government. As the doctor
slowly transforms Serenos into a shark, Rains attempts to reform the government, making numerous enemies in the process and accomplishing very
little. The pseudoshark, finally released into the
ocean, immediately dies, depriving them of the revenge that Rains no longer desires.
Ultimately despairing for the future of oldstyle humanity, Rains resigns and avoids being assassinated, convinced that the Parfects are on the
verge of judging his kind beyond redemption. His
final act as a man is to offer himself as another experimental subject, hoping to find some form of
peace as a shark that was denied him as a human.

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