The Hyperboloid of Engineer Garin: A New Translation

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 Zoë 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 émigré 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.

Pages: 410, Paperback, Independently published