Amerikaner

In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only….BLOOD! Saddly your cyber-steed and join Magnus, Gordon, and Felix as they traverse the fairytale parkland and blasted frontier of Vampire Hunter D, the light novel and anime franchise of Hideyuki Kikuchi and Yoshitaka Amano. 10,000 years after Humanity’s self-imposed demise in nuclear hellfire, the Nobility, the vampires of ancient legend, have remade the world in their own grim and terrible image, enslaving humans as little more than cattle to serve their advanced civilization, and unleashing countless genetically-engineered horrors from myth and legend upon the world. But their cyber-cities lie empty and their hyperspeed highways are silent as the last of the Nobility, wracked by degeneracy and haunted by ennui, are hunted down by skilled mercenaries known as Vampire Hunters. The greatest of these, D, is a legendary Dhampir, the offspring of a human and a Noble. Soft-spoken, deadly dangerous, and haunted by his past, D wanders the frontier hunting down the last of his Father’s kind…

Descending from the blackness of interstellar space, Magnus and Gordon explore the strange and wondrous world of Stansilaw Lem’s Solaris, a wonderful short novel from 1961, detailing humanity’s struggle to understand and communicate with a living planetary ocean, which possesses both extraordinary powers and a seemingly unfathomable nature. Scientific detachment wars with the primal motivations of fear, love, suspicion, and guilt when the research staff find they are not alone on Solaris Station….
Alternately tense, romantic, analytical, and incisive, Lem cuts deep into the delusions of both science and science fiction, and poses the tough questions–can mankind ever truly understand anything about Nature or the Universe? Where does our desire to ‘Contact’ alien beings come from, and what drives it? If, as H.P. Lovecraft put it, Mankind’s own nature is “a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity”, how can we ever hope to understand any part of the Universe, when we cannot understand ourselves?