THE BROKEN LANDS

Ace paperback, 1968. Cover by Richard M. Powers.

"The passing of thousands of years left the planet Earth a series of broken lands ... a mutated world of distant alien empires and near-at-hand rapacious satraps. 

The hunted common people were sustained by one last legend - that some day one would come who would "ride the Elephant" and thereby bring back the Golden Age. 

This is the gripping novel of the young rebel who found out what the legend really signified, and of how he sought to use that banned knowledge in the very heart of the satrap's stronghold of alien magics and well-guarded scientific mysteries. 

THE BROKEN LANDS combines the best elements of sword-and-sorcery and top-notch science-fiction."