Disclaimer

La révolte des robots a provoqué la mort et la désolation. Les robots sont vainqueurs, mais magnanimes, ils conservent en vie quelques humains pour les faire travailler. Pour les humains, commence la lutte pour la survie et la reconquête de la liberté.<

From Kaliningrad on the Baltic to the Russian Far East, journalist Ben Judah has travelled throughout Russia and the former Soviet republics, conducting extensive interviews with President Vladimir Putin’s friends, foes, and colleagues, government officials, business tycoons, mobsters, and ordinary Russian citizens. is the fruit of Judah’s thorough research: a probing assessment of Putin’s rise to power and what it has meant for Russia and her people.

Despite a propaganda program intent on maintaining the cliché of stability, Putin’s regime was suddenly confronted in December 2011 by a highly public protest movement that told a different side of the story. Judah argues that Putinism has brought economic growth to Russia but also weaker institutions, and this contradiction leads to instability. The author explores both Putin’s successes and his failed promises, taking into account the impact of a new middle class and a new generation, the Internet, social activism, and globalization on the president’s impending leadership crisis. Can Russia avoid the crisis of Putinism? Judah offers original and up-to-the-minute answers.

Judah’s dynamic account of the rise (and fall-in-progress) of Russian President Vladimir Putin convincingly addresses just why and how Putin became so popular, and traces the decisions and realizations that seem to be leading to his undoing. The former Reuters Moscow reporter maps Putin’s career and impact on modern Russia through wide-ranging research and has an eye for illuminating and devastating quotes, as when a reporter in dialogue with Putin says, “I lost the feeling that I lived in a free country. I have not started to feel fear.” To which Putin responds, “Did you not think that this was what I was aiming for: that one feeling disappeared, but the other did not appear?” His style, however, feels hurried, an effect of which is occasional losses of narrative clarity. In some cases limited information is available, and his pace-maintaining reliance on euphemistic, metaphorical, and journalistic language can leave readers underserved and confused. Judah is at his best when being very specific, and perhaps the book’s achievement is that it makes comprehensible how Putin got to where he is; those wondering how Putin became and remained so popular will benefit from this sober, well-researched case. (June)

A journalist’s lively, inside account of Russian President Putin’s leadership, his achievements and failures, and the crisis he faces amidst rising corruption, government dysfunction, and growing citizen unrest.

Wartime England: June, 1940. Edward VIII still reigns and mourns the suspicious death of his mistress, Wallis Simpson six years earlier. France has fallen, leaving the bulk of the British Expeditionary Force trapped on the beaches by Rommel’s advancing panzers as 300,000 men are taken prisoner.

Left with almost no troops, guns or tanks, Britain stands alone against a new, more-powerful German Wehrmacht armed with assault rifles, main battle tanks, superbattleships and aircraft carriers, fast and deadly new U-boats and a pair of ‘superguns’ firing seven tonne shells across the English Channel.

Squadron Leader Alec Trumbull commands a rag-tag collection of broken veterans and inexperienced new-recruits flying a motley collection of worn out aircraft as they take to the skies against the seemingly endless streams of German aircraft. Trumbull’s aircraft is damaged in the heat of battle and he is forced out of combat, turning for home in search of safety. Pursued by enemy fighters he can’t outrun, he is shot down and forced to crash land on an empty beach, only to be saved at the last moment by a strange and amazing jet aircraft that can land and take off vertically and is piloted by an Australian officer named Max Thorne.

Trumbull is taken north to a newly-built installation at the Home Fleet Anchorage of Scapa Flow where he is introduced to the Hindsight Unit — a top-secret task force of men and women who have returned to 1940 from the early 21st Century to combat a group of Neo-Nazis calling themselves the ‘New Eagles’: an organisation which has also returned from the future to change history and ensure Nazi Germany wins the Second World War. As each side works feverishly against the other to accelerate technology and events begin to spiral out of control, Trumbull finds himself drawn into Hindsight’s desperate struggle to prevent a seemingly inevitable invasion of Great Britain and the search to find some way of defeating the New Eagles and returning history to its true course.

The second instalment in the Empires Lost series has grown to the point where it has become necessary to split it into two separate novels. The first of these two—which is now titled “Winds of Change”—is close to completion, hopefully within the next two months.

The second instalment—the title now undetermined at this point—will be released (ideally) late this year or sometime into early 2014.

Historischer Abenteuerroman (1843/1958)

Nach der Übersetzung aus dem Jahre 1843 unter Verwendung der englischen Fassung neu bearbeitet und herausgegeben von Edwin Orthmann

Einband und Illustrationen: Gerhard Goßmann

Genre : SF Cuicui<