Relatos de Ciencia Ficción

by Edgar Allan Poe, Julián Díez (Editor), Julio Cortázar (Translator)

La obra de Edgar Allan Poe destaca por una serie de aciertos brillantes, que en ocasiones son fruto de su condición de visionario descontrolado y en otras de su faceta como periodista y observador de la época. Podemos percibir en ella elementos tan consustanciales al género de la ciencia ficción como el vértigo cósmico, la necesidad de verosimilitud o la intencionalidad política. El escritor tenía una actitud heterodoxa ante la ciencia, a la que admiraba pero creía sobrevalorada. En su opinión, la preeminencia que estaba cobrando la ciencia en su época la convertía en una especie de superstición para élites. En un tiempo en el que las fronteras de la ciencia comenzaban a expandirse de forma exponencial casi cada año, Poe albergaba la sospecha de que dichas fronteras alcanzarían pronto territorios más propios del misticismo.

400 pages, Paperback

Published November 8, 2018

About the author

The name Poe brings to mind images of murderers and madmen, premature burials, and mysterious women who return from the dead. His works have been in print since 1827 and include such literary classics as The Tell-Tale Heart, The Raven, and The Fall of the House of Usher. This versatile writer’s oeuvre includes short stories, poetry, a novel, a textbook, a book of scientific theory, and hundreds of essays and book reviews. He is widely acknowledged as the inventor of the modern detective story and an innovator in the science fiction genre, but he made his living as America’s first great literary critic and theoretician. Poe’s reputation today rests primarily on his tales of terror as well as on his haunting lyric poetry.

Just as the bizarre characters in Poe’s stories have captured the public imagination so too has Poe himself. He is seen as a morbid, mysterious figure lurking in the shadows of moonlit cemeteries or crumbling castles. This is the Poe of legend. But much of what we know about Poe is wrong, the product of a biography written by one of his enemies in an attempt to defame the author’s name.

The real Poe was born to traveling actors in Boston on January 19, 1809. Edgar was the second of three children. His other brother William Henry Leonard Poe would also become a poet before his early death, and Poe’s sister Rosalie Poe would grow up to teach penmanship at a Richmond girls’ school. Within three years of Poe’s birth both of his parents had died, and he was taken in by the wealthy tobacco merchant John Allan and his wife Frances Valentine Allan in Richmond, Virginia while Poe’s siblings went to live with other families. Mr. Allan would rear Poe to be a businessman and a Virginia gentleman, but Poe had dreams of being a writer in emulation of his childhood hero the British poet Lord Byron. Early poetic verses found written in a young Poe’s handwriting on the backs of Allan’s ledger sheets reveal how little interest Poe had in the tobacco business.

For more information, please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_al...

Reviews

[Guada · Rating 5 out of 5]

Todo en este libro está bien.
Desconocía esta faceta de Poe, pero vaya descubriendo más agradable.
Aquí no encontrareis naves espaciales, es todo mucho más místico, más intimista, más Poe, al fin y al cabo.
Hiperrecomendadisimo. Especialmente para fans del autor que descubrirán aquí una nueva faceta pero el mismo estilo y calidad.

[Proyecto Fundación Asimov]

De la colección «Letras Populares» de Ediciones Cátedra. Colección imprescindible por la calidad de sus ediciones.