The Dream Millenium

The Dream Millennium

Ballantine, 1974. Novel, 79000 words.

White's working title for The Dream Millennium was The Star Shepherd, which sounds like something from a flip-side of an old Ace Double volume.  But 'shepherd' would be a valid job description for Dr. John Devlin, who flits in-and-out of suspended animation to look after incessantly deep-frozen colonists fleeing the polluted Earth.  "And in that coldsleep, what dreams may come . . ." as the Bardmaster of Avon surely meant to put it.  Devlin runs the Jungian gauntlet from a Silurian trilobite's impersonal extinction to the killing of a British soldier on some Belfast back-street:  "Very soon he was dead.  But for him not nearly soon enough . . ." (p.156).  The starship computer helps Devlin get through his 1,000-year trip -- trips, rather.

Synopsis by Graham Andrews

First Publication:

GALAXY October,November, December 1973

First Book publication:

Michael Joseph, London, 3/6/74

Publication History:

Transworld/Corgi, London, No 0552-10062-5, 65p, June 1976

Ballantine, NY, SBN 345-24012-X-125, $1.25, June 1974

Ballantine, NY, ISBN 0-345-30417-9, $2.50, 2nd printing, May 1982

Foreign Publication:

GOLDMANN SF hardcover, Autumn 1975 as Das Jahrtaussend der Traume

Editrice Nord, Milan, 1977 as Il Sognio del Millennio

Goldmann pb No 23934, October 1978 as Das Jahrtaussend der Traume