By Chris Moriarty First Published: 2006 In this stunning follow-up to the critically acclaimed novel Spin State, Chris Moriarty depicts a grim future in which the final frontier may well be extinction. For as far-flung planets are terraformed and Earth’s age-old conflicts are contracted out to AIs, humanity is losing the only war that counts: the war for survival. Call Arkady a clone with a…
By Chris Moriarty First Published: 2003 UN Peacekeeper Major Catherine Li has made thirty-seven faster-than-light jumps in her lifetime—and has probably forgotten more than most people remember. But that’s what backup hard drives are for. And Li should know; she’s been hacking her memory for fifteen years in order to pass as human. But no memory upgrade can prepare Li for what she finds on…
By Jason Werbeloff First Published: 2014 What if you could reprint yourself young, healthy, and brilliant? In 2249, 3D printers are capable of scanning and printing humans. Life on Earth becomes overpopulated, bullet-paced, and stressed. Thankfully, Solace Inc has the solution: a pill which slows the user’s perception of time, and blots out the interminable busy-ness of the world. But Anders, a quiet anarchist who…
By Jason Werbeloff First Published: 2019 A hundred thousand clones. In one room. On a journey to the stars… Crushing dread wakes Aven each morning. Will today be the day? Will he be dragged to phase four, frog marched to the Pulper, and blended so his body can be used to create another? Is today Aven’s last? Each day is the same torture. Until They…
By Marianne De Pierres First Published: 2004 Rating: Excellent. The Tert–a toxic strip of humanity outside the city limits–is no longer big enough for bodyguard Parrish Plessis and her sadistic boss, Jamon Mondo. So with Mondo’s dingoboys on her tail, Parrish cuts a deal with a rival gang lord to steal some files that could send Mondo to death row. At the same time, she’s…
By Rudy Rucker First Published: 2000 It’s 2054, and Phil Gottner doesn’t know where his life is. His girlfriend is hooked on merge, a drug used in “bacteria-style” sex. His father has just been swallowed by a hyperspatial anomaly that materialized from a piece of art designed to project images of four-dimensional objects into three-dimensional space. Then, at the funeral, Phil meets and falls in…
By Charles Platt First Published: 1991 What is the price of immortality? On the track of high-tech black-market weapons, FBI Agent James Bayley has stumbled on a top-secret project called LifeScan. A renegade team of government scientist, sponsored by an aging billionaire, has found a way to store the human mind inside a computer. Those scanned will be immortals, freed from the weaknesses of human…
By William Gibson First Published: 1984 Rating: Cultural Masterpiece. “The Matrix is a world within the world, a global consensus-hallucination, the representation of every byte of data in cyberspace…” Henry Dorsett Case was the sharpest data-thief in the business, until he crossed the wrong people–his own employer. They crippled his nervous system with a wartime neurotoxin, keeping him from ever jacking into cyberspace ever again.…
By Walter Jon Williams First Published: 1986 Rating: Very Good. Steward is a Beta—a clone. In his memories, he’s an elite commando for an Orbital Policorp— but because his Alpha never did a brain-scan update, Steward’s memories are fifteen years out of date…and in those fifteen years, everything has changed. An interstellar war destroyed the company that held his allegiance. His wife has divorced him,…
By Rudy Rucker First Published: 1988 In 2030, bopper robots in their lunar refuge have founds a way to infuse DNA wetware with their own software code. The result is a new lifeform: the meatbop. Fair is fair, after all. Humans built the boppers, now bops are building humans. . .sort of. Its all part of an insidious plot that is about to ensnare Della…
By Emily Devenport First Published: 1994 Rating: Good, but hampered by excessive sex. She’s a sexy, hard-boiled, ex-prostitute with the face of a goddess, sculpted double-E breasts, and a brilliant mind to match. She’s Scorpianne, and she’s caught in a high-stakes game of cutting-edge technology and interstellar warfare that has her determined to unravel deadly secrets of illegal biotech research.
Editors: Jeffrey Thomas First Published: 2005 It is a jungle of blue vegetation, on a world in another dimension. Here, over a decade earlier, Earth’s Colonial Forces battled against the blue-skinned Ha Jiin people, in order to help support the autonomy of the Jin Haa people. Now, an attempt to grow an apartment village from an organic material has strangely led to the Earth colony…
Editors: Jeffrey Thomas First Published: 2005 Punktown is considered by many critics and readers to be one of the new classics of SF short story collections. In the nightmarish city they call Punktown, on a planet where countless sentient species collide, you can become a creator of clones. You can become a piece of performance art. You might even become a library of sorrows. All…
Editors: Jeffrey Thomas First Published: 2012 Now, in PUNKTOWN: SHADES OF GREY — a brand new collection of stories — Jeffrey Thomas is joined by brother Scott Thomas in giving voices to the citizens of this futuristic urban hell. In its dangerously alluring streets, you will meet: extra-dimensional monsters, murderous aliens, vampiric mutants, coffee-loving robots, confused clones, and war vets looking for one last, bloody…
By JT Nicholas First Published: 2020 Out on a salvage mission with a skeleton crew, Carter Langston is murdered by animated corpses left behind on this ship. Yet in this future, everyone’s consciousness backup can be safely downloaded into a brand-new body, and all you’d lose are the memories of what happened between your last backup and your death. But when Langston wakes up in…
By James Tiptree, Jr: First Published: 1974 Rating: Classic. James Tiptree, Jr. (aka Alice Sheldon) is primarily renowned for her short fiction, but this piece, which won the Hugo for best novella in 1974, is also top-notch. It imagines a future completely ruled by corporations, where advertising is illegal, because life is advertising—companies use celebrities and product placement to sell their wares. Philadelphia (“P.”) Burke…
By Roger Zelazny First Published: 1969 It is long after the death of Earth. A band of men and women on a colony planet has gained control of technology. With it, they have given themselves immortality and godlike powers, and they rule their world as the gods of the Hindu pantheon: Kali, Goddess of Destruction; Yama, Lord of Death; Krishna, God of Lust. All are…