In the Valley of the Kings This story presents a foreboding and terror-driven psychological horror about a man who awakens in a dissheveled and abandoned building complex located on the surface of a distant planet, suffering from total amnesia and not knowing who he is or where he comes from. The eponymous and longest section of the book (deemed a novella by the author), "In the Valley of the Kings" tells the story of an obsessive Egyptologist who has discovered the most massive underground structure ever built: a giant tomb for an unnameable God-king of ancient Egypt whose powers of immortality the researcher tries to unveil,
In the Courts of the Crimson Kings and "fully developed and carefully crafted social system", calling the book overall an "unexpectedly rich lode of creative ore", and judging it extremely favorably compared to Stirling's previous work. At the "SF Site", Dave Truesdale "heartily recommnd(ed)" the book, saying that he could not "think of a better [example]" of planetary romance. In the Courts of the Crimson Kings In the Courts of the Crimson Kings is a 2008 alternate history science fiction novel by American writer S. M. Stirling. The story takes place on the planet Mars in an alternate solar system where probes from the United States of