Gradient Books › First English Editions
A mysterious airship. A masked captain. And a man who has declared himself master of the skies.
High above Europe, astonished balloonists encounter an aircraft unlike anything the world has ever seen: enormous, fantastically fast, and apparently impervious to attack. Its commander is a masked man calling himself Captain Mors.
Once an engineer with a home and family, Mors has been driven from ordinary society by the men who destroyed his life. Now he has returned in a machine of his own invention, owing allegiance to no country and recognizing no authority but his own sense of justice. When revolution and mutiny threaten the cities of the Black Sea, Mors sees both an opportunity to intervene—and a chance to confront some of the men he has hunted for years.
Published in 1908, Der Beherrscher der Lüfte introduced Captain Mors and launched the remarkable 165-part German adventure series Der Luftpirat und sein lenkbares Luftschiff. Combining the technological imagination of Jules Verne with the velocity of later pulp fiction, this first adventure establishes the airship, the masked avenger, and the larger-than-life world that would eventually carry Captain Mors far beyond the Earth itself.
This Gradient Books edition brings the opening adventure of one of science fiction's earliest great serial heroes to English-language readers.
