From science to speculation and beyond—Spectacular Fiction offers the best stimulating writing for this world...and all the others.
TVA BABY TERRY BISSON
“Bisson’s work is a fresh, imaginative attempt to confront some of the problems of our time. It is the Bissons of the field upon whom the future of science fiction depends.” —Washington Post
Beginning with a harrowing, high-speed ride through the Upper South (a TVA baby is a good ol’ boy with a Yankee father and a 12-gauge) and ending in a desperate search through New Orleans’ graveyards for Darwin’s doomsday machine (“Charlie’s Angels”), Bisson’s newest collection of short stories covers all the territory between—from his droll faux-FAQ’s done for Britain’s Science magazine, to the most seductive of his Playboy fantasies (“Private Eye”), to an eerie dreamlike evocation of the 9/11 that might have been (“A Perfect Day”). On the way we meet up with Somali Pirates, a perfect-crime appliance (via PayPal), and a visitor from Atlantis who just wants a burger with fries, please. Readers who like cigarettes, lost continents, cars, lingerie, or the Future will be delighted. For those who don’t, there’s always Reality TV. APR 2011
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978-1-60486-405-2
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$14.95 •
5X8
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192 PAGES
• SCIENCE FICTION
FIRE ON THE MOUNTAIN
TERRY BISSON • INTRODUCTION BY MUMIA ABU-JAMAL “One of the best alternate histories I’ve read.” —Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing
fiction
It’s 1959 in socialist Virginia. The Deep South is an independent Black nation called Nova Africa. The second Mars expedition is about to touch down on the red planet. And a pregnant scientist is climbing the Blue Ridge in search of her great-great grandfather, a teenage slave who fought with John Brown and Harriet Tubman’s guerrilla army. Fire on the Mountain is the story of what might have happened if John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry had succeeded and the Civil War had been started not by the slave owners but the abolitionists. ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Terry Bisson, who was for many years a Kentuckian living in New York City, is now a New Yorker living in California. In addition to science fiction, he has written biographies of Mumia Abu-Jamal and Nat Turner. He is also the host of a popular San Francisco reading series (SFinSF) and the editor of PM’s Outspoken Authors pocketbook series. OCT 2009
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978-1-60486-087-0
SENSATION NICK MAMATAS
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$15.95 •
5X8
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176 PAGES
• SCIENCE FICTION
“…the sharpest, funniest, most insightful, and political purveyor of post-pulp pleasures going. Mamatas is the People’s Commissar of Awesome.” —China Miéville, award-winning author of Kraken and The City & the City
Love. Politics. Parasitic manipulation. Julia Hernandez left her husband, shot a real-estate developer out to gentrify Brooklyn, and then vanished without a trace. Well, perhaps one or two traces were left... With different personal and consumption habits, Julia has slipped out of the world she knew and into the Simulacrum—a place between the cracks of our existence from which human history is both guided and thwarted by the conflict between a species of anarchist wasps and a collective of hyperintelligent spiders. When Julia’s ex-husband Raymond spots her in a grocery store he doesn’t usually patronize, he’s drawn into an underworld of radical political gestures and Internet organizing looking to overthrow a world it knows nothing about— and Julia is the new media sensation of both this world and the Simulacrum. Told ultimately from the collective point of view of another species, Sensation plays with the elements of the Simulacrum we all already live in: media reports, business-speak, blog entries, text messages, psychological evaluation forms, and the always fraught and deceitful lies lovers tell one another. MAY 2011
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978-1-60486-354-3
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$14.95 •
5X8
• PAPERBACK •
224 PAGES
• SCIENCE FICTION
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