He can put a thought in your head. You will believe it is your own.
Germany, the 1920s. Ludwig Stirner is a penniless engineer with a genius for reflexes, a white setter that obeys him too well, and a talent for being underestimated.
Then the banker Karl Gottlieb dies beneath the wheels of a train, and his entire fortune passes - inexplicably, against every expectation and every interest - to his young secretary, Elsa Glück.
The courts find nothing. The lawyers find nothing. But Elsa cannot say why she signed what she signed, why she loves the man she loves, or why her own mind no longer feels like a room she is alone in.
Stirner has built an apparatus that broadcasts thought the way a radio broadcasts sound. And he is only beginning. Soon the exchange convulses and the great banking houses fall in a week. A whole city marches to a tune nobody chose to hum. Armies halt at the edge of an invisible zone and turn back weeping.
To stop a man who can rewrite the mind of anyone who opposes him, the world will need something it has never possessed: an equal weapon.
First published in 1926, Ruler of the World is Alexander Belyaev's startlingly prophetic thriller of telepathy, mass suggestion, and absolute power - from the writer long known as the Russian Jules Verne.