IL PALAZZO NEL CIELO

The Palace in the Sky is a unique work of modern science fiction; hallucination is reality; the robot is the man, the god is the machine. The internal space is the external space. According to the New Genesis, God, on the eighth day, created the Palace in the Sky to rule the Earth and other worlds, to fulfill the wishes of men and robots. After the Great Catastrophe, lost in the past and forgotten, the population of the planets is rare and scattered, living on dreams, like in Liverpool, city of music and pleasure, watched over by robots. And everyone is waiting: on Mars the Astronomers scan the sky, and on Venus the Children of the Flowers believe that the Aril'Beat has now been born, the man who will one day lead them to conquer the Earth that hates and persecutes them. And something is really happening: in the factories the robots are stopping working and from the space come immense spaceships from Vega, Atair and Aldebaran. And a man, Barry London, considered by some a traitor and by others a messiah, wanders between worlds in search of a meaning for his existence: because he has no memories, but he knows that in the Palace in the Sky a murder has been committed and that in his mind there is a message that he himself ignores and that once revealed will change the world forever... and he knows that all the answers he seeks are behind the doors of Luna L'il, the mythical, lost city that holds the key to the past and the future. UGO MALAGUTI was born on July 21, 1945 in Bologna, where he lives and works. He made his debut as an author in 1960 on the pages of Oltre il Cielo with the story Sleep of Millennia. After many adventurous stories and novels, he published in 1965 on Galassia the controversial and seminal novel The welfare system, soon followed by other highly successful works such as Satan of miracles and The ballad of Alain Hardy. In 1965 he took over the direction of the same magazine, presenting to the public and with a wide critical introduction, a selection of texts representative of the multiple types and trends of international SF. Two years later, he founded Libra Editrice and the magazine Nova Sf*, of which he has maintained the direction for fifty consecutive years. The Palace in the Sky, from 1970, is his most famous novel internationally, winner of the Hugo Italia 1975 award, translated into France and Germany and, for some chapters, into English by Ursula K. Le Guin.