Next Up from Quirk Classics

I am a little behind in posting this (it was announced on January 12, 2010) and I chalk that up to having been in a bit of a “funk” the last week or so. Quirk Classics has announced the next title in their acclaimed mash-up series:

Android Karenina

by Leo Tolstoy and Ben H. Winters

(Philadelphia: Quirk Classics, 2010)

Trade Paperback, 320 Pages, Fiction

ISBN: 9781594744600, US$12.95

From the Publisher: Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters co-author Ben H. Winters is back with an all-new collaborator, legendary Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, and the result is Android Karenina—an enhanced edition of the classic love story set in a dystopian world of robots, cyborgs, and interstellar space travel. As in the original novel, our story follows two relationships: The tragic adulterous love affair of Anna Karenina and Count Alexei Vronsky, and the more hopeful marriage of Nikolai Levin and Princess Kitty Shcherbatskaya. These characters live in a steampunk-inspired world of robotic butlers, clumsy automatons, and rudimentary mechanical devices. But when these copper-plated machines begin to revolt against their human masters, our characters must fight back using state-of-the-art 19th-Century technology—and a sleek new model of ultra-human cyborgs like nothing the world has ever seen. Filled with the same blend of romance, drama, and fantasy that made the first two Quirk Classics New York Times best sellers, Android Karenina brings this celebrated series into the exciting world of science fiction.

Me again: Quirk has not yet released the cover art for the book hence the Abraham Lincoln steampunk picture. I have one big reservation about this book—in spite of all the coolness with which a Russian classic combined with steampunk robots is inherently imbued—and that is that Quirk’s version of Anna Karenina is only 320 pages long. My own experience with AK is that it is a much heftier novel than that, and poking around online has revealed other paperback editions to be somewhere in the range of 750-900 pages long. Winters has obviously employed some serious edits to Tolstoy’s novel and I, for one, find that to be more than a little disappointing. As near as I can tell, the Jane Austen mash-ups were in no way “abridged” and so to do so with Tolstoy seems a bit of a betrayal of the spirit in which these books began. But, that’s just my two cents. I’ll still read it of course.