Infinite Fantastika


Book Description

Twelve short stories of speculative fiction from “an author who genuinely comes close to defying all attempts at description. A true original” (Infinity Plus). Enter the boundless realms of science fiction, fantasy, horror, the weird, the surreal, and the absurd with a dozen stories from acclaimed author Paul Di Filippo. Watch as a man tries to adapt when his intense connection with instinct and nature vanishes in “Before and After Science,” a long-lost story that appeared in a fanzine decades ago. Enjoy the flash fiction of “Domotica Berserker!” in which massive house printers get hacked and go on a rampage—painting the town pink. Get a glimpse of how LARPing and nowts (aka now-tweakers) don’t mix in “A Faster, Deeper Now.” And delve into the Lovecraftian mythos with “The Horror at Gancio Rosso,” in which retired New York City crimefighter Joseph Petrosino travels to Sicily to investigate new bodies appearing in a catacomb filled with ancient mummies. This mind-blowing collection is “an example of what makes Di Filippo, Di Filippo. Best part: it throws the taxonomy of genre out the window to be creative in a number of ways” (Speculiction). Praise for Paul Di Filippo “Di Filippo is like gourmet potato chips to me. I can never eat just one of his stories.” —Harlan Ellison “Di Filippo is the spin doctor of SF—and it is a powerful medicine he brews.” —Brian Aldiss, Hugo Award–winning author of Hothouse “Vibrant, nervy, and full of gloriously wiggy language, Ribofunk is anything but the same old stuff.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer




Vangie’s Ghosts


Book Description

Paul Di Filippo delivers a thrilling and thought provoking adventure through the multiverse in Vangie’s Ghosts, a compelling science fiction novel about one girl with extraordinary powers. Three-year-old Vangie is mute and unresponsive. She shows no interest in the people or world around her, much to the frustration of her callous foster parents. Little do they know, Vangie is otherwise occupied observing “ghosts”—an infinite number of versions of herself, in an infinite number of parallel universes. When a tornado hits their trailer and Vangie is severely injured, she makes a desperate leap into another timeline where she survives the tornado, but her foster parents do not. So begins a life of shuttling through various foster homes, cultivating her abilities to seek out alternate timelines, and making jumps calculated to better her circumstances in order to avoid the exploitation of adults who seek to harness her powers for their own means. Vangie never communicates with her avatars, until one day the “Council”—a group of Vangies—appear to her and warn her of an ominous, growing threat in the multiverse: a man they call the Massive. And thus begins an epic conflict, spanning millennia and worlds, in a brutal effort to control the fate of the multiverse. Vangie’s Ghosts is Paul Di Filippo at the height of his imagination and versatility, filled with compelling characters who play captivating roles in a story where the stakes are nothing less than existence itself.




Rambunctious


Book Description

From the award-winning author of Alien Morning, nine science fiction/fantasy stories of everyday people grappling extraordinary circumstances. Witness seemingly ordinary people as they confront their fears and embrace their challenges on a near-future Earth or an alternate-history past or even on a far distant alien world . . . - A single dad of a daughter with Down-syndrome considers what his life and career might have been as a parent and a pro football player in some alternate reality. - A young girl on an isolated Florida island discovers that her quirky grandparents are even stranger than she thought. - A high-school basketball player confronts the ghosts of her past. - A young woman struggles to make peace with the horrors of her forgotten childhood. - An elderly woman slides into dementia even as she finds some essential truths that were lost in the hazy mists of her memory. - A baseball player becomes a spy during an alternate-history version of World War II, where he plays a pivotal role in stopping the Nazi war machine. A powerful and poignant collection of memorable stories from an award-winning storyteller, Rambunctious: Nine Tales of Determination is charming, action-packed, frightening, and thoughtful by turn. Praise for Rambunctious “A major collection from what it's high past time to admit is one of our major writers. Wilber writes with literate flair, compassion, and a deep understanding of human psychology. Highly recommended!” —Robert J. Sawyer, Hugo Award–winning author of The Oppenheimer Alternative “Wilber draws you in through his compassion for his characters and his keen eye for the familiar, and then he slips you sideways into places startlingly new, beautiful, and true. You finish these stories entertained, to be sure, but moved as well, and with your perspective forever widened.” —Gregory Norman Bossert, World Fantasy Award–winning author “Wilber’s voice [has] a kind of authority and compassion that have helped him carve out a niche identifiably his own.” —Locus




The Summer Thieves


Book Description

A masterful, witty, picaresque science fiction adventure story evoking the styles of Gene Wolfe and Jack Vance, The Summer Thieves is the first novel in the new Quinary series by noted author and reviewer Paul Di Filippo. He chased his dreams of the ideal summer across a galaxy of thieves . . . Far in the glorious interstellar future, a time of riches and complex technologies, the stern but utilitarian Quinary guards and regulates the flourishing human-colonized galaxy. Under their business-like rule, a family may own a whole planet. And so two bloodlines—the Corvivios clan and the Soldavere clan—are in full possession of the lush and benign world of Verano. The youngest members of each family—Johrun Corvivios and Minka Soldavere—are slated to wed. All looks rosy for the joint family enterprises. But then the happy future is dramatically and tragically overturned! Circumstances separate the lovers and rob them of their places in the galaxy, and Johrun must undertake a desperate quest across the stars to reclaim his birthright. At first aided only by his devoted chimeric helper, the canny Lutramella, Johrun will face a thousand deadly challenges, from malign magicians to haughty outlaws. As his character is matured in fire, his dedication to Verano and his determination to return increase, and his group of friends and allies becomes stronger . . . but will the precious Summer Planet, and his bride-to-be, even be the same when—and if—he returns?




Rhapsody


Book Description

Acclaimed author and critic Hal Duncan turns his analytic eye towards the development and current state of speculative fiction in American and English writing in the pages of Rhapsody. Duncan's trademark wry humor and suffer-no-fools approach to critiquing the genre will make this book more than a resource for students of the field--anyone who enjoys reading tales of the fantastical and strange can find Duncan's insight worthwhile to read again and again.




Pardon This Intrusion


Book Description

Pardon This Intrusion gathers together 47 pieces by John Clute, some written as long ago as 1985, though most are recent. The addresses and essays in Part One, "Fantastika in the World Storm", all written in the twenty-first century, reflect upon the dynamic relationship between fantastika - an umbrella term Clute uses to describe science fiction, horror and fantasy - and the world we live in now. Of these pieces, "Next", a contemporary response to 9/11, has not been revised; everything else in Part One has been reworked, sometimes extensively. Parts Two, Three and Four include essays and author studies and introductions to particular works; as they are mostly recent, Clute has felt free to rework them where necessary. The few early pieces - including "Lunch with AJ and the WOMBATS", a response to the Scientology scandal at the Brighton WorldCon in 1987 - are unchanged.




Foundations of Science Fiction


Book Description

This important contribution to the study of science fiction explores the origins of the basic literary traditions of the genre. Thematic, rather than chronological, organization sets this work apart from previous analyses. The entire range of literary invention within science fiction is explored from its earliest beginnings through the past hundred years of serious development. Emphasis is on enabling the reader to perceive the evolution of science fiction as an organic whole, rather than a mere accumulation of works linked solely by popular publishing trends.




Infinity Reborn


Book Description

Finn is the only one capable of foiling her father's apocalyptic schemes, but she's being held captive--not only physically but also by the dark secrets and darker impulses within her own fractured mind.




Stay


Book Description

Stay gathers together 100,000 words of reviews, plus short fiction by John Clute, and was originally published to coincide with Loncon3 (the 2014 World Science Fiction Convention) at which he was one of the Guests of Honour. Also included is a complete reprint of the text of The Darkening Garden.




Unstuck in Time


Book Description

Today's Russia, Unstuck in Time suggests, is a nation of time travelers, living either in memories of the Great Patriotic War and a society that provided for all its citizens or in an alternative future in which the USSR never collapsed. Eliot Borenstein examines the ways in which films, fiction, television, social media, political parties, and even theme parks use the conventions of time travel and alternate history to fantasize about narratives that are more appealing than the post-Soviet present. Unstuck in Time explores the centrality of an uncannily persistent USSR in the post-Soviet cultural imagination through deeply engaged and entertaining readings of an impressive array of texts: fantasies in which characters time-crash into the Soviet past, fictions of triumphant far-future Soviet societies, and real-life enterprises feeding the belief that the Soviet Union never ended. Whether channeled into benign nostalgia or dangerous mythmaking, the cases that Borenstein analyzes reveal the extent to which the psychic shock of the end of the Soviet Union left Russians adrift, caught between a past many still long for and a future few can imagine.