The Planet on the Table

They sailed out of Lisbon harbor with the flags snapping and the brass culverins gleaming under a high white sun, priests proclaiming in sonorous Latin the blessing of the Pope, soldiers in armor jammed on the castles fore and aft, and sailors spiderlike in the rigging, waving at the citizens of the town who had left their work to come out on the hills and watch the ships crowd out the sunbeaten roads, for this was the Armada, the Most Fortunate Invincible Armada, off to subjugate the heretic English to the will of God. There would never be another departure like it.

And aboard one of the ships was Manuel Tetuan, a young Moroccan orphan shanghaied from a Franciscan monastery. “Black Air” is the multiple award nominated and World Fantasy Award-winning novelette of Manuel’s beatific innocence, of his compassion in the face of war, and of the miracles that enabled him to survive the tragedy of the doomed Armada.

Robinson’s extraordinary range of interests is demonstrated in haunting stories of: tourists looting the beautiful, sunken ruins of Venice; an amoral future sleuth who, with her bumbling Watson, must find the forger of Monets on a planet of wealthy esthetes; three friends, one brain-damaged, who confront eternity and subtle magic in the snowbound Sierras; a repertoire company of hypnotically trained, surgically altered actors, and an unknown psychopath whose murders mock the scripts of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama; the historic effects of the Second World War’s last traitor, the pilot who deliberately fails to A-bomb Hiroshima; impoverished Uranian miners who seek fame in an interplanetary music competition by reviving an ancient, lost form—Dixieland Jazz; and a dilapidated Arizona grill-souvenir shop that becomes the focus of a drifter’s encounters with Time and destiny.