Lord of All Things
Herr aller Dinge • Book 1
by Andreas Eschbach, Samuel Willcocks
Why You'll Love This
A boy from poverty decides to solve inequality with technology — and the closer he gets to succeeding, the more terrifying the consequences become.
- Great if you want: big-idea sci-fi braided with a decades-long love story
- The experience: slow-building and epic in scope — earns its 650 pages
- The writing: Eschbach writes ideas as characters — concepts carry emotional weight
- Skip if: you prefer tight plots over sprawling, philosophical storytelling
About This Book
What would it take to end poverty forever — not through politics or charity, but through a single, radical leap in technology? That question drives Lord of All Things, Andreas Eschbach's sprawling novel about a Japanese engineer named Hiroshi whose childhood obsession with solving the world's deepest inequality grows into something visionary and possibly dangerous. Woven through it all is his enduring connection to Charlotte, the French diplomat's daughter he met as a boy — a relationship that gives the novel its emotional gravity and reminds us that the grandest ambitions are almost always personal at their core.
Eschbach writes with the controlled momentum of a thriller and the patience of a novelist genuinely interested in ideas. At 650 pages, the book earns its length, moving between decades and continents with structural confidence, letting its central questions about technology, power, and human nature accumulate weight slowly and deliberately. Samuel Willcocks's translation preserves the clarity and intelligence of the original German without calling attention to itself. This is the rare novel that treats both scientific imagination and romantic longing as equally serious subjects — and manages to make them feel inseparable.