Sergei tzaverin (13 risultati)

Paperback. Condizione: new. Paperback. Before the Martian revolution chronicled in Red Star, there was the man who built the world that made it possible.Menni Aldo is twenty-six years old when he stands before Mars's most powerful bankers and ministers and asks for absolute control over the largest engineering project in the planet's history: an inland sea flooded across six hundred thousand square kilometers of dead desert, fed by a canal blasted through solid rock. He gets it. What follows is not just the story of a canal, but of what it costs the man who builds one - his ruthless competence, his marriage to a shipwrecked orphan named Nella, his war with the financiers who made him and would gladly break him, and the slow, irreversible way that absolute power reshapes an idealist.Written in 1913 by Alexander Bogdanov - physician, philosopher, revolutionary, and rival to Lenin within the Bolshevik party - Engineer Menni is both a taut political drama and a founding work of Soviet-era science fiction: the prequel to his celebrated novel Red Star, and a searching meditation on what a better world costs the people who build it. A century before "disruptors" and "founders" entered the language, Bogdanov had already written their tragedy. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.…

Paperback. Condizione: new. Paperback. Someone is stealing the air.Across the world the trade winds have begun to bend. Barometers fall. Aircraft engines miss at altitudes that should be safe. Every current of air on Earth is turning toward a single point in the frozen emptiness of Yakutia - and the Yakut hunters say that no one who follows the wind there comes back.Georgy Klimenko, a Soviet meteorologist, follows it anyway.Beneath the Verkhoyansk mountains he finds a city sunk eight floors into the permafrost, staffed by the sons of bankers and run by an English industrialist named Bailey - a man who has learned to compress the sky into gleaming spheres the size of walnuts. A single one holds a cubic kilometer of air.Bailey is not a madman. He is a businessman, and he has been waiting for a seller's market.As the world begins to gasp, he prepares his terms.First published in 1929 by Alexander Belyaev - the writer often called the Russian Jules Verne - The Air Seller imagines a commodity nobody thought could be owned, and a man patient enough to corner it.Newly translated from the Russian. Complete and unabridged. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.…

Paperback. Condizione: new. Paperback. Off the coast of Argentina, pearl divers whisper of a monster in the bay - a "sea devil" that slashes nets, frees trapped fish, and vanishes beneath the waves before anyone can catch more than a glimpse. The superstitious call it a demon. The greedy call it a fortune waiting to be caught.He is Ichthyander - a young man surgically transformed by his father, the brilliant and secretive Doctor Salvator, into a creature able to breathe both air and water. Raised in isolation from the world, he knows the ocean's beauty better than he knows his own kind - until he falls in love with Guttiere, a poor pearl merchant's daughter, and is drawn into a human world of greed, cruelty, and betrayal he was never prepared to survive.When the ruthless schooner captain Pedro Zurita learns what Ichthyander really is, he sees not a man but a living fortune - a diver who never tires, never drowns, and can be forced to work the pearl beds forever. As Salvator's secret unravels into a public trial that puts science, religion, and human nature themselves in the dock, Ichthyander must choose between the only world that ever felt like home and the one person on land worth risking everything for.First published in 1928, Alexander Belyaev's Amphibian Man became one of the founding classics of Russian and Soviet science fiction - a haunting adventure about isolation, exploitation, and what it costs to be different. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.…

Paperback. Condizione: new. Paperback. He can put a thought in your head. You will believe it is your own.Germany, the 1920s. Ludwig Stirner is a penniless engineer with a genius for reflexes, a white setter that obeys him too well, and a talent for being underestimated. Then the banker Karl Gottlieb dies beneath the wheels of a train, and his entire fortune passes - inexplicably, against every expectation and every interest - to his young secretary, Elsa Glueck.The courts find nothing. The lawyers find nothing. But Elsa cannot say why she signed what she signed, why she loves the man she loves, or why her own mind no longer feels like a room she is alone in.Stirner has built an apparatus that broadcasts thought the way a radio broadcasts sound. And he is only beginning. Soon the exchange convulses and the great banking houses fall in a week. A whole city marches to a tune nobody chose to hum. Armies halt at the edge of an invisible zone and turn back weeping.To stop a man who can rewrite the mind of anyone who opposes him, the world will need something it has never possessed: an equal weapon. First published in 1926, Ruler of the World is Alexander Belyaev's startlingly prophetic thriller of telepathy, mass suggestion, and absolute power - from the writer long known as the Russian Jules Verne. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.…

Paperback. Condizione: new. Paperback. The year is 1918. The Petersburg that The Sisters rendered so precisely - the white nights, the literary cafes, the drawing rooms of the intelligentsia, the specific world of the Silver Age in its last summer - is gone. The October Revolution has occurred, Brest-Litovsk has ceded Ukraine to Germany, and the Civil War is at its most savage and its most fluid: the question of who will govern Russia genuinely open, the front lines shifting across the vast geography of a country at war with itself, the moral landscape organized by a violence too multiple and too overlapping to be contained by the available political categories.Katya and Dasha are dispersed - separated by the geography of catastrophe, the specific intimacy of sisterhood tested against the distances that the revolution has enforced. Telegin has aligned with the Red Army, the practical man's assessment of which side represents the possibility of building something in the ruins. Roshchin has moved toward the White forces, drawn by the military tradition that has organized his entire formation and that the revolution has placed on the wrong side of history. Two men who love two sisters, on opposite sides of the most fundamental conflict of the moment, moving through a landscape whose violence neither their personal loyalties nor their political positions have prepared them for.Alexei Tolstoy published The Eighteenth Year in 1927-1928, after his return to the Soviet Union - writing now from within the literary culture he had committed himself to, under the developing pressures that Socialist Realism would formalize, with the specific constraints and the specific freedoms of a major writer navigating the requirements of the state he had chosen. The difference from Book One is audible in the novel's moral architecture: the historical forces are beginning to resolve toward their destination, the characters' trajectories acquiring the shape that the ordeal's passage requires. But the specific texture of 1918 - its violence, its displacement, its genuine darkness - was too fully known from personal experience to be entirely organized into retrospective clarity, and what survives the constraints is the honest rendering of what it cost individual human beings to walk through the torments and keep walking.The dispersal that the Civil War has enforced is itself the argument: the intimate social world of Book One has been exploded into fragments, and across the vast contested geography of Ukraine and the Don and the Volga, the characters are learning what survives when everything that organized their lives no longer exists.The second movement of one of the great Russian novels of the twentieth century - the world after the Silver Age, the ordeal at its most violent, the question of what the passage leads to still entirely open. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability. …

Paperback. Condizione: new. Paperback. Pyotr Garin has a plan. He has built a device - the hyperboloid, a concentrator of directed light energy whose cutting beam no geological formation can resist - and he intends to use it to bore through the Earth's crust to the olivine belt below, extract gold in quantities sufficient to overwhelm the world's monetary supply, destabilize global capitalism, and make himself the master of the world. The plan is megalomaniacal. It is also internally coherent, technically workable, and pursued by a man of sufficient intelligence and sufficient freedom from moral constraint to have a serious chance of carrying it out.Pursuing him across the international settings of the mid-1920s - from Soviet Russia through Germany and France to the island stronghold he eventually constructs in the Pacific - is the Soviet agent Shelga, the representative of the legitimate order that Garin has placed himself beyond. Between them moves Zoe Montrose, who understands both men completely and is drawn to Garin's genius precisely because she sees its monstrous dimension clearly, which ordinary attraction does not permit.The American capitalist Rolling wants to buy the hyperboloid and contain it within the existing structures of global finance. Garin wants to use Rolling's resources until he no longer needs them. Each intends to discard the other when the using is done. Neither is deceived about this.Alexei Tolstoy serialized The Hyperboloid of Engineer Garin in 1925-1926, two years after Aelita, and it is a decisive shift in register: from lyrical planetary romance to hard-edged international thriller, from the divided consciousness of the emigre years to the specific energies of a writer who had come home and found the genre form that his gifts and his situation required. The hyperboloid itself - a device that concentrates directed light energy through shaped reflective surfaces into a cutting beam - is a structural anticipation of the laser, described nearly four decades before the first working laser was built. Tolstoy did not know the physics. He knew that a man like Garin would need a weapon like this, and that the weapon would need to be adequate to the plan.Garin is one of the great villain-protagonists of twentieth-century popular fiction - amoral, brilliant, and rendered with enough respect for his own internal logic that the order which defeats him is never quite as interesting as the order he was trying to build in its place.The proto-laser. The world's gold supply. The island stronghold. The agent in pursuit. One of the founding works of Soviet science fiction - and one of the most honest about the specific appeal of the man the revolution was supposed to have made impossible. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.…

Paperback. Condizione: new. Paperback. Before the Martian revolution chronicled in Red Star, there was the man who built the world that made it possible.Menni Aldo is twenty-six years old when he stands before Mars's most powerful bankers and ministers and asks for absolute control over the largest engineering project in the planet's history: an inland sea flooded across six hundred thousand square kilometers of dead desert, fed by a canal blasted through solid rock. He gets it. What follows is not just the story of a canal, but of what it costs the man who builds one - his ruthless competence, his marriage to a shipwrecked orphan named Nella, his war with the financiers who made him and would gladly break him, and the slow, irreversible way that absolute power reshapes an idealist.Written in 1913 by Alexander Bogdanov - physician, philosopher, revolutionary, and rival to Lenin within the Bolshevik party - Engineer Menni is both a taut political drama and a founding work of Soviet-era science fiction: the prequel to his celebrated novel Red Star, and a searching meditation on what a better world costs the people who build it. A century before "disruptors" and "founders" entered the language, Bogdanov had already written their tragedy. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from our UK warehouse or from our Australian or US warehouses, depending on stock availability.…

Paperback. Condizione: new. Paperback. Someone is stealing the air.Across the world the trade winds have begun to bend. Barometers fall. Aircraft engines miss at altitudes that should be safe. Every current of air on Earth is turning toward a single point in the frozen emptiness of Yakutia - and the Yakut hunters say that no one who follows the wind there comes back.Georgy Klimenko, a Soviet meteorologist, follows it anyway.Beneath the Verkhoyansk mountains he finds a city sunk eight floors into the permafrost, staffed by the sons of bankers and run by an English industrialist named Bailey - a man who has learned to compress the sky into gleaming spheres the size of walnuts. A single one holds a cubic kilometer of air.Bailey is not a madman. He is a businessman, and he has been waiting for a seller's market.As the world begins to gasp, he prepares his terms.First published in 1929 by Alexander Belyaev - the writer often called the Russian Jules Verne - The Air Seller imagines a commodity nobody thought could be owned, and a man patient enough to corner it.Newly translated from the Russian. Complete and unabridged. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from our UK warehouse or from our Australian or US warehouses, depending on stock availability.…

Paperback. Condizione: new. Paperback. He can put a thought in your head. You will believe it is your own.Germany, the 1920s. Ludwig Stirner is a penniless engineer with a genius for reflexes, a white setter that obeys him too well, and a talent for being underestimated. Then the banker Karl Gottlieb dies beneath the wheels of a train, and his entire fortune passes - inexplicably, against every expectation and every interest - to his young secretary, Elsa Glueck.The courts find nothing. The lawyers find nothing. But Elsa cannot say why she signed what she signed, why she loves the man she loves, or why her own mind no longer feels like a room she is alone in.Stirner has built an apparatus that broadcasts thought the way a radio broadcasts sound. And he is only beginning. Soon the exchange convulses and the great banking houses fall in a week. A whole city marches to a tune nobody chose to hum. Armies halt at the edge of an invisible zone and turn back weeping.To stop a man who can rewrite the mind of anyone who opposes him, the world will need something it has never possessed: an equal weapon. First published in 1926, Ruler of the World is Alexander Belyaev's startlingly prophetic thriller of telepathy, mass suggestion, and absolute power - from the writer long known as the Russian Jules Verne. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from our UK warehouse or from our Australian or US warehouses, depending on stock availability.…

Paperback. Condizione: new. Paperback. Off the coast of Argentina, pearl divers whisper of a monster in the bay - a "sea devil" that slashes nets, frees trapped fish, and vanishes beneath the waves before anyone can catch more than a glimpse. The superstitious call it a demon. The greedy call it a fortune waiting to be caught.He is Ichthyander - a young man surgically transformed by his father, the brilliant and secretive Doctor Salvator, into a creature able to breathe both air and water. Raised in isolation from the world, he knows the ocean's beauty better than he knows his own kind - until he falls in love with Guttiere, a poor pearl merchant's daughter, and is drawn into a human world of greed, cruelty, and betrayal he was never prepared to survive.When the ruthless schooner captain Pedro Zurita learns what Ichthyander really is, he sees not a man but a living fortune - a diver who never tires, never drowns, and can be forced to work the pearl beds forever. As Salvator's secret unravels into a public trial that puts science, religion, and human nature themselves in the dock, Ichthyander must choose between the only world that ever felt like home and the one person on land worth risking everything for.First published in 1928, Alexander Belyaev's Amphibian Man became one of the founding classics of Russian and Soviet science fiction - a haunting adventure about isolation, exploitation, and what it costs to be different. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from our UK warehouse or from our Australian or US warehouses, depending on stock availability.…

Paperback. Condizione: new. Paperback. The year is 1918. The Petersburg that The Sisters rendered so precisely - the white nights, the literary cafes, the drawing rooms of the intelligentsia, the specific world of the Silver Age in its last summer - is gone. The October Revolution has occurred, Brest-Litovsk has ceded Ukraine to Germany, and the Civil War is at its most savage and its most fluid: the question of who will govern Russia genuinely open, the front lines shifting across the vast geography of a country at war with itself, the moral landscape organized by a violence too multiple and too overlapping to be contained by the available political categories.Katya and Dasha are dispersed - separated by the geography of catastrophe, the specific intimacy of sisterhood tested against the distances that the revolution has enforced. Telegin has aligned with the Red Army, the practical man's assessment of which side represents the possibility of building something in the ruins. Roshchin has moved toward the White forces, drawn by the military tradition that has organized his entire formation and that the revolution has placed on the wrong side of history. Two men who love two sisters, on opposite sides of the most fundamental conflict of the moment, moving through a landscape whose violence neither their personal loyalties nor their political positions have prepared them for.Alexei Tolstoy published The Eighteenth Year in 1927-1928, after his return to the Soviet Union - writing now from within the literary culture he had committed himself to, under the developing pressures that Socialist Realism would formalize, with the specific constraints and the specific freedoms of a major writer navigating the requirements of the state he had chosen. The difference from Book One is audible in the novel's moral architecture: the historical forces are beginning to resolve toward their destination, the characters' trajectories acquiring the shape that the ordeal's passage requires. But the specific texture of 1918 - its violence, its displacement, its genuine darkness - was too fully known from personal experience to be entirely organized into retrospective clarity, and what survives the constraints is the honest rendering of what it cost individual human beings to walk through the torments and keep walking.The dispersal that the Civil War has enforced is itself the argument: the intimate social world of Book One has been exploded into fragments, and across the vast contested geography of Ukraine and the Don and the Volga, the characters are learning what survives when everything that organized their lives no longer exists.The second movement of one of the great Russian novels of the twentieth century - the world after the Silver Age, the ordeal at its most violent, the question of what the passage leads to still entirely open. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from our UK warehouse or from our Australian or US warehouses, depending on stock availability. …

Paperback. Condizione: new. Paperback. By 1920 the outcome of the Civil War is being determined. Denikin's White Army has reached its furthest advance and broken; the Red Army is consolidating across the vast geography of the former Russian Empire; and the question that The Eighteenth Year had rendered in its full uncertainty - who will govern Russia, what will survive, whether the ordeal has a destination - is becoming an answer. The answer is bleak. It is also, Tolstoy insists in the word he chose for the trilogy's title, morning.Roshchin has been fighting for the White cause - the cause that drew the imperial officer, the man formed by a tradition the revolution placed on the wrong side of history, with the loyalty of someone who cannot simply discard what his formation has made him. Across the years of the Civil War he has discovered what the White cause actually is and what it is becoming: not the restoration of what was worth restoring but the exhaustion of a world that no longer exists and cannot be reconstructed. His crossing to the Red side is the trilogy's central psychological event - not ideological conversion but the specific recognition of a man who has let the accumulated weight of historical experience reach its conclusion, who carries into his new commitment everything the old one has been, changed but not erased.Alexei Tolstoy completed The Bleak Morning in 1941, thirteen years after The Eighteenth Year, as Germany was crossing the Soviet border. The coincidence gave the novel's conclusion - the story of how Russia had survived the Civil War's ordeal - an urgency that no purely literary publication could have matched: a narrative of Russian survival, offered at the moment when Russian survival was again in question. The trilogy that had begun in emigre Paris in 1919, written by a man who had not yet determined his relationship to the Soviet state, ended in besieged Russia in 1941, completed by a man who had made his choice and lived within it for twenty years.The reunions that the novel delivers - Telegin and Dasha, Katya and Roshchin - are the reunions of people the ordeal has remade. The love is real. It is the love of people who have walked through the torments and know exactly what the walking cost.The title's word is precise: khmuroe - bleak, overcast, not triumphant. The morning arrives under clouds. It is morning nonetheless - and in 1941, as in 1920, that is not a small thing to say.The conclusion of one of the great Russian novels of the twentieth century - the ordeal arrived at, the cost counted, the dawn that was always the destination finally, bleakly, here. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from our UK warehouse or from our Australian or US warehouses, depending on stock availability.…

Paperback. Condizione: new. Paperback. Pyotr Garin has a plan. He has built a device - the hyperboloid, a concentrator of directed light energy whose cutting beam no geological formation can resist - and he intends to use it to bore through the Earth's crust to the olivine belt below, extract gold in quantities sufficient to overwhelm the world's monetary supply, destabilize global capitalism, and make himself the master of the world. The plan is megalomaniacal. It is also internally coherent, technically workable, and pursued by a man of sufficient intelligence and sufficient freedom from moral constraint to have a serious chance of carrying it out.Pursuing him across the international settings of the mid-1920s - from Soviet Russia through Germany and France to the island stronghold he eventually constructs in the Pacific - is the Soviet agent Shelga, the representative of the legitimate order that Garin has placed himself beyond. Between them moves Zoe Montrose, who understands both men completely and is drawn to Garin's genius precisely because she sees its monstrous dimension clearly, which ordinary attraction does not permit.The American capitalist Rolling wants to buy the hyperboloid and contain it within the existing structures of global finance. Garin wants to use Rolling's resources until he no longer needs them. Each intends to discard the other when the using is done. Neither is deceived about this.Alexei Tolstoy serialized The Hyperboloid of Engineer Garin in 1925-1926, two years after Aelita, and it is a decisive shift in register: from lyrical planetary romance to hard-edged international thriller, from the divided consciousness of the emigre years to the specific energies of a writer who had come home and found the genre form that his gifts and his situation required. The hyperboloid itself - a device that concentrates directed light energy through shaped reflective surfaces into a cutting beam - is a structural anticipation of the laser, described nearly four decades before the first working laser was built. Tolstoy did not know the physics. He knew that a man like Garin would need a weapon like this, and that the weapon would need to be adequate to the plan.Garin is one of the great villain-protagonists of twentieth-century popular fiction - amoral, brilliant, and rendered with enough respect for his own internal logic that the order which defeats him is never quite as interesting as the order he was trying to build in its place.The proto-laser. The world's gold supply. The island stronghold. The agent in pursuit. One of the founding works of Soviet science fiction - and one of the most honest about the specific appeal of the man the revolution was supposed to have made impossible. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from our UK warehouse or from our Australian or US warehouses, depending on stock availability.…