He noted that those sections are 'not quite science fiction', but added that they were the result of extensive research into what life could be like then. Doerr said he set part of Cloud Cuckoo Land in the future to show how long ancient texts could survive. His fascination with the city's story made him realize that he had to write about it. He said in an interview with Entertainment Weekly that its walls had withstood many sieges, and that it was only when gunpowder appeared in Europe that the Ottomans were able to breach its defenses with cannons in 1453. While researching defensive walls for his previous novel All the Light We Cannot See (2014), which centers on the walled city of Saint-Malo, Doerr kept finding references to Constantinople.

Many of Zeno's experiences as a prisoner of war in Korea appear in Remembered Prisoners of a Forgotten War: An Oral History of Korean War POWs (2002) by Lewis H.

Ideas for the fable come from The Golden Ass by Apuleius, which Doerr says tells the story of a man turning into a donkey 'with far more zest and skill than I do'. The Cloud Cuckoo Land codex is a fictional book-within-a-book that Doerr wrote, but credited it to Diogenes. In his travels, he is transformed into a donkey, a sea bass, and finally a crow, which allows him to fly to the gates of the city in the clouds.ĭoerr stated in Cloud Cuckoo Land 's 'Author's Note' that his novel draws on several other books, most notably Antonius Diogenes' now-lost 'globetrotting tale', Wonders Beyond Thule. It is a fictional book written by real Greek novelist Antonius Diogenes in the second century, and tells the story of Aethon, a shepherd on a quest to find the fabled paradise in the sky. Their stories are bound by an Ancient Greek codex entitled Cloud Cuckoo Land that each of the five characters discover and find solace in. In the twenty-second century, Konstance is a young girl aboard the Argos, a generation starship heading for a planet called Beta Oph2. In the present day, Zeno, a Korean War veteran, works in a library in Idaho translating Ancient Greek texts, while Seymour, a disturbed autistic youngster, becomes caught up with a group of ecoterrorists. In the fifteenth-century Byzantine Empire, Anna is a young seamstress living in Constantinople, and Omeir is a village boy conscripted into the Ottoman army, as they are preparing to take the city. The novel centers around an Ancient Greek codex that links characters from fifteenth-century Constantinople, present-day Idaho, and a twenty-second-century starship.Ĭloud Cuckoo Land is the story of five characters spanning eight centuries. It was first published on September 28, 2021, in the United States by Charles Scribner's Sons and the United Kingdom by Fourth Estate.

Cloud Cuckoo Land is a 2021 historical and speculative fiction novel by Pulitzer-prize winning author Anthony Doerr.

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