By Jason Werbeloff First Published: 2015 11 mind-bending sci-fi shorts. 1 must-read anthology. Your brain will never be the same again. Jason Werbeloff’s short stories have been downloaded over 20,000 times. Obsidian Worlds brings together 11 of his best sci-fi shorts into a mind-bending philosophical anthology. In Your Averaged Joe, a man’s headache is large enough to hold the multiverse. Q46F is an obsessive-compulsive android…
By Jason Werbeloff First Published: 2019 Welcome to the Bubble … DO NOT adjust your smart-glasses. Make sure your phase modulator is strapped on tight. And try not to soil your intelli-clothing. Become a bloodthirsty android obsessed with The Bold and the Beautiful. Meet a desperate father who trades his daughter’s health on the stock market. Marry your lover, and merge your body with hers.…
By Ian McDonald First Published: 2007 A collection of eight stories, “Cyberabad Days” is a triumphant return to the India of 2047 (the India of River of Gods); a new, muscular superpower in an age of artificial intelligences, climate-change induced drought, strange new genders, and genetically improved children. Featured Stories: • America is Not the Only Planet (2009) essay by Paul McAuley • Sanjeev and…
By D.L. Young First Published: 2015 Rating: Excellent Eleven gripping tales explore the near-future impacts of advanced robotics, artificial intelligence, automated warfare, and genetic engineering. The award-winning story The Reader, Training the Fundies, and the title work Juarez Square envision an anarchic, cutthroat existence along the US-Mexico border. In Ximena, a defiantly unconventional woman opens a robot brothel in Madrid. The Gianni Box tells the…
By Peter Watts First Published: 1994 Combining complex science with skillfully executed prose, these edgy, award-winning tales explore the shifting border between the known and the alien. The beauty and peril of technology and the passion and penalties of conviction merge in narratives that are by turns dark, satiric, and introspective. Among these bold storylines: a seemingly humanized monster from John Carpenter’s The Thing reveals the true…
By Jeff Noon First Published: 1998 Rating: Classic. ‘”In the first shop they bought a packet of dogseed, because Doreen had always wanted to grow her own dog…” Pixel Juice is the collected outpourings of an overactive mind. A selection of fifty stories from Jeff Noon’s head, each one strange, telling, disturbing, or sometimes just plain weird. From the breakdown zones of the mediasphere and…
By William Gibson First Published: 1977-1985 Rating: Classic. Ten tales, from the computer-enhanced hustlers of Johnny Mnemonic to the techno-fetishist blues of Burning Chrome. Featured Stories: • Johnny Mnemonic (1981) • The Gernsback Continuum (1981) • Fragments of a Hologram Rose (1977) • The Belonging Kind (1981) with John Shirley • Hinterlands (1981) • Red Star, Winter Orbit (1983) with Bruce Sterling • New Rose…
By Pat Cadigan First Published: 1989 This is a book of science fiction – without galactic fleets or plucky scientists’ daughters; a book of fantasies – without elves, barbarians or wizards; a book of horror – without clichéd mad slashers in hockey masks. If one must categorize this collection by Pat Cadigan, then the inevitable conclusion would be that Patterns is a book about people,…
By George Alec Effinger First Published: 1972-1988 Long identified as a science fiction writer, except in his own eyes, George Alec Effinger had some of his biggest critical and commercial success with a series even he recognized and characterized as SF. Set in the marvelously realized, imaginary Muslim city of Budayeen, the three novels, When Gravity Fails, A Fire in the Sun and The Exile…
By John Shirley First Published: 1989 Rating: Excellent. “Darkness can be divided. It can be split like an atom, and in it can be found a destructive fire—or light. Light, too, can be folded into darkness.” The stories brought to light in John Shirley’s stunning DARKNESS DIVIDED — most of them never before collected, some written especially for this book–are presented in two sections: one…