The Luminous Depths (The First Republic trilogy Book 2)

Brno, Czechoslovak Republic, 1931. Eight years before the Nazi invasions . . .

At the Theater on the Ramparts, a performance of the world-famous robot play R.U.R is in rehearsal, attended grudgingly by its author, Karel Čapek. A former master of science fiction, Čapek now devotes himself to the here-and-now, writing small works vital to his beloved Republic. He finds little real pleasure in the proceedings but for the contributions of his brother Josef, a renowned avant-garde artist, and Pavel Haas, a disciple of the late eccentric composer, Maestro Leos Janáček.

Yet in the midnight streets of the city, Haas has found a luminous enigma; or rather, it has found him, floating down out of the starry sky. Once activated it carries Haas, as well as the Brothers Capek, the actors, robots and musicians, into a nightmarish world of Occupation, of immense devastation and fecund marvels, of dire transport East, setting in motion of terrifying siege and a phantasmagorical night journey leading from the Theater on the Ramparts to the lonely and now-forgotten cottage of Leos Janáček.

Newly revised, The Luminous Depths is the second volume in the First Republic trilogy, an epic tale of death and rebirth set in the hinterlands of Europe between the World Wars, featuring a group of real-life artists who clash with the clockwork of Time.

"The Luminous Depths has a richness of prose and a density of allusion and ideas reminiscent of authors like Aldiss and Wolfe -- and, incidentally, it is a page-turning cracker of a horror story. Outside his homeland, Karel Capek may be remembered primarily through his legacy of the term “Robot”. It is Herter’s achievement in this novella to lead us through the narrow window of that single chthonic word to a rich evocation of a fragile, doomed period of Central European history”
— Stephen Baxter on The Luminous Depths

“Just as there are touches of D M Thomas's The White Hotel (1981) in Herter's depiction through his beloved Janacek of the warp and weave of a civilization under stress, so there are suggestions of Algernon Blackwood's "The Willows"(1907) in the way he spells his great composer into tranced rapport with whatever breathes inside the wood and does not wish to be carved into music.”
—John Clute on On the Overgrown Path

“David Herter’s trilogy, to which One Who Disappeared provides a spectacular and moving conclusion, does not fall; on the contrary, it remains perfectly suspended, sturdy and elegant—and by virtue of its topography, it does not, like more myopic literary projects, taper off into soothing closure, but opens wide to an even vaster and more glorious universe of possibility.” —Brian Stableford on One Who Disappeared

“Distinctive and imaginative, Herter's tale moves to its own disconcerting logic: a debut of immense promise.” —Kirkus Reviews on Ceres Storm