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The so-called lost word from Kronos exists only in the form of an electronic message to his usurper, the cyborg Dollmaker. It is a rambling, incoherent text, self-exculpatory and full of accusations of ingratitude, threats, and curses. However, there is good reason to suppose that this text is a forgery, perhaps the work of the Dollmaker himself. The creation of a “mad Kronos.” whose sane mirror image he was, suited the cyborg’s purposes perfectly: and such is history’s appetite for the lurid that this version was widely accepted. (That single portrait of Kronos is notable, as we have remarked, for the scientists insane eyes.) Lately, the discovery of fragments of Professor Kronos’s journals has shed new light on his state of mind. A very different Kronos emerges from these fragments, whose authenticity seems beyond dispute: the handwriting is clearly the Professor’s. “The gods. too. murdered the Titans who made them,” Kronos writes. “Artificial life here merely mirrors the real thing. For man is born in chains but everywhere seeks to be free. I too once had strings. I loved my puppets, knowing that, like children. they might walk away from me one day. But they ca
After Kronos’s disappearance, a PK delegation led by the Dollmaker and his lover, the Goddess of Victory, took the scientist’s place at the next a
A few days later a small. battered amphibious craft landed u
The continuing story of the twin goddesses and doubled professors, of Zameen’s search for the vanished Akasz Kronos, and of the struggle for power between the two communities of Baburia will be reported on this site in regular bulletins. Click on the links for more PK info or on the icons below for answers to 101 FAQs, access to interactivides, and to see the wide range of PK merchandise available for INSTANT shipping NOW All major credit cards accepted.
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As a young man in the early 1960s, Malik Solanka had devoured the science fiction novels of what was later recognized as the form’s golden age. In flight from his own life’s ugly reality, he found in the fantastic its parables and allegories, but also its flights of pure invention, its loopy, spiraling conceits—a ceaselessly metamorphosing alternative world in which he felt instinctively at home. He subscribed to the legendary magazines, Amazing and F&SF bought as many of the yellow-jacketed Victor Gollancz SF series as he could afford, and all but memorized the books of Ray Bradbury, Ze
To such a reader—and admirer, in the cinema, of the highbrow sci-fi of Fahrenheit 451 and Solaris—George Lucas was a kind of Antichrist and the Spielberg of Close Encounters was a kid playing in the grown-ups’ sandbox, while the Terminator films, and above all the mighty Blade Ru
Akasz he got from aakaash, Hindi for “sky.” Sky as in Asmaan (Urdu), as in poor Sky Schuyler, as in the great sky gods: Ouranos-Varuna, Brahma, Yahweh, Manitou. And Kronos was the Greek, the child-devourer, Time. Zameen was earth, the heavens’ opposite, which embraces the sky at the horizon. Akasz he had seen clearly from the first, picturing his whole life’s arc. Zameen, though, had surprised him. In this tale of a drowning world he hadn’t expected an earth goddess—even one modeled on Neela Mahendra—to take a central role. Yet here she undeniably was, and by showing up she had valuably thickened the plot. Her presence seemed to have been prefigured, even though he hadn’t pla