The Hair Carpet Weavers

Description

A mind-expanding space opera from one of Germany's most acclaimed science-fiction writers In the dusty wastes of a far-flung planet, strange artisans toil. Like their fathers before them, they tie intricate knots out of the hair of their wives and daughters, slowly forming carpets. Delicate and unique, each carpet requires an entire lifetime of work - and all will be sold to pave the Emperor's palace. Then, one day, the empire falls. Soon, strange men begin to arrive from the stars, in search of the carpets' true destination. What they discover will astonish them . . . Combining brilliant world-building with an irresistible sense of mystery, Andreas Eschbach's acclaimed space opera is a compelling meditation on faith, fundamentalism and the meaning of life itself.

Andreas Eschbach is one of Germany's pre-eminent science-fiction writers. Born in the city of Ulm in 1959, he studied aerospace engineering at the University of Stuttgart. The Hair Carpet Weavers (Die Haarteppichkn pfer, 1995) was his debut novel, and won the Deutscher Science Fiction Preis, the Belgian Prix Bob Morane and the French Grand Prix de l'Imaginaire for best foreign-language novel. His subsequent books have won numerous prizes in Germany and been translated into a number of languages, including English, French, Italian, Russian, Serbian, Polish, Turkish and Japanese.

A tale of empire, indoctrination, and extravagant revenge, that begins on a world where men dedicate their lives to weaving excruciatingly complicated carpets out of their wives' hair -- Rosanna Mclaughlin * The White Review, Books of the Year * A novel of ideas that evokes complex emotions through the working out of an intricate and ultimately satisfying plot, with echoes of Gene Wolfe, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Isaac Asimov * The New York Times Book Review * German SF has recently produced at least one new writer on the world stage: Andreas Eschbach * The New York Review of Science Fiction * Eschbach is a novelist with vision, with compassion, and with a sense of tragedy, of character, of spectacle, and of human possibility, and also human inevitability ... An unforgettable, beautiful, perpetually entertaining novel -- Orson Scott Card An outstanding work -- John Clute A world-class SF voice * Locus * The Carpet Makers will blow you away ... clever, insightful, entertaining and satisfying * Analog * A magnum opus ... Even more astounding, it was Eschbach's debut * Kirkus *