Urn Burial Summary
Robert Westall

Urn Burial Summary

Urn Burial is a fast-paced sciencefiction novel with a strong sense of place and interesting characters, not all of them human. It features several exciting action sequences (ray gun battles in the dark and underground) and a couple of genuinely scarey bits (humans forced to serve as experimental animals). The book also deals with a number of topics likely to appeal to young adult readers. The most important of these is the possibility that extraterrestrials may have periodically visited the Earth for centuries, leaving behind artifacts like the burial urn that triggers the story's action, and unwittingly generates such figures out of myth as werewolves and devils, not to mention the Book of Revelations.

The novel also features what might be called limited pacifism. Unlike other Quaker science fiction writers such as Joan Slonczewski and Judith Moffett, who appear to argue that it is never proper to take...

(read more from the Short Guide)