The Ship of Ishtar
core novel 1924 The Ship of Ishtar
Record
| First published | 1924 |
|---|---|
| Original language |  EN |
| Work type | novel |
| Canon status | core |
| Reader rating | 3.55 (624 ratings, collected 2026-09-29) |
| Page count | 230 |
| First-edition ISBN | 9781601251770 |
Synopsis
John Kenton, home from the Great War with his ambitions in archaeology burned out of him, receives a crate from Professor Forsythe, the Babylonian scholar whose expedition he funded in his own place. Inside is a block of stone carved with cuneiform, unaccountably light, and when Kenton strikes it the stone crumbles to reveal a jewelled model of a ship. In a dizzy instant he is aboard it, full-sized, on an eternal sea. The ship is divided down its middle by a barrier no one aboard can cross: at one end Sharane, priestess of Ishtar, goddess of love, and her women; at the other Klaneth, black priest of Nergal, god of the underworld, and his men, locked for six thousand years in their gods' quarrel. Kenton alone can cross the line, and his arrival breaks the deadlock, though his hold on the ship keeps slipping and hurling him back to New York.
Where it sits
- Universe: The Ship of Ishtar
- Series: not part of a registered series (standalone work within its universe)
- Author: A. Merritt
Notes
- Serialised in Argosy All-Story Weekly, November-December 1924; first book edition G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1926 (abridged); the full text was restored in later editions. Pre-ISBN work: the ISBN recorded is the 2009 Planet Stories edition's, the standard in-print unabridged text. A separate world from The Moon Pool.
Sources
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Part of the Library. Fields without an identified source are omitted, never guessed.