One Who Disappeared
Introduction by Brian Stableford. Cover art by Vlad Verano.
Hollywood, California, 1949. Exiled Czechoslovak composer Paul Haas lives a comfortable life at Universal Studios. He has a loving wife and family. His opera The Insect Play has been a hit at the Metropolitan in New York. But for Paul, the past is never far away; he’s haunted by memories of home, of too many friends and loved ones lost in the Holocaust of the Second World War.
On a summer day, a telegram arrives, hinting at answers to mysteries sinister yet promising. It leads Paul into the heights of Brentwood Hills, and a startling revelation.
Driven by strange currents of destiny, Haas is compelled to leave his easy existence for one last journey into the past, to perform an act of devotion...
Prague, Czechoslovak Republic, 1929. Haas arrives in his beloved country at the zenith of her brief flourishing. Keeping to the shadows, Paul finds himself nonetheless drawn into the orbit of the urbane, witty Karel Capek and his insightful brother Josef, both in the prime of their artistic lives, unaware of the horror that lurks on the horizon.
After an encounter with a young flautist named Magdalena, who alone spies the truth of him, Paul seeks out a mysterious village in the hinterlands of Austria. It was there, six years earlier, that the eccentric Maestro J------ – Paul’s beloved mentor – snatched a melody from the air, disrupting the fabric of time. Now, in ruins far older than Christianity, Paul will be changed irrevocably, beginning an odyssey that leaps across the dwindling years toward a great conflagration, where artists of his Republic join with those of Europe and America to deliver an unexpected challenge to the coming chaos.
With On the Overgrown Path, The Luminous Depths, and now One Who Disappeared, David Herter has crafted a singular epic of time travel; a reverie on the World Wars from unique angles; an explication of a near-forgotten strand of Eastern European science fiction, music, and painting; and, most of all, a memorable evocation of real-life artists who, for a brief moment, changed the heartbeat of the world.
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David Herter
David Herter is an American author. Herter lives in Seattle, Washington.
His first novel was Ceres Storm in 2000, which was chosen as one of the top 10 science fiction books of 2000 by Amazon.com, followed by Evening's Empire in 2002.
On the Overgrown Path, a novella about the Czech composer Leoš Janá?ek, was published in 2006 by P.S. Publishing, with an introduction by John Clute; a sequel, The Luminous Depths, featuring the writer Karel ?apek and the composer Pavel Haas, with an introduction by Stephen Baxter, was released in 2008. One Who Disappeared completes the trilogy.
The Czech Trilogy
The Czech Trilogy consists of three books. The current recommended reading order for the series is provided below.
