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Fourth volume in Mike Ashley's acclaimed set on the history of science-fiction magazines. This volume looks at the 1980s.
Skillfully combining complex science with finely executed prose, these edgy, award-winning tales explore the always-shifting border between the known and the alien. The beauty and peril of technology and the passion and penalties of conviction merge in stories that are by turns dark, satiric, bold, and introspective. A seemingly humanized monster from John Carpenter’s The Thing reveals the true villains in an Antarctic showdown. An artificial intelligence shields a biologically-enhanced prodigy from her overwhelmed parents. A deep-sea diver discovers that her true nature lies not within the confines of her mission but in the depths of her psyche. A court psychologist analyzes a psychotic graduate student who has learned to reprogram reality itself. A father tries to hold his broken family together in the wake of an ongoing assault by sentient rainstorms. Gorgeously saturnine and exceptionally powerful, these collected fictions are both intensely thought-provoking and impossible to forget.
Twenty short stories “from the surreal to the horrific, from dark fantasy to black humor” by the World Fantasy Award–winning author—“a terrific collection” (SF Site). Deliciously frightening, darkly satirical, and always unexpected, Robert Shearman has won the World Fantasy Award, the British Fantasy Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the Edge Hill Reader’s Prize. Remember Why You Fear Me gathers together his best dark fiction, the most celebrated stories from his acclaimed books, and ten new tales that have never been collected before. In this collection, you will read of a woman who rejects her husband’s heart―and gives it back to him, still beating, in a plastic box; a little boy who betrays his father to the harsh mercies of Santa Claus; a widower who suspects his dead wife’s face is growing over his own; and a man who goes to Hell, where he finds he’s roommate to the ghost of Hitler’s dog. Also lurking in these pages are giant spiders, killer angels, ghost cat photography, and the haunted house at the center of the Garden of Eden.
This “fast paced madcap caper story . . . is a worthy sequel” to the author’s Fireball Award–winning industrial crime thriller Katja From the Punk Band (Publishers Weekly). After escaping the work island she once called home, Katja is free and on the mainland. But when she finally comes out of hiding, she finds herself hunted by debt collectors, mad surgeons, and a corrupt detective, all of whom will stop at nothing to claim her for their own. And behind this scramble for Katja lies the twisted mind of an old adversary, desperate to have his revenge. Replete with dark humor and careening action, Get Katja continues the critically acclaimed adventures of this industrial punk crime thriller by the author of Pretty Little Things to Fill Up the Void, Nothing Is Inflammable, and I-O.
Tine is detective, bureaucrat, family member, an Active agent of the Interplanetary Criminal Investigation Bureau on a planet with no crime and a physiological barrier to travel or immigration. Tine is also a monster: a hooved, troll-like person looked down upon by any of the galaxy's aesthetes who even know that his people, the Caliban, exist at all. When his boss sends him, at Tine's great personal cost, to investigate a disappearance on a planet renowned for the beauty of its dreamweavers and the dreams they create, Tine is an intruder in Paradise: ugly, base, fallible, vulnerable, principled—and ultimately forced to go far beyond his mandate to solve the crime and bring about some semb...
This hugely acclaimed collection is now in its 14th successful year, and Gardner Dozois's selection for 2001 maintains its high standards of excellence with more than 25 SF stories from contemporary talents such as John Kessel, Ursula K Le Guin, Nancy Kress, Paul J. McAuley, Alastair Reynolds, Brian Stableford, Stephen Baxter, Greg Egan, Charles Stross, Ian McDonald and many other bright stars of SF, as well as the usual thorough summation of the year and recommended reading lists.
Compostela (Tesseracts Twenty) is an anthology of hard and soft science fiction stories that best represent a futuristic view of the sciences and how humanity might be affected (for better or worse) by a reliance in all things technological. The stories contained with in the pages of Compostela are a refelction of the world we live in today; where science produces both wonders and horrors; and will leave us with a future that undoubtedly will contain both. Journeys to the stars may be exhilarating and mind-expanding, but they can also be dangerous or even tragic. SF has always reflected that wide range of possibilities. Compostela (Tesseracts Twenty) features works by Canadian visionaries: A...
“Pushes urban fantasy noir to its logical extreme by casting the resurrected body of Christ—now called Cross—as an angel-slaying, wise-cracking antihero.” —Publishers Weekly For thousands of years, Cross has wandered the earth, a mortal soul trapped in the undying body left behind by Christ. He’s been a thief, a con man, a soldier, and a drunkard. He’s fought as a slave in the Colosseum and as a knight at King Arthur’s side. But now he must play the part of reluctant hero, as an angel comes to him for help finding the Mona Lisa—the real Mona Lisa that inspired the painting. Cross’s quest takes him into a secret world within our own, populated by characters just as strange...
Stories of suspense, sorrow, and horror by the Bram Stoker Award–winning, New York Times–bestselling author of Ararat. A circus clown willing to give anything to be funny. A spectral gunslinger who must teach a young boy to defend the ones he loves. A lonely widower making a farewell tour of the places that meant the world to his late wife. A faded Hollywood actress out to deprive her ex-husband of his prize possession. These are just some of the characters to be found in Tell My Sorrows to the Stones, a remarkable collection of short fiction by one of today’s literary masters of darkness. “Some of my editor friends tell me that horror fiction is finally starting to make a comeback. If that’s true, writers like Christopher Golden are a big part of the reason.” —George R. R. Martin
The one unmissable SF collection Widely regarded as the essential book for every science fiction fan, The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 18 continues to uphold its standard of excellence with more than two dozen stories from the previous year. This year's volume includes not just a host of established masters, but also many bright young talents of science fiction. It embrace every aspect of the genre - soft, hard, cyberpunk, cyber noir, anthropological, military and adventure. Plus the usual thorough summations of the year and a recommended reading list.