"It was an age of freaks, monsters, and grotesques. All the world was misshapen in marvelous and malevolent ways. The Classicists and Romantics who hated it were unaware of the potential greatness of the 25th century. They were blind to a cold fact of evolution - that progress stems from the clashing merger of antagonistic extremes, out of the marriage of pinnacle freaks. Classicists and Romantics alike were unaware that the solar system was trembling on the verge of a human explosion that would transform Man and make him the master of the Universe. It is against this seething background of the 25th century that the vengeful history of Gulliver Foyle begins."

1956.