Including SOS the rope – VAR The Stick – NEQ The Sword. In this highly imaginative trilogy, master science fiction writer Piers Anthony creates a world of savage power of primitive and brutal laws where all disputes are settled in the battle circle, and where men must seize and realise their vision of an empire by the might of their primitive weapons. “Anthony’s story of men fighting for mastery of wandering tribes, with sword, club and rope in the ceremonial Great Circle, has its own internal conviction – its own grandeur, even.... a rigorous masculine power, rare in any kind of novel nowadays.