Seven Cities of Gold

A novella.

A gem of alternate history by one of SF's brightest rising stars; a searing journey into a very different yet strangely familiar North America...

In anno domini 714, seven Catholic bishops fleeing the Muslim invasion of Spain set sail across the Western Ocean. There, in a new world, they founded seven legendary cities – and a legendary Christian empire.

Now, twelve centuries later, war rages across that new world: a culture war, a clash of civilizations, as the armies of the Caliphate of al-Andalus invade a failed state become a terrorist safe haven, a breeding ground for global reconquistadores.

Doctor-Lieutenant Chi‘ Nakada is a physician with the Relief Ministry of the Regency of Japan. In the war of Muslims and Christians, Buddhist Japan is officially neutral. But when a mysterious weapon of mass destruction razes the Muslim-occupied city of Esp’rito Santo, Nakada is tasked to travel up the great river Acuamagna, seek out the messianic leader of the Christian resistance, and put a permanent end to that leader's apocalyptic delusions.

But the burnt-out, opium-addicted Nakada has her own delusions to contend with. And as she proceeds upriver, witness to spectacles dreadful and magnificent, ominously authentic and luridly misleading, Nakada learns that she is only another pawn in a savage game of Belief played across the millennia and across all the permutations of history.

Drawing on the enigmatic legend of Cibola, the mirage that lured baffled conquistadors into the heart of America five centuries ago, Seven Cities of Gold is deft, finely written, full of emblematic violence and acute symbolism, a meditation on 9/11, the War on Terror, Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, and much besides. Novel in scope and universal in impact, it is the first masterpiece by David Moles, and surely not the last.