Zardoz

On the 50th anniversary of its release, Repeater is honoured to reissue John Boorman’s novelization of his cult film Zardoz with a new introduction by the director.

In a post-apocalyptic 2393, society is split between an elite group of immortal Eternals and a brutal underclass that live in the outlands and are controlled by the Exterminators. Zed, an Exterminator who has come to question his role and the exact nature of the world he inhabits, stows away in the flying head that descends to issue guns and sermons to the Exterminators, and enters the world of the Eternals: the Vortex. An ostensible paradise of rationality and order, the Vortex is revealed as a place which is itself full of division and intrigue. Has he come here of his own free will? Or is he part of some larger competition among the Eternals? How has the Vortex come about, and what might come after? What is it in Zed that the Eternals lack, and is he there to bring them ＂the gift of death＂? Expanding on and fleshing out the characters’ histories and the themes of his riotous, psychedelic cult classic film Zardoz, Boorman’s novelization has become something of a cult itself, a fully realised visionary sci-fi novel by one of the most important directors of the twentieth century.

Sir John Boorman (b. 1933) is widely recognised as one of the great filmmakers of the postwar period, with a unique and innovative filmography that cuts across genre, from the pop-modernist experimentation of the legendary Point Blank (1967) through his Arthurian epic Excalibur (1981) to the award-winning The General (1998).