The Burning City

by Larry Niven

The first and last parts of the novel are set in Tep's Town, on the site of modern Los Angeles. The town consists of three classes: the Lords, the ruling class, who live in a separate area of the town; the kinless, essentially a slave class forbidden to carry weapons, descendants of a people conquered by the allied ancestors of the Lords and the Lordkin; and the Lordkin, proud, uneducated, undisciplined and indolent knife fighters organised into street gangs, who live by "gathering" whatever they wish from the kinless. The Lords supervise the kinless and placate the Lordkin. The kinless are unarmed and untrained in the use of weapons, and cannot resist the Lordkin. Some leave the town, but the surrounding vegetation is malevolent. The town is the base of a fire god, Yangin-Atep, who possesses the Lordkin every few years to burn the town down and rape any kinless woman they can catch.

The main character, Whandall, is an 11-year-old Lordkin boy severely beaten unto scarring and broken bones by Lordsmen (police) for associating with a Lord girl and illegally entering the segregated Lord's Hills. As an adult he becomes a product of his culture — a thief, a rapist, and a murderer, but, strangely, not without regret, not without honor, and not without the reader's sympathy. He teams up with an ex-Atlantis wizard and some kinless and they escape from the city. Beyond the city they find traders and Whandall founds a successful trading empire. Eventually, he returns to the city to establish a trade route there, and defeats Yangin-Atep.

In the epilogue the authors add further information to the timeline of the described reality: long after the described events, the savage people who became the "so-called Native Americans" appear on the stage and wipe out the existing civilization, including horses (and presumably cats and wheels) in their conquest of the Americas.