The Amphibian / Человек-амфибия. Книга для чтения на английском языке

The Amphibian / Человек-амфибия. Книга для чтения на английском языке

Александр Романович Беляев

Russian Classic Literature

Alexander Belyaev is one of the founders of Russian science fiction literature and the first of the Soviet writers to devote himself entirely to this genre. In all, he has written more than 70 science fiction works, including 17 novels. For a significant contribution to Russian fiction and his visionary ideas, Belyaev is often called the "Russian Jules Verne."The Amphibian is a science fiction novel written in 1927 and first published in 1928. Fishermen and pirates of Buenos Aires are frightened – a mysterious "sea devil" appeared in the sea. However, a cold-blooded businessman Pedro Zurita, the owner of the crew of pearl-divers, decides to catch the mysterious creature and adapt it to his business. This creature with both lungs and gills of a shark is actually a young man named Ichthyander, the result of Doctor Salvator's bold experiments with organ transplantation. One day, Ichthyander rescues a girl drowning in the sea – Gutierrez, the adoptive daughter of Baltasar, one of Zurita's assistants…

Alexander Belyaev / Александр Беляев

The Amphibian / Человек-амфибия. Книга для чтения на английском языке

В© РљРђР Рћ, 2018

From the Publishers

The Amphibian will throw you back to a time when skin and deep-sea diving had not yet made the Silent World begin yielding up its secrets on a really big scale, as aqualung and snorkel are doing today, and present to you Alexander Belyaev’s 1928 prevision of the ocean mastered by mankind.

Sea-devil has appeared in the Rio de la Plata. Weird cries out at sea, slashed fishermen’s nets, glimpses of a most queer creature astride a dolphin leave no room for doubt. The Spaniard Zurita, greed overcoming his superstition, tries to catch Sea-devil and force it to pearl-dive for him but fails.

On a lonely stretch of shore, not far from Buenos Aires, Dr. Salvator lives in seclusion behind a high wall, whose steel-plated gates only open to let in his Indian patients. The Indians revere him as a god but Zurita has a hunch that the god on land and the devil in the sea have something in common. Enlisting the help of two wily Araucanian brothers he sets out to probe the mystery.