SOURCE: A review of Kingdoms of the Wall, in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Vol. 113, August, 1993, pp. 161-69.

In the following excerpt, Easton explicates the plot of Kingdoms of the Wall in terms of literary analogies.

Picture, if you will, the village of Jespodar, set at the foot of a massive mountain, Kosa Saag, the Wall. The village is one among many. The people who live there are flexible of form—shape-changers reminiscent of those we met on Majipoor—and their minds are dominated much less by their distant king than by the over-looming Wall atop which, their legends say, live the gods. Indeed, thousands of years before, the First Climber went up the mountain, all the way to the distant summit of Kosa Saag, and met those gods. They gave him such gifts as fire, and every year since then the people have selected forty of their...