Burning Tower

infobox Book |
name = Burning Tower
title_orig =
translator =


image_caption =
author = Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle
illustrator =
cover_artist =
country = United States
language = English
series =
genre = Fantasy novel
publisher = Pocket Books
release_date = February 1, 2005
english_release_date =
media_type = Print (Hardcover)
pages = 448 pages
isbn = ISBN 0-7434-1691-0
preceded_by = The Burning City
followed_by =

Burning Tower is a fantasy novel by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. It is a sequel to The Burning City, set some years after that novel concluded. It was published in 2005.

Plot summary

The three main characters are Sandry, a Lord of Tep's Town, his cousin Regapisk, also a Lord, and Burning Tower, a daughter of Whandall, the main character of the previous book. Regapisk is an incompetent Lord and his family arrange for him to be shanghaied to become an oarsman on a coastal ship. Sandry and Burning Tower are romantically linked throughout the book.

Large flightless birds attack trading caravans, but Sandry fights them off. He is sent by the Lords with the caravan which Burning Tower is also part of to see what the source of the birds is. They travel to the southern city of Condigeo, and then to Crescent City, defeating terror bird attacks along the way. In Crescent City, they are joined by Regapisk, who has escaped from his ship. The three of them travel on to the high-magic city of Aztlan, where Regapisk redeems himself.

The authors researched Aztec culture for the book, and a number of aspects of the culture displayed in the book are based on that culture. This is explained in a brief note at the end of the book. The authors claim that the terror birds continued to exist until long after humans spread through the Americas; this is based on the North American phorusrhacid "Titanis walleri" (but see McFadden "et al." 2007).

References

* McFadden, Bruce; Labs-Hochstein, Joann; Hulbert, Richard C. Jr. & Baskin, Jon A. (2007): Revised age of the late Neogene terror bird ("Titanis") in North America during the Great American Interchange. "Geology" 35(2): 123-126. doi|10.1130/G23186A.1 [http://www.gsajournals.org/perlserv/?request=res-loc&uri=urn%3Aap%3Apdf%3Adoi%3A10.1130%2FG23186A.1 PDF fulltext]