Demon

Concluding Varley's seething, monumental trilogy of Titan (1979) and Wizard (1980) - about "Gaea," a vast, sentient, wheel-like rotating structure in orbit about Saturn. With several of her subsidiary brains incapacitated, Gaea is now quite mad; and, in her latest physical incarnation as a fifty-foot-tall clone of Marilyn Monroe (where most of her remaining power is concentrated), she's obsessed with crushing ex-Wizard and former ally Cirocco Jones - and with making an epic movie of the resulting showdown! (Meanwhile, the structure of Gaea is bulging with refugees from the nuclear war that, with Gaea's connivance, has ravaged the Earth.) So the suitably enormous, complicated plot here involves the step-by-step efforts of Cirocco and her allies (including ex-Chief Engineer Gaby Plauget, killed in an earlier episode, now literally a ghost in the machine; and the saintly, centaur-like race of Titanides) to defeat the apparently unkillable, all-but-omnipotent Gaea before she wipes out what's left of humanity. Grand-scale entertainment - violent, witty, irreverent, tirelessly inventive: even if the narrative is rather distant, this'll have readers guessing and gasping right up to the end. (Kirkus Reviews)