Download or read book The Postutopian Adventures of Darger and Surplus written by Michael Swanwick and published by . This book was released on 2020-04-30 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This entertaining volume collects Swanwick's tales of his recurring roguish con artists (who previously appeared in the novel Chasing the Phoenix) and their exploits in a neo-Victorian, postapocalyptic future. Throughout, melancholy human Darger and passionate Surplus, a bioengineered humanoid canine, blithely get themselves into and out of predicaments with sanguine ease in a future in which most technological science has regressed, while the biological sciences have progressed in often terrifying ways." -- Publishers Weekly
Download or read book Dancing with Bears written by Michael Swanwick and published by Night Shade. This book was released on 2011-05-01 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Michael Swanwick—The Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy award- winning author of Stations of the Tide—delivers a stunning "Postutopian" novel of swashbuckling adventure, dangerous women, and genocidal AIs. Dancing with Bears follows the adventures of notorious con men Darger and Surplus: They've lied and cheated their way onto the caravan that is delivering a priceless gift from the Caliph of Baghdad to the Duke of Muscovy. The only thing harder than the journey to Muscovy is their arrival in Muscovy. An audience with the duke seems impossible to obtain, and Darger and Surplus quickly become entangled in a morass of deceit and revolution. The only thing more dangerous than the convoluted political web surrounding Darger and Surplus is the gift itself, the Pearls of Byzantium, and Zoësophia, the governess sworn to protect their virtue. This steampunk-esque adventure explores the great game of espionage and empire building, from the point of view of the world’s most accomplished con men, Darger and Surplus.
Download or read book Chasing the Phoenix written by Michael Swanwick and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2015-08-11 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Darger and Surplus, a human and a genetically engineered dog with human intelligence who walks upright, are a pair of con men and the heroes of a series of prior Swanwick stories. They travel to what was once China and invent a scam to become rich and powerful: pretending to have limited superpowers, they aid an ambitious local warlord who dreams of conquest and once again reuniting China under one ruler. And, against all odds, it begins to work--but it seems as if there are other forces at work behind the scenes.
Download or read book The Iron Dragon s Daughter written by Michael Swanwick and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2016-05-31 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Notable Book: “Combining cyberpunk’s grit with dystopic fantasy, this iconoclastic hybrid is a standout piece of storytelling” (Library Journal). Jane is trapped as a changeling in an industrialized Faerie ruled by aristocratic high elves and populated by ogres, dwarves, night-gaunts, and hags. She is the only human in a factory where underage forced labor builds cybernetic, magical dragons that are weaponized and sent off to war. When the damaged dragon Melanchthon tempts Jane with promises of freedom, the stage is set for a daring escape that will shake the foundations of existence. Combining alchemy and technology, a coming-of-age story like no other, The Iron Dragon’s Daughter takes place against a dystopic mindscape of dark challenges and class struggles that force Jane to make costly decisions at every turn. A finalist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel, and the 1994 Locus Award, The Iron Dragon’s Daughter a is one-of-a-kind melding of grimdark fantasy and cyberpunk grit from the Nebula Award–winning author of Stations of the Tide. It engages the reader in a nihilistic world in which nothing is as it seems and everything comes at a steep and often horrific price.
Download or read book The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021 written by John Joseph Adams and published by Mariner Books. This book was released on 2021-10-12 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The best science fiction and fantasy stories of 2021, selected by series editor John Joseph Adams and guest editor Veronica Roth. This year's selection of science fiction and fantasy stories, chosen by series editor John Joseph Adams and bestselling author of the Divergent series Veronica Roth, showcases a crop of authors that are willing to experiment and tantalize readers with new takes on classic themes and by exchanging the ordinary for the avant-garde. Folktales and lore come alive, the dead rise, the depths of space are traversed, and magic threads itself through singular moments of love and loss, illuminating the circulatory nature of life, death, the in-between, and the hereafter. The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021 captures the all-too-real cataclysm of human nature, claiming its place in the series with compelling prose, lyrical composition, and curiosity's never-ending pursuit of discovering the unknown.
Download or read book The Year s Best Science Fiction Vol 2 written by Jonathan Strahan and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-09-28 with total page 624 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most celebrated science fiction short story editor of our time, multi-award-winning editor and Locus Magazine critic Jonathan Strahan presents the definitive collection of best short science fiction of 2020. With short works from some of the most lauded science fiction authors, as well as rising stars, this science fiction collection displays the top talent and cutting-edge cultural moments that affect our lives, dreams, and stories. These brilliant authors examine the way we live now, our hopes, and struggles, all through the lens of the future. An assemblage of future classics, this star-studded anthology is a must-read for anyone who enjoys the vast and exciting world of science fiction.
Download or read book The Dog Said Bow Wow written by Michael Swanwick and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of sixteen stories from the Hugo-winner features such situations as time-traveling dinosaurs wreaking havoc on a quiet town in Vermont to a locked room murder of an ogre.
Download or read book Live Without a Net written by Lou Anders and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2003-07-01 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Imagine a future without cyberspace or without the Web or virtual reality. What would happen in an alternate Information Age? What would you do? What would you fear? What wouldn’t you know? Today’s top masters of speculative fiction offer visions of futures near and far, of alternative histories, and journeys down roads not taken. What does await us at the end of a different tunnel? What would we find in dimensions where the inevitable vastness of cyberspace has been replaced by things surprising and strange? Welcome to science fiction unplugged, and set free to be. Live Without a Net contains works by such standout science fiction authors as Lou Anders, John Grant, Matthew Sturges, and many more!
Download or read book Tales of Old Earth written by Michael Swanwick and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2016-05-31 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of nineteen short stories from the Nebula and Hugo Award–winning author of The Iron Dragon’s Daughter and Stations of the Tide Written over the course of a decade, Tales from Old Earth contains nineteen masterful pieces of short fiction—including the Hugo Award–winning stories “The Very Pulse of the Machine” and “Scherzo with Tyrannosaur;” the World Fantasy Award–winning novella “Radio Waves;” Hugo Award finalists “The Dead,” “Radiant Doors,” and “Wild Minds;” and World Fantasy Award finalist “The Changeling’s Tale”—as well as an introduction by Bruce Sterling. From pure fantasy to hard science fiction, this finely crafted collection from one of the greatest science fiction writers of his generation promises to stretch readers’ minds far beyond ordinary limits. These tales are guaranteed to delight and are an excellent introduction to this highly praised author.
Download or read book Not So Much Said the Cat written by Michael Swanwick and published by Tachyon Publications. This book was released on 2016-07-18 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The master of literary science fiction returns with this dazzling new collection. Michael Swanwick takes us on a whirlwind journey across the globe and across time and space, where magic and science exist in possibilities that are not of this world. These tales are intimate in their telling, galactic in their scope, and delightfully sesquipedalian in their verbiage. Join the caravan through Swanwick's worlds and into the playground of his mind. Travel from Norway to Russia and America to Ancient Gehenna. Discover a calculus problem that rocks the ages and robots who both nurture and kill. Meet a magical horse who protects the innocent, a semi-repentant troll, a savvy teenager who takes on the Devil, and time travelers from the Mesozoic who party till the end of time...
Download or read book Jack Faust written by Michael Swanwick and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2016-05-31 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An alternate-history reimagining of the Faust legend from the Nebula Award–winning author of Stations of the Tide Taking as his canvas the classic tale of the temptation of Faust—made famous by such literary luminaries as Goethe, Marlowe, and Mann—author Michael Swanwick paints a fresh vision of the dangers posed by the pursuit of knowledge. Set in Old World Germany, this tale of science and damnation begins with the great scholar Dr. Johannes Faust burning his books, having concluded that all his knowledge is nothing compared to the vast sea of ignorance surrounding him. Out of his despair, he inadvertently summons the tempter spirit, Mephistopheles, who is the projection of a dying alien race determined to make the destruction of humankind its final deed. Their weapon is knowledge—of science and technology, the mechanics of flight, the nature of the atom, and the secrets of economics. When, in an act of defiance, Faust nails the Periodic Table of the Elements to a church door in Wittenberg, he ushers in a golden age of prosperity for Germany that will make him the most powerful man in the world. But the love of the beautiful Margarete will be his downfall. What happens when the greed for knowledge and glory goes unchecked? Has a demon ever made a bad deal yet? Nominated for the Hugo Award, the Locus Award, and the British Science Fiction Award, Jack Faust is a masterful retelling of legend by one of science fiction’s finest craftsmen.
Download or read book In the Drift written by Michael Swanwick and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2016-05-31 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The “shocking [and] powerful” classic of postapocalyptic terror by the Nebula Award–winning author of The Iron Dragon’s Daughter (New York Daily News). It’s been one hundred years since Three Mile Island went into full meltdown, filling the atmosphere with a radioactive poison that would contaminate the skies for hundreds of generations. Since then, the area around the island—now known as the Drift—has been a wasteland of disease and deformity, madness and monsters. It’s been one hundred years since humanity knew what order and hope were. The Drift has a law unto itself—one of vampires and mutants and outcasts left to struggle for daily survival. Within its bounds, the simplest act—even asking the wrong questions—can mean death. Or worse. Praised by George R. R. Martin as “a potent new myth from the reality of radioactive waste,” In the Drift is an inventive and unsettling look at the lives of those who are left to deal with the fallout of a nuclear disaster—a towering work of postapocalyptic fiction that provokes conversation and consideration even as it produces nightmares.
Download or read book City Under the Stars written by Gardner Dozois and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2020-08-25 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: City Under the Stars completes a journey undertaken by Gardner Dozois and Michael Swanwick 25 years ago, when they published the novella The City of God. Over two decades later, the two realized there was more to the story, and began the work of expanding it. Now, after Gardner Dozois' tragic passing, the story can be told in full. God was in his Heaven—which was fifteen miles away, due east. Far in Earth's future, in a post-utopian hell-hole, Hanson works ten solid back-breaking hours a day, shoveling endless mountains of coal, within sight of the iridescent wall that separates what’s left of humanity from their gods. One day, after a tragedy of his own making, Hanson leaves the city, not knowing what he will do, or how he will survive in the wilderness without work. He finds himself drawn to the wall, to the elusive promise of God. And when the impossible happens, he steps through, into the city beyond. The impossible was only the beginning. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Download or read book The Best of Greg Egan written by Greg Egan and published by Gollancz. This book was released on 2021-03-18 with total page 736 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Greg Egan is arguably Australia's greatest living science fiction writer. In a career spanning more than thirty years, he has produced a steady stream of novels and stories that address a wide range of scientific and philosophical concerns: artificial intelligence, higher mathematics, science vs religion, the nature of consciousness, and the impact of technology on the human personality. All these ideas and more find their way into this generous and illuminating collection, the clear product of a man who is both a master storyteller and a rigorous, exploratory thinker. The Best of Greg Egan contains twenty stories and novellas arranged in chronological order, and each of them is a brilliantly conceived, painstakingly developed gem, including the Hugo Award-winning novella "Oceanic", a powerful account of a boy whose deeply held religious beliefs are undermined by what he comes to learn about the laws of the physical world. This book really does represent the best of Greg Egan, and it therefore takes its place among the best of contemporary SF. Startling, intelligent and always hugely entertaining, it provides an ideal introduction to one of the most accomplished and original writers working today. This is an important and provocative collection, and it deserves a place on the serious science fiction reader's permanent shelf.
Download or read book Vacuum Flowers written by Michael Swanwick and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2016-05-31 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A cyberpunk thriller from Nebula Award winner Michael Swanwick that explores bioengineering, wetware, and the riddle of personality Rebel Elizabeth Mudlark is a recorded personality owned by corporate giant Deutsche Nakasone. When Rebel’s personality is uploaded to persona tester Eucrasia Walsh and burned into her brain, Rebel escapes the corporation and takes off across an exotically transformed solar system, hijacking Eucrasia’s body and becoming the most wanted fugitive in existence. A fast-paced technological thriller, Vacuum Flowers allows the reader to consider the implications of bioengineering while providing an entertaining and dynamic story. Reminiscent of the innovative work of Philip K. Dick, William Gibson, and Bruce Sterling, this high-tech work of science fiction carves out a niche all its own with themes as relevant today as when it was first published.
Download or read book The Dragons of Babel written by Michael Swanwick and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2008-01-08 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fantasy masterpiece from a five-time Hugo Award winner! A war-dragon of Babel crashes in the idyllic fields of a post-industrialized Faerie and, dragging himself into the nearest village, declares himself king and makes young Will his lieutenant. Nightly, he crawls inside the young fey's brain to get a measure of what his subjects think. Forced out of his village, Will travels with female centaur soldiers, witnesses the violent clash of giants, and acquires a surrogate daughter, Esme, who has no knowledge of the past and may be immortal. Evacuated to the Tower of Babel -- infinitely high, infinitely vulgar, very much like New York City -- Will meets the confidence trickster Nat Whilk. Inside the Dread Tower, Will becomes a hero to the homeless living in the tunnels under the city, rises as an underling to a politician, and meets his one true love–a high-elven woman he dare not aspire to. You've heard of hard SF: This is hard fantasy from a master of the form.
Download or read book The Book of Lost Saints written by Daniel José Older and published by Feiwel & Friends. This book was released on 2022-02-22 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Book of Lost Saints is an evocative multigenerational Cuban-American family story of revolution, loss, and family bonds from New York Times-bestselling author Daniel José Older. Marisol vanished during the Cuban Revolution, disappearing with hardly a trace. Now, shaped by atrocities long-forgotten, her tenacious spirit visits her nephew, Ramón, in modern-day New Jersey. Her hope: that her presence will prompt him to unearth their painful family history. Ramón launches a haphazard investigation into the story of his ancestor, unaware of the forces driving him on his search. Along the way, he falls in love, faces a run-in with a murderous gangster, and uncovers the lives of the lost saints who helped Marisol during her imprisonment. Uplifting and evocative, The Book of Lost Saints is a haunting meditation on family, forgiveness, and the violent struggle to be free. An Imprint Book
