John Kessel

John Kessel, one of the most visionary writers in the field, has created a rich matriarchal utopia, set in the near future on the moon, a society that is flawed by love and sex, and on the brink of a destructive civil war. In the middle of the twenty-second century, over three million people live in underground cities below the moon’s surface. One city-state, the Society of Cousins, is a matriarchy, where men are supported in any career choice, but no right to vote—and tensions are beginning to flare as outside political intrigues increase. After participating in a rebellion that caused his mother’s death, Erno has been exiled from the Society of Cousins. Now, he is living in the Society’s rival colony, Persepolis, when he meets Amestris, the defiant daughter of the richest man on the moon. Mira, a rebellious loner in the Society, creates graffiti videos that challenge the Society’s political domination. She is hopelessly in love with Carey, the exemplar of male privilege. An Olympic champion in low-gravity martial arts and known as the most popular bedmate in the Society, Carey’s more suited to being a boyfriend than a parent, even as he tries to gain custody of his teenage son. When the Organization of Lunar States sends a team to investigate the condition of men in the Society, Erno sees an opportunity to get rich, Amestris senses an opportunity to escape from her family, Mira has a chance for social change, and Carey can finally become independent of the matriarchy that considers him a perpetual adolescent. But when Society secrets are revealed, the first moon war erupts, and everyone must decide what is truly worth fighting for.

The Moon and the Other

James Patrick Kelly

Following the rapid evolution of cyberpunk from Bruce Sterling and William Gibson into the current millennium, this vivid anthology welcomes a new generation of exciting writers to take the genre in new and unexpected directions. Cyberpunk freewheels with punk rock energy, careening between the internet, bioengineering, and international politics, its influence saturating entertainment and the mass media. Drawing on the traditions of the pioneering cyberpunk manifesto, Mirrorshades, each story delves into the gritty world of technological change. Legendary Mirrorshades editor and contributor Bruce Sterling is back, alongside such cutting-edge writers as Cory Doctorow, Jonathan Lethem, Gwyneth Jones, Hal Duncan, Charles Stross, and Pat Cadigan. With a daring introduction from James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel, editors of the controversial Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology, this collection is an exhilarating snapshot of a vibrant literary movement.

The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology

Rewired

“Dark and gripping and tense and beautiful.” —Karen Joy Fowler, New York Times bestselling author of The Jane Austen Book Club and Pulitzer Prize finalist for We Are All Completely Besides Ourselves Pride and Prejudice meets Frankenstein as Mary Bennet falls for the enigmatic Victor Frankenstein and befriends his monstrous Creature in this clever fusion of two popular classics. Threatened with destruction unless he fashions a wife for his Creature, Victor Frankenstein travels to England where he meets Mary and Kitty Bennet, the remaining unmarried sisters of the Bennet family from Pride and Prejudice. As Mary and Victor become increasingly attracted to each other, the Creature looks on impatiently, waiting for his bride. But where will Victor find a female body from which to create the monster’s mate? Meanwhile, the awkward Mary hopes that Victor will save her from approaching spinsterhood while wondering what dark secret he is keeping from her. Pride and Prometheus fuses the gothic horror of Mary Shelley with the Regency romance of Jane Austen in an exciting novel that combines two age-old stories in a fresh and startling way.

Pride and Prometheus

This ingeniously conceived anthology raises the intriguing question, If Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow had won the Nebula award in 1973, would the future distinction between literary fiction and science fiction have been erased? Exploring the possibility of an alternate history of speculative fiction, this literary collection reveals that the lines between genres have already been obscured. Don DeLillo's ?Human Moments in World War III” follows the strange detachment of two astronauts who are orbiting in a skylab while a third world war rages on earth. ?The Ziggurat” by Gene Wolfe traverses a dissolving marriage, a custody dispute, and the visit of time travelers from the future. T. C. Boyle's ?Descent of Man” is the subversively funny tale of a man who suspects that his primatologist lover is having an affair with one of her charges. In ?Schwarzschild Radius,” Connie Willis draws an allegorical parallel between the horrors of trench warfare and the speculative physics of black holes. Artfully crafted and offering a wealth of esteemed authors?from writers within the genre to those normally associated with mainstream fiction, as well as those with a crossover reputation?this volume aptly demonstrates that great science fiction appears in many guises.

The Secret History of Science Fiction

Presents a collection of science fiction tales on the topic of slipstream by such authors as Michael Chabon, George Saunders, Karen Joy Fowler, and Carol Emschwiller.

The Slipstream Anthology

Feeling Very Strange

"Pride and Prometheus," a story in The Baum Plan for Financial Independence involving characters from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, is winner of the 2008 Nebula award for Best Novelette. A long-awaited collection of fourteen stories that intersect imaginatively with Pride and Prejudice, Frankenstein, The Wizard of Oz, and Flannery O'Connor. Kessel, whose story "A Clean Escape" was filmed as part of ABC's Masters of Science Fiction, ranges through genres with a lean, graceful style that incorporates everything from future autobiography, alternate history, phone sex, perpetual motion, and his modern classic sequence of four stories about life on the moon. The hardcover edition includes a parallel universe reversible dustjacket. "In his first collection in a decade, Kessel jumps from place to place like a jolty time machine. In "Pride and Prometheus," Frankenstein and Jane Austen intersect in an uncanny Victorian tale of unrequited love, while "A Lunar Quartet" introduces a matriarchal, hypersexual moon colony in the future. But as a group, these stories offer a sustained exploration of the ways gender dynamics can both empower and enslave us. Kessel's wit sparkles throughout, peaking with the most uproariously weird phone-sex conversation you'll ever read ("The Red Phone")." A- --Entertainment Weekly "Anyone who thinks genre writing can't be literary deserves to have Kessel's hefty new collection of stories dropped on his or her head." --Time Out Chicago "Dark, wacky, wide-ranging short stories." --Charlotte Observer "A pleasant callback to the days when science-fiction authors read more than just science fiction." --The Seattle Stranger "Kessel's blend of dark humor and reality-stretching scenarios is consistently mesmerizing." --Booklist "These well-crafted stories, full of elegantly drawn characters, deliver a powerful emotional punch." --Publishers Weekly "Kessel proves himself again a master not just of science fiction, but also of the modern short story, crafting compelling characters and following them through plots that never fail to please--or to defy prediction." --Metro Magazine "One of the best collections of the year." --Locus "Kessel is a deft stylist and a master of all his tools, whose range is nearly limitless." --SciFi.com "John Kessel's writing exists at the edge of things, in the dark corner where the fiction section abuts the science-fiction shelves, in the hyphen where magic meets realism. Reading Kessel's wonderful fabulations is like staying out too late partying and seeing strange angels while stumbling home in the dawn's first light. This is one of those too rare short story collections that you can recommend with confidence to both the literary snob and the hard-core computer geek." --Rich Rennicks, Malaprop's Bookstore, Asheville, NC "Invest. Invest now.... Your returns will be multitudinous." --The Fix John Kessel co-directs the creative writing program at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. A winner of the Nebula, Sturgeon, Locus, and Tiptree awards, his books include Good News from Outer Space, Corrupting Dr. Nice, and The Pure Product, and story collection, Meeting in Infinity (a New York Times Notable Book). Most recently, with James Patrick Kelly he edited the anthologies Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology, Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology, and The Secret History of Science Fiction. He lives in Raleigh, North Carolina.

The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories

In 1998, a reporter for a tabloid suspects that the aliens the highly successful Reverend Jimmy-Don Gilray predicts will arrive to usher in the Millennium have already arrived

Good News from Outer Space

Corrupting Dr. Nice

After receiving the Nebula Award in 1983 for his stunning nouvelle "Another Orphan, " John Kessel has written a group of stories that for sheer imaginative audacity defy conventional classification. In "The Pure Product" an amoral time-traveler embarks upon a harrowing joyride through the Midwest; "The Big Dream" is a 1920s hardboiled detective thriller in the Los Angeles of Raymond Chandler; while Faustfeathers" involves a head-on collision between Christopher Marlowe and the Marx Brothers. Dark visions both satiric and tragic, from the author of Good News from Outer Space: "The Pure Product, " "Mrs Schummel Exits A Winner, " "The Big Dream, " "The Lecturer, " "Hearts Do Not in Eyes Shine, " "Faustfeathers, " "A Clean Escape, " "Not Responsible! Park and Lock It!, " "Man, " "Invaders, " "Judgment Call, " "Buddha Nostril Bird, " "Another Orphan, " and "Buffalo."

Allegories & Extrapolations

Meeting in Infinity

Mark L. Van Name

Richard Butner

A collection of superb science fiction stories offers works by the writers who were invited in 1994 to attend the prestigious Sycamore Hills Writers' Conference, including Robert Frazier, Carol Emshwiller, Gregory Frost, and Bruce Sterling, among others.

The Sycamore Hill Anthology

Intersections

A selection of fiction and nonfiction traces the path of the Singularity, an era when advances in technology will totally transform human reality, and features stories and essays by H. G. Wells, Elizabeth Bear, Ray Kurzweil, Justina Robson, Cory Doctorow and many more. Original.

The Singularity Anthology

Digital Rapture

Mary Robinette Kowal

Elizabeth Bear

Nancy Kress

Michael Swanwick

Robert Reed

Each year, members of the World Science Fiction Convention vote for the science fiction and fantasy works they love the most: the Hugo Awards. Now, for the first time in more than a decade, you can find these treasured gems within a single volume. The Hugo Award Showcase collects the stories-by rising stars like Kij Johnson, beloved taleslingers like Michael Swanwick, and literary legends like Nancy Kress-that have captured the hearts and imaginations of some of the genre's most dedicated readers.

2010 volume

The Hugo Award Showcase

Stories for Men

Margaret Maron

Kelly Starling Lyons

Scott Huler

Elaine Neil Orr

Angela Davis-Gardner

G.D. Gearino

David Rigsbee

Bridgette A. Lacy

Andrea Weigl

27 VIEWS of RALEIGH: The City of Oaks in Prose & Poetry features the work of twenty-seven (plus two) Raleighites who create a literary montage of North Carolina's capital city in fiction, essays, and poetry. Novelists, poets, essayists, journalists, and even a science fiction writer capture the city in a variety of genres—spanning neighborhoods, generations, cultural and racial experiences, historic eras—reflecting the social, historic, and creative fabric of Raleigh. As Wilton Barnhardt writes in the book's introduction, “We seem to have flourished not because we have solved all the problems of the New South, despite leading the way now and again, but because we the citizens of Raleigh decided to be erudite, cultured, enriched, and entertained . . ."

The City of Oaks in Prose & Poetry

27 Views of Raleigh

Singularity

Peter Watts

Jay Lake

Robert Charles Wilson

Paul McAuley

Steven Gould

Sarah Monette

Ian Creasey

Sara Genge

A collection of the “best of the best” science fiction stories published in 2009 by current and emerging masters of the genre. In “Erosion,” by Ian Creasey, a man tests the limits of his exo-suit prior to leaving a dying Earth. In “As Women Fight,” by Sara Genge, a hunter, in a society of body-switchers, has no time to train for a fight to inhabit his wife’s body. In “A Story, with Beans,” by Steven Gould, the role of religion in a dystopian future plagued with metal-eating bugs is considered. In “Events Preceding the Helvetican Renaissance,” by John Kessel, a monk, in the far future, steals the only copy of a set of plays from a repressive regime and uses this loot to free his people. In “On the Human Plan,” by Jay Lake, a mysterious alien visits a far-future, dying Earth in search of the death of Death. Set in the Jackaroo sequence, “Crimes and Glory,” by Paul McAuley, a detective chases a thief to recover alien technology that both aliens and humanity are desperate to recover. Set in the Lovecraftian “Boojum” universe, “Mongoose” by Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear, a vermin hunter and his tentacled assistant come on board a space station to hunt toves and raths. In “Before My Last Breath,” by Robert Reed, a geologist discovers a strange fossil in a coal mine that leads to the discovery of a peculiar graveyard. In the Hugo Award winning novelette “The Island,” by Peter Watts, a woman on a spaceship must decide whether to place a stargate near an alien society that will ultimately destroy it. Finally, “This Peaceable Land; or, The Unbearable Vision of Harriet Beecher Stowe,” by Robert Charles Wilson, is an alternate American Civil War history in which the war was never fought, slavery gradually disappeared, and Uncle Tom’s Cabin was never published.

The Year's Top Ten Tales of Science Fiction 2

Dystopic and comedic, this anthology explores top fiction from generations of writers and artists who have drawn inspiration from Franz Kafka's writings. The stories in this illuminating collection include Philip Roth's alternate history in which Kafka survived into the 1940s and emigrated to America; Jorge Luis Borges' bizarre lottery that develops into a mystical system; Carol Emshwiller's woman seeking to be accepted as officially male by a society of men; and Paul Di Filippo's hero who works as a magazine writer by day but is a costumed crime fighter by night. Rounding out the exceptional lineup is R. Crumb's humorous work, "A Hunger Artist" from Kafka for Beginners alongside a new English translation of the story itself. Each author also responds to the question Why Kafka? and discusses his writing, its relevance and relation to their own work, and his enduring legacy.

John Kessel

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