A secret, military project is in the process of colonising a planet called Springfield. When contact with Earth is lost, the Springfielders are forced to look out for themselves. In this story about alternative worlds, there are alternative endings. In the first, aggressive aliens arrive, forcing the Springfielders to choose between fight and flight. In the second ending, a machine intelligence seems to offer renewed contact with Earth. Unwittingly, it attracts an apparition previously believed to exist only in legend.

Never before published in English, the stories in Mr. Kafka and Other Tales from the Time of the Cult were written mostly in the 1950s and present the Czech master Bohumil Hrabal at the height of his powers. The stories capture a time when Czech Stalinists were turning society upside down, inflicting their social and political experiments on mostly unwilling subjects. These stories are set variously in the gas-lit streets of post-war Prague; on the raucous and dangerous factory floor of the famous Poldi steelworks where Hrabal himself once worked; in a cacophonous open-air dance hall where...