The city is a surreal landscape overrun by abducted strippers, nomadic artists, reluctant pornographers, subversive newspaper columnists, alienated movie critics, teenage hookers afraid of the rain, and legendary filmmakers who may or may not exist. Steve Erickson is the author of five novels and two works of nonfiction.

    In people's minds there was no actual event … and thus it could be followed by no period of shock or mourning. There could be no catharsis. Everyone was simply reset to zero."On day zero, humankind collectively lost its memory. The collapse of civilisation was as instantaneous as it was inevitable. For a man named Kayle Jenner, confined by a regime to a commune on a remote beach, all that remains is the vague and haunting vision of a son … That, and a wooden raft.It is a raft that will set Kayle on a journey across a broken world to find his son.Braving a landscape of elusive encounters, a maze of other people's dreams, and muddled memories, Kayle will discover more than just his lost past. He will discover the truth behind Day Zero – a truth that makes both fools and gods of men.

    But when you look around at the world as it stands you see Darfur, you see Somalia and the Congo, you see the modern slavery of indentured servitude, you see children sold into prostitution, you see millions starving, you see mindless wars, you see people you care about dying of Alzheimer's and children dying of cancer and millions of others trapped in schizophrenia or living lives of media-hypnotized desperation... And you know that it's only going to get worse. This can't go on; something has to change. What if you could change it? What if you could design your own Judgment Day? Not a Judgment Day based on childish interpretations of religion, on bias and cultural narrowness... What if you could design a Judgment Day, for the whole world--one that offers real Justice?What would it be like? In John Shirley's novel, THE OTHER END, a wave of light shatters the world's assumptions; human behavior takes a sudden unexpected turn. Swift, a newspaper reporter, has to find his missing daughter in a panicking world even as something from Every Where makes millions of people suddenly look inward. And looking inward, strangely, takes them outward again... And then come the Adjustors. Who are they? Where exactly are they from? They say they're not angels, or aliens... Then who are they? The usual End Timers offer one End of the World as We Know It... John Shirley's courageous, genuinely risky new novel offers the other end. The other end of the ideological spectrum; the other end of the world. Does it involve...aliens? No. Does it involve God? Not really--but then, it depends on your definition. John Shirley, the award-winning author of DEMONS, IN DARKNESS WAITING, CELLARS, A SPLENDID CHAOS, ECLIPSE, BLACK BUTTERFLIES, and so much more gives us a totally unexpected Judgment Day. Something is coming, to near-future Earth--to the whole world. Something is coming that will finally give the human race the chance it never had before...to bring it to THE OTHER END.

    For the American sociologist had uncovered a disturbing pattern of crimes that were unusual even in the rapidly deteriorating society of 1990s Britain.David had made a fortune creating highly addictive designer drugs. Sheila, alone and unarmed, had killed a Marine commando. Roger, a boarding school student, ran a sex-ring that catered to the most depraved tastes. All of their offenses went unpunished. And all of the criminals were barely fourteen years old.As Claudia's research turned up further cases, Peter realized they were on to much more than just a story. For these children were either the last hope for Mankind's survival...or the beginning of the end of what it meant to be human.

    Michael has everything; tall, handsome, and famous, he is worshipped by billions of fans around the globe. He is wealthy beyond measure, the heir apparent to RiverGroup, one of the handful of high-tech corporations that controls the world. He is fashionable, setting trends with his wardrobe of immaculate designer suits, each a unique and celebrated work of art. And Michael is in love, perfect love, sharing a private language based entirely on quotes from the latest fashion magazine advertisements, with Nora, his beautiful, witty, and equally perfect fianc

    Altho they have no bodies to move around with, they're free to mentally visit any of the other residents, & engage in all the emotional, intellectual & pseudo-sexual congress that they desire. This is the story of a projection of life in the 25th century. People have been reduced to Cerebromorphs--disembodied brains stored in tanks in huge Depositories & wired up to computers, memory files & mammoth study programmes. In the tanks they're supposed to pass thru various levels of understanding before they are liberated, implanted in hatchery-nurtured perfect bodies & sent back into a pastoral paradise flourishing outside. The novel follows a small group of these brains: that of a 12-year-old boy killed in an air crash; an ex-movie queen, fastidious, rich & lethal; a former Nigerian sculptor & the last of the great humanists.

    Because it takes a lifetime for each region of the planet to experience dawn, midday and dusk, the planet's population does not remember the catastrophes that occur as the sun moves across the sky - entire civilizations have been scorched into oblivion. The only people who remember the dangers of the past are the planet's "angels" - a people who have tried to preserve past technologies to save the planet. This action-filled story of a very strange planet showcases Duncan's remarkable ability to create unique worlds.

    Cultures collide in real life and virtual reality. The city is literally a weed, its growth left unchecked. Life is cheap, and data is cheaper.When Boris Chong returns to Tel Aviv from Mars, much has changed. Boris’s ex-lover is raising a strangely familiar child who can tap into the datastream of a mind with the touch of a finger. His cousin is infatuated with a robotnik—a damaged cyborg soldier who might as well be begging for parts. His father is terminally-ill with a multigenerational mind-plague. And a hunted data-vampire has followed Boris to where she is forbidden to return.Rising above them is Central Station, the interplanetary hub between all things: the constantly shifting Tel Aviv; a powerful virtual arena, and the space colonies where humanity has gone to escape the ravages of poverty and war. Everything is connected by the Others, powerful alien entities who, through the Conversation—a shifting, flowing stream of consciousness—are just the beginning of irrevocable change.At Central Station, humans and machines continue to adapt, thrive...and even evolve.

    A BodyBank computer system implanted in each citizen records their movements from moment to moment, and connects them to the audio-visual overlay of the ImmaNet, so that every inch of this cyber-dystopian metropolis crawls with information and shifting cinematic promotainment.Amon Kenzaki works as a Liquidator for the Global Action Transaction Authority. His job is to capture bankrupt citizens, remove their BodyBank, and banish them to BankDeath Camps where they are forever cut off from the action-transaction economy. Amon always plays by the rules and is steadily climbing the Liquidation Ministry ladder.With his savings accumulating and another promotion coming, everything seems to be going well, until he is asked to cash crash a charismatic politician and model citizen, and soon after is charged for an incredibly expensive action called “jubilee” that he is sure he never performed. To restore balance to his account, Amon must unravel the secret of jubilee, but quickly finds himself asking dangerous questions about the system to which he’s devoted his life, and the costly investigation only drags him closer and closer to the pit of bankruptcy.In book one of the Jubilee Cycle, Cash Crash Jubilee, debut novelist Eli K. P. William wields the incisive power of speculative fiction to show how, in a world of corporate finance run amok, one man will do everything for the sake of truth and justice.

    Dick—that unfolds in the near future, in parallel worlds.In his youth, Richard “Dodge” Forthrast founded Corporation 9592, a gaming company that made him a multibillionaire. Now in his middle years, Dodge appreciates his comfortable, unencumbered life, managing his myriad business interests, and spending time with his beloved niece Zula and her young daughter, Sophia. One beautiful autumn day, while he undergoes a routine medical procedure, something goes irrevocably wrong. Dodge is pronounced brain dead and put on life support, leaving his stunned family and close friends with difficult decisions. Long ago, when a much younger Dodge drew up his will, he directed that his body be given to a cryonics company now owned by enigmatic tech entrepreneur Elmo Shepherd. Legally bound to follow the directive despite their misgivings, Dodge’s family has his brain scanned and its data structures uploaded and stored in the cloud, until it can eventually be revived. In the coming years, technology allows Dodge’s brain to be turned back on. It is an achievement that is nothing less than the disruption of death itself. An eternal afterlife—the Bitworld—is created, in which humans continue to exist as digital souls. But this brave new immortal world is not the Utopia it might first seem . . . Fall, or Dodge in Hell is pure, unadulterated fun: a grand drama of analog and digital, man and machine, angels and demons, gods and followers, the finite and the eternal. In this exhilarating epic, Neal Stephenson raises profound existential questions and touches on the revolutionary breakthroughs that are transforming our future. Combining the technological, philosophical, and spiritual in one grand myth, he delivers a mind-blowing speculative literary saga for the modern age.

    In near-future Britain, this is more illegal than ever. The punishment for being caught three times is to cut off your entire household from the internet for a year - no work, school, health or money benefits.Trent thinks he is too clever for that to happen, but it does, and nearly destroys his family. Shamed and shattered, Trent runs away to London, where slowly he learns the ways of staying alive on the streets. He joins artists and activists fighting a new bill that will jail too many, especially minors, at one stroke. Jem introduces him to the Jammie Dodgers, beautiful brilliant "26" to love and cemetery parties.Things look bad. Parliament is in power of a few wealthy media conglomerates. But the powers-that-be haven’t entirely reckoned with the power of a gripping movie to change people’s minds ...

    Entire neighborhoods drown in mud, glass rains from the sky, birds speak gibberish, and parents of young children disappear. Millions starve while others grow coats of mold. But a few are able to survive and find a light in the aftermath, illuminating what we’ve become. In "The Disappeared", a father is arrested for missing free throws, leaving his son to search alone for his lost mother. A boy swells to fill his parents’ ransacked attic in "The Ruined Child". Rendered in a variety of narrative forms, from a psychedelic fable to a skewed insurance claim questionnaire, Blake Butler’s full-length fiction debut paints a gorgeously grotesque version of America, bringing to mind both Kelly Link and William H. Gass, yet imbued with Butler's own vision of the apocalyptic and bizarre.

    Not just any boy, but one she is certain she has met before.Only that's not possible.Gwyn lives in the last city of men, where memories are made through repetition and yesterday is forgotten with the reset. The world has peace, what's left of it anyway. Peace that has been gained through sacrifice.But as behavioural school ends and Gwyn is sent out into the work force, she discovers that not everyone resets. Not everything is as it seems. The peace they live in is as fake as the masks they wear in the clubs. She starts to see that the walls surrounding the city, to keep the monsters out, might actually be keeping them in.And maybe the boy she thought she knew, isn't what he appeared to be at all.Don't miss this exciting new Post-Apocalyptic Romance from the author of the bestselling series The Born Trilogy!

    Travel rain-shot streets with a gang of hip malcontents, hooked on the most powerful drug you can imagine. Yet Vurt feathers are not for the weak. As the mysterious Game Cat says, ‘Be careful, be very careful’. But Scribble isn’t listening. He has to find his lost love. His journey is a mission to find Curious Yellow, the ultimate, perhaps even mythical Vurt feather. As the most powerful narcotic of all, Scribble must be prepared to leave his current reality behind. This edition also includes three additional short stories by Noon.

    Imagine a world so technologically advanced that happiness and contentment can be achieved without effort, a world where there is no sickness or hunger, no deprivation, no want, no striving, no disappointment. Imagine that any experience can be yours and any fantasy or desire reconstructed by machines and fed directly into your cerebral cortex. Imagine all this, and you have the world of James Gunn's The Joy Makers, a nightmare world of indolence, of lost purpose, of the death of civilization. The Joy Makers tells of a future society on Earth where the psychomedical science of Hedonics, concerned with the manipulation of human desired and the achievement of happiness, becomes the ruling philosophy. In a chilling climax, an Earthman returning from Venus, where life is still a rugged pioneering affair, attempts to smash the grotesque domination of the machine over a captive human population. Originally published as separate stories in 1954 and 1955 in the pulp magazines of the day and first published in book form in 1961, The Joy Makers is a brilliant exposition of a theme well known to science fiction fans -- that of a paradise gone wrong. Its author takes a jaundiced look at utopian societies and suggests that unhappiness and dissatisfaction may be necessary underpinnings of all human progress.