The Queen of Alboné and her entourage are going to Honoi in a diplomatic mission. Yáxtor Brandan, empirical adept at the Queen’s service, will be among them. But he is not the Yáxtor Brandan he used to be. He has recovered the stolen memories from his past and he is beginning to assimilate them.

Little by little, people and places that until now had no meaning for Yáxtor are becoming more and more familiar and the empirical adept finds himself in the middle of an unexpected exploration of his past. Old forgotten faces from his youth walk his mind halls and begin to give new shape to what he is and what he can become.

His first love, his old mentor, his wife and his son, a betrayed lover and a new friend… those are the faces from Yáxtor’s past he has to confront. And also a new one, an unknown face hidden in the shadows that could be the face of his greatest enemy.

Ignotus Award 1996, Best Novel
English Translation by Steve Redwood

The neutral Convergence Space Station No. 1, known as the Whirld, is the unofficial but deadly battleground in which several Galactic powers fight, by all means at their disposal, to obtain a certain piece of information that would inevitably determine their whole future. But then an all-powerful malevolent AI, for reasons known only to itself, also enters the game…

Cat's Whirld, a book indispensable for understanding the evolution of Spanish science fiction, is an original fusion of thriller, cyberpunk, and space opera, with unforgettable characters, and a frenetic pace and rhythm that never falter; a hybrid novel in which elements from distinct genres make a surprisingly harmonious whole.

Originally published in 1995, it was the first cyberpunk novel in Spanish; a specially remarkable achievement in that it was also the first of Rodolfo Martínez’ many novels, and yet was not afraid to tread new ground, and, moreover, to do so with great narrative confidence. Twenty years later, the story still retains its power, as fresh and exciting as ever.

The People's Covenant and God's Hammer have raged a Cold War that has lasted for over twenty years. A war without armies, where battles are fought in the dark and information is the most dangerous weapon.

In this world —which sometimes seems the Middle Ages, sometimes the Renaissance and sometimes the Nineteenth Century— lives Yáxtor Brandan, empirical adept at the service of the Queen of Alboné. A relentless, amoral and unscrupulous character, Yáxtor fights to recover his own past as he tries to prevent a new player in the espionage game to end the world, as he knows it.

A fascinating fast-moving and complex plot, full of tension and surprises and excellently paced; a main character for whom it should be impossible to feel the slightest sympathy, and yet somehow we do, even as his cruelty disturbs us more and more –an extremely difficult feat to pull off so successfully; powerful secondary actors, who either leave you with a sense of uneasiness with regard to their motivations and loyalties, or make you want to shout out –as people did in the early days of cinema- “Look out, don’t trust him!”; and a pervading atmosphere of tragedy, especially in a final unexpected and shocking, yet on reflection almost inevitable, scene. In short, a totally addictive and highly original novel set in a world that is at once both strangely familiar and disturbingly alien.
—Steve Redwood, author of Fisher of Devils