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Romance and Russian Cyborgs


android karenina.jpg

?Quirk’s next book is Android Karenina (the announcement is old, but I’d been holding out for the cover). From the press release:

Sense
and Sensibility and Sea Monsters
coauthor Ben H. Winters is back
with an all-new collaborator, legendary Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy,
and the result is Android Karenina: an enhanced edition of
the classic love story set in a strange new world of robots, cyborgs,
and interplanetary travel.

As in the
original novel, our story follows two relationships: the tragic
adulterous romance of Anna Karenina and Count Alexei Vronsky, and the
much more hopeful marriage of Nikolai Levin and Kitty Shcherbatskaya.
These four, yearning for true love, live in a steampunk-inspired 19th
century of mechanical butlers, extraterrestrial-worshiping cults, and
airborne debutante balls. Their passions alone would be enough to
consume them–but when a secret cabal of radical scientific
revolutionaries launches an attack on Russian high society’s high-tech
lifestyle, our heroes must fight back with all their courage, all their
gadgets, and all the power of a sleek new cyborg model like nothing the
world has ever seen.

I know some of you are tired of the literary classic mash-up, but I think both Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters were great, so I’m very much looking forward to this. Although I actually haven’t read the original Anne Karenina, unlike the two Austen mash-ups. Somehow, I doubt it’ll be much of a problem.