GLASS BEES, THE

In The Glass Bees the celebrated German writer Ernst Juenger presents a disconcerting vision of the future. Zapparoni, a brilliant businessman, has turned his advanced understanding of technology, and strategic command of the information and entertainment industries, into a discrete, and seemingly benign, form of global domination. But Zapparoni is worried that the scientists he depends on might take his secrets to a rival. He needs a chief of security, and Richard, a veteran and war hero who has fallen on hard times, is ready. But when Richard arrives at the beautiful country compound that is Zapparoni's headquarters, he finds himself subjected to an unexpected ordeal--one for which nothing he has ever known has prepared him. Soon he is led to question his past, his character, and even his senses. When The Glass Bees was first published in 1960, Juenger's German critics dismissed the book's vision of the future as without contemporary relevance. Today, however, that future seems something very much like the present we now know.