The Scholars of Night

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John M. Ford’s The Scholars of Night is an extraordinary novel of technological espionage and human betrayal, weaving past and present into a web of unbearable suspense.

Nicholas Hansard is a brilliant historian at a small New England college. He specializes in Christopher Marlowe. But Hansard has a second, secret, career with The White Group, a “consulting agency” with shadowy government connections. There, he is a genius at teasing secrets out of documents old and new—to call him a code-breaker is an understatement.

When Hansard’s work exposes one of his closest friends as a Russian agent, and the friend then dies mysteriously, the connections seem all too clear. Shaken, Hansard turns away from his secret work to lose himself in an ancient Marlowe manuscript. Surely, a lost 400 year old play is different enough from modern murder.

He is very, very wrong.

Reviews

“[The Scholars of Night] should have been marketed like The Name of the Rose. You needed to go, ‘We have a great writer who is really fucking brilliant and he has written a book that combines high and low culture.’” —Neil Gaiman

“So easy to get lured into the world of death and double-dealing. Quite an artistic job we have here by Ford, crafty and complex.”

— The MYSTERY FANcier, Vol. 11, No. 1, Winter 1989.

“There’s a slight Tom Clancy air to the plot, but it’s unmistakably a John M. Ford book. It’s a technothriller in the same way that The Final Reflection is a Star Trek novel—it has all the requisite elements put together in more or less the usual way, but everything ends up at an odd angle, creating something that is entirely different.” — Science Blogs

“A wonderful kaleidoscope of the imagination.”

—Poul Anderson

“Extraordinary…both original and dazzling.” — The Cleveland Plain Dealer

PRAISE FOR THE DRAGON WAITING

“An unfolding cabinet of wonders. . . Provokes that rare thrill that one gets from the work of Gene Wolfe, or John Crowley, or Ursula K. Le Guin.” — Slate

“Lots of historical fantasies and alternate histories play games with history, but most of them are playing tic-tac-toe while The Dragon Waiting is playing three-dimensional Go.” —Jo Walton

“A glittering tapestry of passion and betrayal, magic and intrigue. Exhilarating.” —Philadelphia Inquirer

“An exceedingly fine, intelligent, powerful novel.” —Chicago Sun-Times

“Rich and splendid.” —Kirkus Reviews

About the Author

John M. Ford was, in his lifetime, a favorite author of many writers better known than he was, including Neil Gaiman and Robert Jordan. He won World Fantasy Awards for both his novel The Dragon Waiting and his poem "Winter Solstice, Camelot Station," and he won the Philip K. Dick Award for his novel, Growing Up Weightless. His Star Trek™ novel, The Final Reflection, essentially created the nuanced Klingon culture seen later in the feature films, and his other novel in that universe, How Much For The Planet?, was a Star Trek™ tale told as a Gilbert & Sullivan musical, complete with songs. He was a genius. He died in 2006.

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Books By John M. Ford