Voyage of Reldresal

A hidden manuscript. A forgotten voyage. A world stranger than Gulliver ever imagined.When Lemuel Gulliver escaped Lilliput, he left behind a friend — Reldresal, Principal Secretary for Private Affairs, the man who had saved his life. Now, twenty years later, Reldresal faces a conspiracy of his own. Dispatched on an impossible diplomatic mission to England by his ruthless rival Admiral Bolgolam — a voyage designed not for his success, but for his death — he sets sail across an ocean he has never seen, in a boat built for a giant, toward a country he has only heard of in stories.He never arrives. Blown catastrophically off course, he finds himself somewhere no Lilliputian has ever been, and no map has ever named.What follows is a voyage unlike any in the literature of exploration: to Midlandria, a kingdom of giants ruled by an elected queen who governs by the consent of her people; to the Island of the Arguers, a civilization organized entirely around the principle of honest disagreement, where a single constitutional debate has continued, uninterrupted, for three hundred and forty years; and to the Isle of the Cathari, a people born without sight who have mapped the entire cosmos — not by looking at it, but by listening.The Voyage of Reldresal is a companion to Swift's immortal Gulliver's Travels, written in the voice and spirit of its age: witty, satirical, morally serious, and alive with the conviction that the universe is larger than we think it is — and that we are, somehow, audible within it. It is a novel about power and its limits, about what it means to govern well, about the moment when the mind is forced to expand beyond everything it previously knew. And it is, above all, the story of a careful man who discovers, late in life and entirely against his will, that he is also brave.Presented from manuscripts discovered in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, 1791. Edited by H.W. Cantwell, M.A., Brasenose College.