'A virtuoso storyteller ... a Jorge Luis Borges for the Space Age' The New York Times 'He was a robot-hypochondriac. On his squeaking cart he carried a complete set of spare parts.' A freighter pilot leads a manhunt across the Moon for a robot gone berserk; a shapeshifting assassin falls in love with the man she's programmed to kill; a…
In the mid-eighteenth century, as new ideas begin to sweep the continent, a young Jew of mysterious origins arrives in a village in Poland. Before long, he has changed not only his name but his persona; visited by what seem to be ecstatic experiences, Jacob Frank casts a charismatic spell that attracts an increasingly fervent following. In the decade to…
The Penguin Modern Classics edition of Ryszard Kapuscinski's The Emperor is translated by William R. Brand and Katarzyna Mroczkowska-Brand, with an introduction by Neal Ascherton. After the deposition of Haile Selassie in 1974, which ended the ancient rule of the Abyssinian monarchy, Ryszard Kapuscinski travelled to Ethiopia and sought out surviving courtiers to tell their stories. Here, their eloquent and ironic voices…
'There were two kinds of landscape characteristic of the inner planets of the Sun: the purposeful and the desolate.' The planet Quinta is pocked with ugly mounds and covered by a spiderweb-like network draped from spindly poles. It is a kingdom of phantoms and of a beauty afflicted by madness. The Earth spaceship Hermes arrives on Quinta with the best…
