In this book you will find volumes 3 to 5: The Land Without Stars, Welcome to Alflolol and Birds of the Master – three stories that introduce the societal criticism aspect of the series. Battle of the sexes, totalitarianism and extreme productivism are lambasted, but never at the expense of fantasy or of the action. And as they travel from world to distant world, Laureline becomes a truly equal partner, far from the stereotypical female sidekick roles of the time. Finally, the second part of the exclusive interview with the authors and director Luc Besson is followed by an in-depth portrait of Pierre Christin, the writer.
Fifth volume of the collection, and it’s almost a new series that begins, without ever losing any of what makes its strength or its charm. In this volume of the Collection you will find books 13 to 15, and our heroes’ life has been irretrievably changed with the disappearance of future Earth and Galaxity. Lacking work, they become freelance spies in the 80s in On the Frontiers. Lacking money, they’re reluctant arms dealers in The Living Weapons. Lacking options, they turn investigators slash bait on corrupt Rubanis in The Circles of Power. The apparent descent into hell of the two former agents is the chance for the authors to study the ambiguities of our world, either directly or through the lens of alien civilisations; along with the ambiguity – pragmatism versus heroism – of the titular character, saved from a fall from grace by his ever irreproachable partner.
Fourth volume of the collection: return to Earth, and some great upheavals in the characters’ lives, are on the menu for the best titles of the series. This volume contains books 9 to 12 – two unmissable two-parters that represent a turning point in the story of our agents, and which are widely considered by critics and readers alike to be the pinnacle of the series. Characterised by a return to 20th century Earth, these two stories are suffused with incredible melancholy and poetic charm, and force Valerian, the action man, to face his limitations. As the real date neared 1986, final year of our world according to the authors, Pierre Christin reconciled fiction and reality with consummate skill and daring, sweeping aside the status quo and sending his heroes down a completely new path. This book is introduced by several articles of the recently departed Stan Barets.
In this sixth volume of the Collected Edition, our two former agents, now idle, create their own adventures by helping their fellow beings, and resume their quest to find Earth.
The last volume of this magnificent collection, which includes the final three books of the main saga, bringing to a close the adventures of Valerian, Laureline and the vanished Earth in style.
This first volume of the collection contains books 1 and 2 of the series: The City of Shifting Waters – in its original two-part, 9 pages longer format – and The Empire of a Thousand Planets. It also includes book 0, Bad Dreams, translated into English for the first time: the very first adventures of our two heroes, published after City and retroactively numbered. Finally, linking the volumes of this collection together, a long, exclusive interview with the authors and director Luc Besson is illustrated with new art as well as numerous sketches, studies and photographs from the latter’s upcoming big-screen adaptation.
This third book of the collected edition contains volumes 6 to 8: Ambassador of the Shadows – the story that directly inspired Luc Besson’s film – On the False Earths and Heroes of the Equinox. Over the course of these titles, among the finest in the series, Laureline takes her rightful place as the brains of the outfit, while Valerian fully embraces his role as anti-hero: always brave, but often a bit out of his depth. You will also find the end of the interview with Luc Besson and the authors, and an in-depth portrait of Jean-Claude Mézières, the artist.
After the events of The Time Opener, Valerian and Laureline reverted to childhood, and are now living with Mr Albert on 21st century Earth. But in a universe where time travel is a reality, words like ‘after’ or even ‘now’ can be somewhat ... hazy, and elsewhere, in other times, our young but nonetheless adult agents are still working tirelessly to maintain a galactic peace threatened as always by greed and the thirst for power.
The works of George G. Lorentz, spanning more than 60 years, have played a significant role in the development and evolution of mathematical analysis. The papers presented in this volume represent a selection of his best works, along with commentary from his students and colleagues.
The deep and original ideas of Norman Levinson have had a lasting impact on fields as diverse as differential & integral equations, harmonic, complex & stochas tic analysis, and analytic number theory during more than half a century. Yet, the extent of his contributions has not always been fully recognized in the mathematics community. For example, the horseshoe mapping constructed by Stephen Smale in 1960 played a central role in the development of the modern theory of dynami cal systems and chaos. The horseshoe map was directly stimulated by Levinson's research on forced periodic oscillations of the Van der Pol oscillator, and specifi cally by his seminal work initiated by Cartwright and Littlewood. In other topics, Levinson provided the foundation for a rigorous theory of singularly perturbed dif ferential equations. He also made fundamental contributions to inverse scattering theory by showing the connection between scattering data and spectral data, thus relating the famous Gel'fand-Levitan method to the inverse scattering problem for the Schrodinger equation. He was the first to analyze and make explicit use of wave functions, now widely known as the Jost functions. Near the end of his life, Levinson returned to research in analytic number theory and made profound progress on the resolution of the Riemann Hypothesis. Levinson's papers are typically tightly crafted and masterpieces of brevity and clarity. It is our hope that the publication of these selected papers will bring his mathematical ideas to the attention of the larger mathematical community.
