Circumpolar! is a whopping tale of a round-the-world aerial race that weds the sepia flicker of an old-time newsreel to the cliffhanging burlesque of Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon. Romping through an alternate history, it's a flight to high adventure replete with dashing heroes, dastardly villains, magic, monstrosities, and feats of derring-do.

It's the mid-nineteen-twenties, after the One Year War, and Germany has been roundly defeated. But they're going to get their own back. Mrs. Victoria Woodhull Martin has offered a prize of $50,000 to the first team to complete a round-the-poles flight, and the eyes of the world are on the daring young aviators who have taken up the challenge.

The Germans are sending up the Red Baron, his kid brother Lothar Von Richthofen, and the Princess Irina Lvova of Russia. In the United States, Charles Lindbergh, Amelia Earhart, and Howard Hughes are running the final preflight checks on The Spirit of San Diego. The rival teams don't know what they'll find on the unexplored other side of the world—but kelpies or wizards, walls of ice or the lost continent of Mu, it isn't going to stand in the way of winning this race.

And what a race! From sabotage in the Ecuadorian jungles to dogfights over San Diego, it's a madcap race for riches, thick with treachery, pratfalls, wonders, and romance. Will our heroes escape death at the hands of Pegasus-riding Valkyries? Will our villains outscheme Lodur the Magician in the spell-spun keeps of Svartalheim? From Muiaian ziggurats to gravity-mad tides, from the freezing jaws of ice dragon and polar toad—will either team survive and make it back at all to claim the prize?

In Circumpolar! Richard A. Lupoff, author of Space War Blues and the Nebula Award-nominated Sword of the Demon, spins a unique, freewheeling yarn about a world way back when, a world that might have been. Paying homage to Edgar Rice Burroughs and other masters of pulp adventure, Circumpolar! soars aloft with a magic all its own. John Carter, Indiana Jones—even Pauline, for all her perils—never had it so tough!

Circumpolar!

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