'What use to a being that lives beneath a sun are jewels of gas and silver stars of ice?' From a giant of twentieth-century science fiction, these four miniature space epics feature crazy inventors, surreal worlds, robot kings and madcap machines. The four stories are "The Three Electroknights", "The White Death", "King Globares and the Sages", and "The Tale of King Gnuff". All have previously been published in the collection Mortal Engines.