Mortal Engines by the late pioneering Polish author Stanisław Lem (ISFDB, Wikipedia) is the vintage classic English-language collection of his science fiction stories, this set mostly having to do with robots, free courtesy of publisher Penguin UK, who are e-printing it from its original 1977 edition out from Seabury Press, which apparently reprints much of the 1964 Polish collection Bajki Robotów, according to Wikipedia, as translated by Michael Kandel (ISFDB, Wikipedia), an award-nominated science fiction author in his own right.
Currently free to pre-order (slated for Oct 1st) @ Amazon UK (and apparently also other countries in EU/Oceania/Japan/South America, etc. when I spot-check their regional URLs) & Google Play (available to the UK at the very least, and I hope you all appreciate the hoops I had to jump through to find and install a working VPN IP proxy that both supports non-US countries and was sufficiently convincing to get past Google's pickiness on my Mac so that I could check that this even existed, much less verify the price). Price-drop-check link for Sainsbury, which has a catalogue entry for this, but no pre-order capability that I can see from Canada, proxied or not.
Unlikely to cross the pond, as the reprint rights to Lem's estate seem to be held by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in North America.
And this has been the (late!) selected 3rd (non-repeat) free ebook thread of the day.
Because not only it is always a pleasant treat to receive sfnal freebies and deals, to get a vintage classic collection by one of the major old school international authors in the genre, translated by another notable back in the day author, as an apparently official offering in multiple stores and not as a glitch, is always extra doubleplus good. :yahoo: :celebrate:
Enjoy!
Description
'On one side of the ducats was stamped the radiant profile of Archithorius, on the other - an image of his six hundred arms'
Mortal Engines is a selection of the best of Stanislaw Lem's extraordinary miniature space epics, chosen by his heroic translator Michael Kandel, who has somehow battled through Lem's jokes, parodies, fabricated technological terms and unreliable robots and brilliantly converted them from Polish into English. Encompassing his Fables for Robots and stories from his protagonists Ijon Tichy (from The Star Diaries) and Pirx the Pilot, this is a highly entertaining but also deeply alarming view of the glories and absurdities of Outer Space.
Currently free to pre-order (slated for Oct 1st) @ Amazon UK (and apparently also other countries in EU/Oceania/Japan/South America, etc. when I spot-check their regional URLs) & Google Play (available to the UK at the very least, and I hope you all appreciate the hoops I had to jump through to find and install a working VPN IP proxy that both supports non-US countries and was sufficiently convincing to get past Google's pickiness on my Mac so that I could check that this even existed, much less verify the price). Price-drop-check link for Sainsbury, which has a catalogue entry for this, but no pre-order capability that I can see from Canada, proxied or not.
Unlikely to cross the pond, as the reprint rights to Lem's estate seem to be held by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in North America.
And this has been the (late!) selected 3rd (non-repeat) free ebook thread of the day.
Because not only it is always a pleasant treat to receive sfnal freebies and deals, to get a vintage classic collection by one of the major old school international authors in the genre, translated by another notable back in the day author, as an apparently official offering in multiple stores and not as a glitch, is always extra doubleplus good. :yahoo: :celebrate:
Enjoy!
Description
'On one side of the ducats was stamped the radiant profile of Archithorius, on the other - an image of his six hundred arms'
Mortal Engines is a selection of the best of Stanislaw Lem's extraordinary miniature space epics, chosen by his heroic translator Michael Kandel, who has somehow battled through Lem's jokes, parodies, fabricated technological terms and unreliable robots and brilliantly converted them from Polish into English. Encompassing his Fables for Robots and stories from his protagonists Ijon Tichy (from The Star Diaries) and Pirx the Pilot, this is a highly entertaining but also deeply alarming view of the glories and absurdities of Outer Space.