I really loved this book. It's a multi-generational saga following a clan of 21st-century posthumans.

The recession has ended, but populations are ageing and the rate of tech change is accelerating dizzyingly. Manfred makes his living from spreading ideas around, putting people in touch with one another and leaving a spray of technologies in his wake.

He lives at the cutting edge of intelligence amplification technology, but even Manfred can take on too much.

And when his pet robot cat picks up some interesting information from the SETI data, his world - and the world of his descendants - is turned on its head.

A “seven-league boot” vehicle that could supposedly make each step about six times longer, allowing astronauts or soldiers to move quickly across rough terrain.

Painted by Italian illustrator Walter Molino. Cover of the Italian weekly magazine La Domenica del Corriere, January 2, 1966.

"The death-winds of Venus screamed with glee as George Main lay dying. Then the winds brought strange shapes to haunt him—and a stranger hope—"

Great short story here. One of my favs from the pulp era. Published in Planet Stories July 1951.

Some planets invite you to visit. Venus does not.

A lone man falls out of the sky onto a world where every shadow seems to be watching, where the air itself is death, and the silence carries the weight of forgotten things.

His ship is gone. Home is impossibly far away.

Survival becomes a conversation with a planet that refuses to answer.