K-PAX

A stranger in sunglasses arrives at New York's Central Park station and publicly declares that he comes from K-PAX, a planet near Lyra about a thousand light-years from Earth, traveling faster than light to study Earth. The police take him for a lunatic and send him to a mental hospital, where he is placed under the care of psychiatrist Mark Powell. The patient, who calls himself "prot," is gentle and self-assured, and his descriptions of K-PAX are detailed and vivid: there are no nations, governments, or laws, no families or marriages, and beings coexist according to a universal, constant goodness. His startling astronomical knowledge and his answers shake the doctor and fellow patients alike. Strangely, some long-hopeless patients improve under his influence, and even Mark finds himself reexamining his own family and career through their conversations. Prot then announces an exact date for his departure from Earth. Is he an extraterrestrial visitor, or a patient who has wrapped a massive trauma in fantasy? The novel advances through therapeutic dialogue, leaving a rift between science and belief, reality and hallucination, that cannot easily be adjudicated. This Chinese edition was published in a single volume together with Solaris, as part of the World Science Fiction Masters series.