Earth was a planet of incompetents, but Simmons was the greatest loser of all. It seemed as if the powers of the Universe were concentrated on grinding his small soul into ultimate insignificance, until the aliens came. To them, Simmons was the most important human on the planet - for only through his mind could they overcome this world.

Thomas Mann's last great novel, first published in 1947 and now newly rendered into English by acclaimed translator John E. Woods, is a modern reworking of the Faust legend, in which Germany sells its soul to the Devil. Mann's protagonist, the composer Adrian Leverkühn, is the flower of German culture, a brilliant, isolated, overreaching figure, his radical new music a breakneck game played by art at the very edge of impossibility. In return for twenty-four years of unparalleled musical accomplishment, he bargains away his soul—and the ability to love his fellow man.

Jonathan Herovit is a science fiction writer in a state of deep personal and professional crisis. Whilst struggling to deal with his wife’s post-partum depression, his own alcoholism, and a long-overdue novel that he has no motivation to write, the pseudonym under which he writes begins talking to him....

When man roamed freely among the planets and away to the stars, spacecraft had to carry the best advisers with them, for outside help was usually too far off to do any good in emergencies. And so the android simulacrum was born - a conveniently storable but believably human package which duplicated all the strengths of the Master after whom each was modeled. For centuries a Sigmund Freud was standard equipment on long voyages, but put to little use. Then Man met his first ETs, and Freud's career entered a new phase - one which would change history forever.

Galaxies is a brilliantly original science fiction novel arranged in fragments that satirize the science fiction writer imagining new worlds and characters. Its central persona is a female astronaut of the 40th century investigating a mysterious "black galaxy".