Expediter: Restored Classics to Go Edition

· Otbebookpublishing
Ebook
37
Pages
Eligible

About this ebook

Josip Pekic has spent his life waiting for the midnight knock that took his father, a victim of an old purge, and when it finally comes, his worst fear is confirmed. Dragged through a sleeping city by two silent security men, he is delivered not to a routine interrogation but into the orbit of Transbalkania's highest rulers, Zoran Jankez and Aleksander Kardelj. There, in a bizarre blend of menace, bureaucracy, and dark comedy, he is named the nation's "average man" and chosen to serve as its first "expediter," a supposedly practical reformer modeled on wartime efficiency experts. Given sweeping authority to travel the country and override officials, Josip begins exposing shortages, corruption, and absurd state projects, from missing consumer goods to wasteful backyard steel smelters and a disastrous bird-extermination campaign that wrecks the harvest. As he humiliates petty functionaries and challenges inflated claims of socialist success, the novel sharpens its satire of authoritarian planning, political favoritism, and the gulf between propaganda and reality. Beneath the comic surface lies a tense political drama about ambition, paranoia, and the fragile machinery of power in a modern police state. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.
Josip Pekic has spent his life waiting for the midnight knock that took his father, a victim of an old purge, and when it finally comes, his worst fear is confirmed. Dragged through a sleeping city by two silent security men, he is delivered not to a routine interrogation but into the orbit of Tr...

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About the author

Mack Reynolds was an American science fiction writer whose life was as restless and unconventional as the futures he imagined. Born in 1917 and shaped by the political upheavals of the twentieth century, he spent years as a labor organizer, political activist, journalist, and world traveler before becoming a prolific author of speculative fiction. That broad experience gave his writing a sharply social edge: he was less interested in gadgetry than in the pressures of economics, class, power, and the ways ordinary people try to survive systems built around control. Over the course of a long career, he produced a substantial body of novels and stories that blended adventure with satire, often imagining near-future societies where technology, bureaucracy, advertising, and political ideology collide. His work stands out for its accessibility and urgency, using fast-moving plots to ask serious questions about inequality, mass manipulation, labor, and the fragility of democracy. Reynolds remains relevant today because so many of the issues he explored—corporate influence, propaganda, surveillance, and social unrest—feel strikingly modern. Readers who enjoy thought-provoking science fiction with a political pulse, a skeptical eye, and a strong sense of forward momentum will find much to admire in his work, especially if they like stories that challenge assumptions as much as they entertain.

Mack Reynolds was an American science fiction writer whose life was as restless and unconventional as the futures he imagined. Born in 1917 and shaped by the political upheavals of the twentieth century, he spent years as a labor organizer, political activist, journalist, and world traveler befor...

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