by Leo Tolstoy and Ben H. Winters
06/08/10
Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters co-author 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 dystopian world of robots, cyborgs, and interstellar space travel.
As in the original novel, our story follows two relationships: The tragic adulterous love affair of Anna Karenina and Count Alexei Vronsky, and the more hopeful marriage of Nikolai Levin and Princess Kitty Shcherbatskaya. These characters live in a steampunk-inspired world of robotic butlers, clumsy automatons, and rudimentary mechanical devices. But when these copper-plated machines begin to revolt against their human masters, our characters must fight back using state-of-the-art 19th-century technology—and a sleek new model of ultra-human cyborgs like nothing the world has ever seen.
Filled with the same blend of romance, drama, and fantasy that made the first two Quirk Classics New York Times best sellers, Android Karenina brings this celebrated series into the exciting world of science fiction.
I can't wait! Quirk Books continues to tickle our fancy with it's first steampunk treasure. I am more than thrilled to see if Winters can make his android suffer as much as our Anna did. Will he prove that artificial intelligence can also have a soul? The most exciting thing about current trends in book publishing is that with vampires in the tight clutches of teenagers, adults feel they must set themselves apart by exploring the filth and fury (and the future) with zombies and steampunk. And the result is that we all win!
