The Laughter of Carthage

Overview

“A formidable work in which science and technology are subordinated to narrative techniques not usually found in popular fiction . . . a work of grand design.” —Time magazine

Maxim Arturovitch Pyatnitski, or Pyat, that charming but despicable mythomaniac who first appeared in Byzantium Endures, is back in this second book of the Pyat quartet. Having fled Bolshevik Russia in late 1919, Pyat's progress is a series of leaps from crisis to crisis, as he begins affairs with a baroness and a Greek prostitute while undertaking schemes to build flying machines in Europe and the United States. His devotion to flamboyantly racist, particularly anti-Semitic doctrines—like his devotion to cocaine—remains unabated, and he both sings the praises of Mussolini and lectures across America for the Ku Klux Klan. Meanwhile, his best-kept secret is the fact that he is Jewish. As the novel ends, Pyat is in Hollywood—his new Byzantium—hobnobbing with movie stars and dreaming of making films like those of his hero, D.W. Griffith. This authoritative edition brings this book back into print after 30 years and boasts a new introduction by Alan Wall.

Reviews

"This is a rich, ambitious and erudite book. . . . If one purpose of fiction is to lead us into different worlds and, as Virginia Woolf says, to make of them 'some kind of whole,' then Michael Moorcock succeeds brilliantly."  —Carolyn Slaughter, Guardian

"The Laughter of Carthage and its companion volumes will be seen . . . as an imaginative record of our own time rather than as a simple reconstruction of that which has gone."  —Peter Ackroyd, Sunday Times

"Michael Moorcock is an absolute wizard of a storyteller. . . . It is marvelous to meet a novelist who has the energy for the epic. It is not simply a case of energy, Mr. Moorcock is also a storyteller, an old-fashioned button-holing, 19th-century storyteller."  —Stanley Reynolds, Punch

Author Biography

Michael Moorcock is an award-winning author of more than 80 works of fiction and nonfiction, including The Cornelius Quartet, Doctor Who, and Elric: The Stealer of Souls. He has received the Nebula, World Fantasy, and British Science Fiction awards and is a Grandmaster of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. His nonfiction has appeared in Financial Times, the Guardian, and the Los Angeles Times. He lives in Bastrop, Texas. Alan Wall is a novelist, a short story writer, a poet, an essayist, and a professor of writing and literature at the University of Chester. His novels include Bless the Thief, China, The Lightning Cage, The School of Night, and Sylvie's Riddle.