Recently in Science Fiction Category

Inclination

By William Shunn

Release date: 26 May 2020

Nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Awards

“Outstanding. . . . It’s a fascinating future, and Jude’s personal story is involving.”

Jude Plane is not your typical teenage boy, even among the other kids in his cloistered religious enclave. He belongs to the Machinist Guild, a group that forbids the use of any technology more advanced than a doorknob. But advanced technology can be hard to avoid when you live in an overlooked corner of Netherview Station—a giant wheel in space, twelve light-years from Earth.

Jude wants to live an obedient life, whatever that means, but his resolve is put to the test when his abusive father sends him to work outside the enclave, unloading freight at the station’s hub. There Jude will make friends stranger than any he has ever known and will find himself confronted by choices he never imagined. But will he solve the biggest mystery of all—the mystery of who he is?

“An intelligent, well-crafted piece. . . . Shunn’s elaborate details about the religious rules and philosophies of this group form thought-provoking parallels with some of today’s funda­men­talist religious groups. It would not surprise me if this tale eventually finds a place in someone’s year’s best science fiction anthology.”

“A well-considered examination of a basic SF concern: the clash of differing technological levels, and how this (especially now) can cause the lower-tech culture to retreat into funda­men­talism. . . . Shunn gets a lot of good satirical digs in, and a contemporary dilemma is penetratingly illuminated.”

An Alternate History of the 21st Century

Stories

By William Shunn

Release date: 3 September 2019

“William Shunn is one of those SF writers who, because they specialize in short fiction, are not given quite the recognition they deserve—no novels, no mass-market publication, so only the plaudits of the cognoscenti of the short form. Yet Shunn is a fine writer; ingenious, stylish, closely in touch with current global trends and expert in producing thought-provoking near-future SF, and at last he has a collection to show off that keen ability . . . including two impressive original novelettes.”

A presidential inauguration in a fascist America eerily similar to our own. A man who broadcasts his every sense and emotion to a national audience. A space station unequipped to deal with alien visitors. Welcome to an off-kilter 21st century as only Hugo and Nebula Award nominee William Shunn could envision it.

From time travel to nanoterrorism, Los Angeles to Lagrange Point 2, the six stories in this collection—originally published by Spilt Milk Press in 2007—span not just the length of a century but the breadth of a unique and provocative imagination. Step inside, settle in, and discover a world that’s always surprising but never unfamiliar. Discover the 21st century.

“[These stories] tellingly and concisely ironize the clichés and tropes of genre SF, but without destroying their use as toolkit.”

“[William Shunn] has the sure instincts of a twenty-first century science fiction writer. He is keenly attuned to the present (in the twenty-first century, there’s no point keeping track of the future). He recognizes those truly present-day moments that could only come now, today, in this futuristic present that we swim through without ever really seeing. This extraordinary book is a journey through our present. From the bitingly political (‘From Our Point of View We Had Moved to the Left’) to the sad and personal (‘Not of This Fold’—a gorgeous novella about faith and humanity that could only have been written by a lapsed Mormon sf writer), and everything in between, this collection is the kind of thing that you can never unread, a book that will awaken you to the present all around you.”

Our Dependence on Foreign Keys

By William Shunn

Release date: 2 May 2017

“Shunn is a fine writer; ingenious, stylish, closely in touch with current global trends and expert in producing thought-provoking near-future SF.”

When high-tech partycrashers swarm his exclusive soirée high above the floodways of New York City, billionaire inventor Pell Franziskaner can’t be sure whether it’s a garden-variety annoyance or a prelude to murder. His own.

Environment, economics, and augmented reality collide in this novelette of reputation, revenge, and artificial intelligences so advanced they run directly on the fabric of spacetime.

The Revivalist

By Perry Slaughter

Release date: 11 August 2015

America as we know it is no more.

Forty years ago, a military experiment in nanotechnology ran amok, wiping out most of North America and rendering it an uninhabitable plain of silvery goo. To set one foot in that silent tide is to suffer immediate disassembly into one’s constituent molecules. But against all odds, the town of Wellington, Nevada, has held off the threat, thanks mostly to the presence of Carl McFarland, one of the scientists responsible for the disaster. Now an old man, Carl is largely ignored by the townspeople of Wellington, with the exception of his avid student Orrin Pritchard.

But when a wagon train appears on the horizon, somehow crossing the silver tide without harm, all that will change. What miracles do these strangers bring? What news from the world beyond? And how is it that their charismatic leader, Pastor Smith, can raise the dead with the touch of his hand? Is Carl once again the only person standing between Wellington and a great tide of evil—or is he himself now the town’s greatest threat?

Whether We Are Mended

Three Love Stories

By Perry Slaughter

Release date: 16 June 2015

Perry Slaughter’s work has been called “dismayingly sexist” and “what you might get if Philip K. Dick and Chuck Palahniuk raised a special-needs baby.” His characters, grappling as they do with issues of manhood and violence, are not what one would generally regard as romantics, and yet here, in a run of remarkable stories penned in the late ’80s, he gives us romance as only he could—or would.

In settings ranging from Earth to distant planets to parallel worlds, with characters running the gamut from human to cyborg to alien, Perry Slaughter shows us love (or its analogues) in all its dirty, wretched, heartfelt squalor. With his characteristic energy and peculiar style, he shakes us by the lapels and shouts that romance is a thing of bloody science fiction.

Deus ex Machina

By Perry Slaughter

Release date: 16 December 2014

With the computer called ARTHUR, Cliff Peabody has made a major breakthrough in artificial intelligence. It should be the most triumphant event of his professional career—but why, then, is the federal government invading his laboratories? Why is half the country suffering an inexplicable power outage? And, most disturbing of all, why is reality itself going haywire in the vicinity of Cliff’s office?

To answer these questions, Cliff will need to sacrifice everything—and everybody—that has ever been precious to him. And even then, there’s no guarantee that he’ll like what he learns. Especially when it points to the overthrow of the Creator of the universe itself...

First published in samizdat form in 1985, this rollicking, inventive, and blasphemous sci-fi adventure heralded the emergence of Perry Slaughter as a force to be reckoned with in American letters. Nearly three decades later, Deus ex Machina still retains its power to shock, astound, and entertain.