A collection of Science Fiction and variations thereupon the genre. I rather loathe the same old ALIEN movie / Star Wars high fantasy rip offs, so you won't find that here. I confess I'm not a frequent scifi reader, so if you have recs I have an open mind for them.
It begins in Toronto, in the years after the smart drug revolution. Any high school student with a chemjet and internet connection can download recipes and print drugs, or invent them. A seventeen-year-old street girl finds God through a new brain-altering drug called Numinous, used as a sacrament by a new Church that preys on the underclass. But she is arrested and put into detention, and without the drug, commits suicide.
Lyda Rose, another patient in that detention facility, has a dark secret: she was one of the original scientists who developed the drug. With the help of an ex-government agent and an imaginary, drug-induced doctor, Lyda sets out to find the other three survivors of the five who made the Numinous in a quest to set things right.
A mind-bending and violent chase across Canada and the US, Daryl's Afterparty is a last chance to save civilization, or die trying.
War is coming, but no one knows who the enemy is.
In an ungoverned portion of the world after, three communities are on edge. Ruthless, damaged, and dangerous, Cadoc and Zade become reluctant allies to stay alive long enough to keep old promises and get the truth. The questions they ask get answers they weren't prepared for, but lust, attraction, and new types of love trump their fears and spark new hope.
Arlo Thorne might be the name most feared, but he's not the only threat.
A stalker who speaks in riddles.
A germaphobe living in a dirty world.
A madman with bloody hands.
Three leaders at war.
Cadoc and Zade have ties to them all.
Who will come out the other side and who is the real enemy?
Alter Arlo is an MM dark romance with psychological themes, a dystopian setting, and adult content. Check the warning at the beginning of the book. Standalone novel.
Told in the manner of scientific reports, this collection of science fiction stories explores the allegorical overtones about the precariousness of species. Biogenesis and Other Stories collects five stories by Tatsuaki Ishiguro.In Biogenesis, two professors research the rare winged mouse and how the genetic makeup of the creatures pointed to their eventual extinction. The discover that upon mating, both the male and female of the species died. The professors try to clone the winged mice without success, so they breed the remaining pair in captivity, noting the procedure, which includes a vibration of the creatures' wings, what appeared to be kissing, and the shedding of tears--composed of the same substance as their blood--until their eventual death.
This version includes two additional stories.
Table of Contents
“It is with the Deepest Sincerity that I Offer Prayers …”
Snow Woman
Midwinter Weed
The Hope Shore Sea Squirt
Swine Hill was full of the dead. Their ghosts were thickest near the abandoned downtown, where so many of the town's hopes had died generation by generation. They lingered in the places that mattered to them, and people avoided those streets, locked those doors, stopped going into those rooms . . . They could hurt you. Worse, they could change you.
Jane is haunted. Since she was a child, she has carried a ghost girl that feeds on the secrets and fears of everyone around her, whispering to Jane what they are thinking and feeling, even when she doesn't want to know.
Henry, Jane's brother, is ridden by a genius ghost that forces him to build strange and dangerous machines. Their mother is possessed by a lonely spirit that burns anyone she touches. In Swine Hill, a place of defeat and depletion, there are more dead than living. When new arrivals begin scoring precious jobs at the last factory in town, both the living and the dead are furious.
This insult on the end of a long economic decline sparks a conflagration. Buffeted by rage on all sides, Jane must find a way to save her haunted family and escape the town before it kills them.
A breakthrough in human cloning becomes one woman's waking nightmare in a mind-bending thriller by the Wall Street Journal bestselling author of the Gibson Vaughn series.
In the near future, advances in medicine and quantum computing make human cloning a reality. For the wealthy, cheating death is the ultimate luxury. To anticloning militants, it's an abomination against nature. For young Constance “Con” D'Arcy, who was gifted her own clone by her late aunt, it's terrifying.
After a routine monthly upload of her consciousness--stored for that inevitable transition--something goes wrong. When Con wakes up in the clinic, it's eighteen months later. Her recent memories are missing. Her original, she's told, is dead. If that's true, what does that make her?
The secrets of Con's disorienting new life are buried deep. So are those of how and why she died. To uncover the truth, Con is retracing the last days she can recall, crossing paths with a detective who's just as curious. On the run, she needs someone she can trust. Because only one thing has become clear: Con is being marked for murder--all over again.
About the Author
Matthew FitzSimmons is the author of the Wall Street Journal bestselling Gibson Vaughn series, which includes Origami Man , Debris Line , Cold Harbor , Poisonfeather , and The Short Drop. Born in Illinois and raised in London, he now lives in Washington, DC, where he taught English literature and theater at a private high school for more than a decade. For more information, visit him at www.matthewfitzsimmons.com.
A young girl and her father take a desperate pilgrimage through a blasted post-apocalyptic Mojave Desert to the Holy City of Las Vegas in this vivid and uncanny tale of outsiders in a dangerous world.
An unknown devastation has swept across the United States, a sickness causes the dead to flower and sprout fruit, and the promise of miracles draws pilgrims from all over to the Holy City of Las Vegas.
Magdala and her father flee their home in the Sonora Desert, setting out across the wasteland in search of a cure for her disability. As they pass through blasted cities and ruined towns, they are forced to join with a group of survivors making their own pilgrimage.
But the road to Las Vegas is filled with danger, strange cults occupying the wreckage of towns, and uncanny stuffed men roaming the desert.
As a strange sickness begins to take hold, the band of survivors grows ever thinner, and months turn to years. Magdala finds herself placing her trust in the most unlikely of places, and the closer she gets to her holy destination, the further from salvation she seems.
Louise Erdrich, the New York Times bestselling, National Book Award-winning author of LaRose and The Round House, paints a startling portrait of a young woman fighting for her life and her unborn child against oppressive forces that manifest in the wake of a cataclysmic event.
The world as we know it is ending. Evolution has reversed itself, affecting every living creature on earth. Science cannot stop the world from running backwards, as woman after woman gives birth to infants that appear to be primitive species of humans. Twenty-six-year-old Cedar Hawk Songmaker, adopted daughter of a pair of big-hearted, open-minded Minneapolis liberals, is as disturbed and uncertain as the rest of America around her. But for Cedar, this change is profound and deeply personal. She is four months pregnant.
Though she wants to tell the adoptive parents who raised her from infancy, Cedar first feels compelled to find her birth mother, Mary Potts, an Ojibwe living on the reservation, to understand both her and her baby's origins. As Cedar goes back to her own biological beginnings, society around her begins to disintegrate, fueled by a swelling panic about the end of humanity.
There are rumors of martial law, of Congress confining pregnant women. Of a registry, and rewards for those who turn these wanted women in. Flickering through the chaos are signs of increasing repression: a shaken Cedar witnesses a family wrenched apart when police violently drag a mother from her husband and child in a parking lot. The streets of her neighborhood have been renamed with Bible verses. A stranger answers the phone when she calls her adoptive parents, who have vanished without a trace. It will take all Cedar has to avoid the prying eyes of potential informants and keep her baby safe.
A chilling dystopian novel both provocative and prescient, Future Home of the Living God is a startlingly original work from one of our most acclaimed writers: a moving meditation on female agency, self-determination, biology, and natural rights that speaks to the troubling changes of our time.
A group of employees and their CEO, celebrating the sale of their remarkable emotion-mapping-AI-algorithm, crash onto a not-quite-deserted tropical island.
Luckily, those who survived have found a beautiful, fully-stocked private palace, with all the latest technological updates (though one without connection to the outside world). The house, however, has more secrets than anyone might have guessed, and a much darker reason for having been built and left behind.
Kristen, the hyper-competent "chief emotional manager" (a position created by her eccentric, boyish billionaire boss, Sumter) is trying to keep her colleagues stable throughout this new challenge, but staying sane seems to be as much of a challenge as staying alive.
Being a woman in tech has always meant having to be smarter than anyone expects--and Kristen's knack for out-of-the-box problem-solving and quick thinking has gotten her to the top of her field. But will a killer instinct be enough to survive the island?
A gleefully decadent near future whodunit from Madeline Ashby, the acclaimed futurist and author of Company Town--perfect for fans of Severance, The White Lotus, and Black Mirror.
What if you could enter the mind of the person you love the most? Enka meets Mathilde in art school and is instantly drawn to her. Mathilde makes art that feels truly original, and Enka--trying hard to prove herself in this fiercely competitive world--pours everything into their friendship. But when Mathilde's fame and success cause her to begin drifting away, Enka becomes desperate to keep her close. Enter SCAFFOLD. Purported to enhance empathy, this cutting-edge technology could allow Enka to inhabit Mathilde's mind and access her memories, artistic inspirations, and deep-seated trauma. Undergoing this procedure would link Enka and Mathilde forever. But at what cost? Blisteringly smart, thought-provoking, and shocking, Immaculate Conception offers us a portrait of close friendship--achingly tender and twisted--that captures the tenuous line between love and possession that will haunt you long after you turn the final page.
What if toxic pollutants traveled up the socioeconomic ladder rather than down it? A Black biochemist provides an answer in this wildly original novel of pollution, poison, and dark pleasure
In Atlanta, Kenny Bomar is a biochemist-turned-coffee-shop-owner in denial about his divorce and grieving his stillborn daughter. Chemicals killed their child, leaching from a type of plant the government is hiding in Black neighborhoods. Kenny's coping mechanisms are likewise chemical and becoming more baroque--from daily injections of lethal snake venom to manufacturing designer drugs. As his grief turns corrosive, it taints every person he touches.
Black epidemiologists Retta and Ebonee are called to the scene when a mysterious black substance is found to have killed a high school girl. Investigating these “blackouts” sends the women down separate paths of blame and retribution as two seemingly disparate narratives converge in a cinematic conclusion.
Liquid Snakes is an immersive, white-knuckle ride with the spookiness of speculative fiction and the propulsion of binge-worthy shows like FX's Atlanta and HBO's Random Acts of Flyness. Transfiguring a whodunit plot into a labyrinthine reinterpretation of a crime procedural, Stephen Kearse offers an uncanny commentary on an alternative world, poisoned.
An electrifying novel set in deep space and perfect for fans of science fiction and horror, Paradise-1 follows two agents from the United Earth Government as they investigate the complete disappearance of humanity's first deep space colony. When Special Agent Petrov and Dr. Lei Zhang are woken up from cryogenic sleep, dragged freezing and dripping wet out of their pods with the ships's alarms blaring in the background, they know something is very wrong.
Warned by the Captain that they're under attack, they have no choice but to investigate. It doesn't take much time to learn that they've been met by another vessel -- a vessel from Paradis-One, Earth's first deep-space colony, and their final destination. Worse still, the vessel is empty. And it carries with it the message that all communications from the 150,000 souls inhabiting the Paradis-One has completely ceased.
Petrov and Zhang must board the empty ship and delve further into deep space to discover the truth of the colony's disappearance -- but the further they go, the more dangers loom.
In 2034, the stars went out. Riots and religions break out after an unknown agency surrounds the solar system with an impenetrable barrier, now leaving the universe in darkness. While some see this act as revenge from God, others see it as protection. The only thing known is that for now and forever, Earth and the universe shall never be connected again.
Or so it seems.
In 2067, PI Nick Stavrianos is hired to investigate the disappearance of Laura, a mentally disabled woman. The trail leads him to the Republic of New Hong Kong, where an organization known as the Ensemble has uncovered Laura's secret and the only possible way she could have escaped from the institution: her ability to walk through walls. It's up to Nick not only to find out what the Ensemble plans to do with Laura, but also--if he can--to get her before her powers transform the world. Will it be for good or bad? That's the question Nick has to answer.
From the mind of Hugo Award-winning author Greg Egan, Quarantine is a tour de force of hard science fiction that will grip you from the first page and not let go. Originally published more than twenty years ago, Quarantine is now back in print and available to readers again.
A scavenger robot wanders in the wasteland created by a war that has destroyed humanity in this evocative post-apocalyptic "robot western" from the critically acclaimed author, screenwriter, and noted film critic.
It's been thirty years since the apocalypse and fifteen years since the murder of the last human being at the hands of robots. Humankind is extinct. Every man, woman, and child has been liquidated by a global uprising devised by the very machines humans designed and built to serve them. Most of the world is controlled by an OWI--One World Intelligence--the shared consciousness of millions of robots, uploaded into one huge mainframe brain. But not all robots are willing to cede their individuality--their personality--for the sake of a greater, stronger, higher power. These intrepid resisters are outcasts; solo machines wandering among various underground outposts who have formed into an unruly civilization of rogue AIs in the wasteland that was once our world.
One of these resisters is Brittle, a scavenger robot trying to keep a deteriorating mind and body functional in a world that has lost all meaning. Although unable to experience emotions like a human, Brittle is haunted by the terrible crimes the robot population perpetrated on humanity. As Brittle roams the Sea of Rust, a large swath of territory that was once the Midwest, the loner robot slowly comes to terms with horrifyingly raw and vivid memories--and nearly unbearable guilt.
Sea of Rust is both a harsh story of survival and an optimistic adventure. A vividly imagined portrayal of ultimate destruction and desperate tenacity, it boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, yet where a humanlike AI strives to find purpose among the ruins.
Whatever this is, it started when Nicholas Slopen came back from the dead. In a locked ward of a notorious psychiatric hospital sits a man who insists that he is Dr. Nicholas Slopen, failed husband and impoverished Samuel Johnson scholar. Slopen has been dead for months, yet nothing can make this man change his story. What begins as a tale of apparent forgery involving unknown letters by the great Dr. Johnson grows to encompass a conspiracy between a Silicon Valley mogul and his Russian allies to exploit the darkest secret of Soviet technology: the Malevin Procedure. With echoes of Jorge Luis Borges and Philip K. Dick, Marcel Theroux's Strange Bodies takes the reader on a dizzying speculative journey that poses questions about identity, authenticity, and what it means to be truly human.
An epic debut novel about a lovelorn eighteenth-century Russian noble, cursed with longevity and an immunity to cold, whose quest for the truth behind his condition spans two thrilling centuries and a stunning array of historical events.
The Empress Anna Ioannovna has issued her latest eccentric order: construct a palace out of ice blocks. Inside its walls her slaves build a wedding chamber, a canopy bed on a dais, heavy drapes cascading to the floor--all made of ice. Sealed inside are a disgraced nobleman and a deformed female jester. On the empress's command--for her entertainment--these two are to be married, the relationship consummated inside this frozen prison. In the morning, guards enter to find them half-dead. Nine months later, two boys are born.
Surrounded by servants and animals, Prince Alexander Velitzyn and his twin brother, Andrei, have an idyllic childhood on the family's large country estate. But as they approach manhood, stark differences coalesce. Andrei is daring and ambitious; Alexander is tentative and adrift. One frigid winter night on the road between St. Petersburg and Moscow, as he flees his army post, Alexander comes to a horrifying revelation: his body is immune to cold.
J. M. Sidorova's boldly original and genrebending novel takes readers from the grisly fields of the Napoleonic Wars to the blazing heat of Afghanistan, from the outer reaches of Siberia to the cacophonous streets of nineteenth-century Paris. The adventures of its protagonist, Prince Alexander Velitzyn--on a lifelong quest for the truth behind his strange physiology--will span three continents and two centuries and bring him into contact with an incredible range of real historical figures, from Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, to the licentious Russian empress Elizaveta and Arctic explorer Joseph Billings.
A novella set in post-climate disaster Alberta; a woman infected with a mysterious parasite must choose whether to pursue a rare opportunity far from home or stay and help rebuild her community
The world is nothing like it once was: climate disasters have wracked the continent, causing food shortages, ending industry, and leaving little behind. Then came Cad, mysterious mind-altering fungi that invade the bodies of the now scattered citizenry. Reid, a young woman who carries this parasite, has been given a chance to get away -- to move to one of the last remnants of pre-disaster society -- but she can't bring herself to abandon her mother and the community that relies on her.
When she's offered a coveted place on a dangerous and profitable mission, she jumps at the opportunity to set her family up for life, but how can Reid ask people to put their trust in her when she can't even trust her own mind?
With keen insight and biting prose, Premee Mohamed delivers a deeply personal tale in this post-apocalyptic hopepunk novella that reflects on the meaning of community and asks what we owe to those who have lifted us up.
A public murder televised live and across the world prompts filmmakers Seth and Charlotte to trace the threads of blood to the rich and powerful, and the horror of global destruction. Can they stop the Gaia Chime?
Charlotte, seeking to make a documentary for her graduate thesis enlists the older Seth, a burned-out film teacher with a history of scandal, to film the daily life of a rising tennis star, Bobby Weller. It's a glimpse into the world of the rich and dedicated that turns horrifying when Bobby murders both his parents on live TV. It's patricide, an echo of Zeus rising up against Cronos, the young gods replacing the titans. Now, the very public slaughter prompts the filmmakers to trace the threads of blood to the rich and powerful and the horror of global destruction. Can they stop the Gaia Chime? First, they need to find out what it is.
A mesmerizing tale of a gambling house whose deadly games of chance and skill control the fate of empires.Everyone has heard of the Gameshouse. But few know all its secrets. . .It is the place where fortunes can be made and lost through chess, backgammon -- every game under the sun.
But those whom fortune favors may be invited to compete in the higher league. . . a league where the games played are of politics and empires, of economics and kings. It is a league where Capture the Castle involves real castles, where hide and seek takes place on the scale of a continent.Among those worthy of competing in the higher league, three unusually talented contestants play for the highest stakes of all. . .
Claire North is pseudonym used by Catherine Webb, a pseudonym for an acclaimed author who has previously published several novels in different genres.
The rule is simple: don't bleed.
For as long as Molly Southbourne can remember, she's been watching herself die. Whenever she bleeds, another molly is born, identical to her in every way and intent on her destruction.
Molly knows every way to kill herself, but she also knows that as long as she survives she'll be hunted. No matter how well she follows the rules, eventually the mollys will find her. Can Molly find a way to stop the tide of blood, or will she meet her end at the hand of a girl who looks just like her?
My name is Hope Arden, and you won't know who I am. But we've met before-a thousand times.
It started when I was sixteen years old.
A father forgetting to drive me to school. A mother setting the table for three, not four. A friend who looks at me and sees a stranger.
No matter what I do, the words I say, the crimes I commit, you will never remember who I am.
That makes my life difficult. It also makes me dangerous.
The Sudden Appearance of Hope is the tale of a girl no one remembers, yet her story will stay with you forever.
Claire North is a pseudonym used by Catherine Webb, an acclaimed author who has previously published several novels in different genres.
Eva is a survivor. She's not sure what she survived, exactly, only that They invaded without warning, killed nearly all of humanity, and relentlessly attack everyone who's left. All she can do to stay sane, in the blockaded city that's no longer home, is keep a journal about her struggle. Fifty years later, Eva's words are found by Emerson, a young anthropologist sent to the ruins to study what happened. The discovery could shed light on the Invasion, turning the unyielding mystery of the short war into a story of hope and defiance.
The Time-Ball Tower of Tempuston houses the worst criminals in history. Given the option of the death penalty or eternal life, they chose eternal life. They have a long time to regret that choice. Phillipa Muskett is a newly chosen for the Tower duties, meant to play warden and caretaker. But a deeper, darker mystery lies behind those walls. Who deserves punishment, and what punishment could ever be justified?
Tower is a series of interconnected stories set in Beanstalk, a 674-story skyscraper and sovereign nation. Each story deals with how citizens living in the hypermodern high-rise deal with various influences of power in their lives: a group of researchers have to tell their boss that a major powerbroker is a dog, a woman uses the power of the internet to rescue a downed fighter pilot abandoned by the government, and an out-of-towner finds himself in charge of training a gentle elephant to break up protests. Bae explores the forces that shape modern life with wit and a sly wink at the reader.
This psychological sci-fi thriller from a debut author follows one doctor who must discover the source of her crew's madness... or risk succumbing to it herself.
Misanthropic psychologist Dr. Grace Park is placed on the Deucalion, a survey ship headed to an icy planet in an unexplored galaxy. Her purpose is to observe the thirteen human crew members aboard the ship--all specialists in their own fields--as they assess the colonization potential of the planet, Eos. But frictions develop as Park befriends the androids of the ship, preferring their company over the baffling complexity of humans, while the rest of the crew treats them with suspicion and even outright hostility.
Shortly after landing, the crew finds themselves trapped on the ship by a radiation storm, with no means of communication or escape until it passes--and that's when things begin to fall apart. Park's patients are falling prey to waking nightmares of helpless, tongueless insanity. The androids are behaving strangely. There are no windows aboard the ship. Paranoia is closing in, and soon Park is forced to confront the fact that nothing--neither her crew, nor their mission, nor the mysterious Eos itself--is as it seems.