{"product_id":"2940157322748","title":"The Mirror of Present Events","description":"Ten French scientific romances by Georges de La Fouchardière, Henri Lanos, E.M. Laumann, Francois-Félix Nogaret, Jean Rameau \u0026amp; Régis Vombal. The Mirror of Present Events (1790) is an irreverent political allegory in which a Syracusan beauty, following Archimedes' death, offers her hand in marriage to the inventor who can produce the most innovative homage to the great man's mechanical genius. A series of suitors comes forward, each offering a mechanical device ostensibly more marvelous than the last. Also included are an 1887collection of six futuristic stories by Jean Rameau featuring electric guns, automata and a striking vision of a future Paris in which people have become dependent on industrial pollution; The Immortal (1908) extrapolates the notion of immortality to a conclusion that might not be inevitable, but is no less symbolically dramatic; a hilarious 1910 feuilleton describing the career of an automaton racehorse; and L'Aerobagne 32 (1920), about a French engineer hired by a German company who discovers that its industrial operations are a cover for a rearmament scheme, and who refuses to surrender the formula for a new poison gas. He is then incarcerated in a vast airborne prison. This is the fourteenth in a series of anthologies of exemplary texts in the evolution of the French genre of roman scientifique.","brand":"Black Coat Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47071148900592,"sku":"2940157322748","price":5.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/2940157322748_p0.jpg?v=1764095134","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/2940157322748","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}