Pacifica was a monument to freedom and equality-until the off-worlders came. The Femocrats, a party of female separatists, and the Transcendental Scientists, an institute of technofascists dedicated to male supremacy. Carlotta Madigan, Pacifica's prime minister, and Royce Lindblad, her handsome young lover and media adviser, had to find a way to stop the Pink and Blue War-without becoming casualties themselves.
Can human consciousness exist within the framework of an electronic "brain" and still maintain its humanity? In DEUS X, a dying priest's consciousness is uploaded into the most advanced computer of the day - and what ensues is a thought-provoking, entertaining and overly intriguing clash between the various characters surrounding the experiment, a female Pope and a computer guru who'd rather be sailing and smoking pot, for example.
Updates Lentz's previous work (which Library journal said was producers, screenwriters, cinematographers, special effects technicians, make-up artists, art directors. III: film index. IV: TV series index. V: alternate title index. Science fiction writer Spinrad presents 13 essays, some previously published, examining particular works in the genre, aspects of the industry, and how they influence each other. Topics include critical standards, the visual expression in comic books and movies, modes of content, politics, and profiles of individual authors. No bibliography. Paper edition (unseen), $14.95. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
When hack agent Jimmy "Tex" Balaban discovers Ralf on a Borscht Belt stage, his act appears to be a clever joke. Ralf claims to be from the future, shouting foul-mouthed prophecies of where we went wrong. And he delivers a harrowing message. The world is in chaos. Our biosphere has been devastated, our air is unbreathable and the final stalwarts of mankind have taken refuge in pressurized shopping malls. Humanity clings to the last mediocre vestiges of life on a dead planet that we did not know how to save. But it might not be too late. Has Ralf returned to the past to awaken our consciences? Is he who he says he is or is he insane? And if we have one last chance to save the world, does any of this matter? Then Dexter D. Lampkin, a fading science fiction writer, and Amanda Robin, a New Age guru-wannabe, magnificently transform Ralf into what the world really needs: a messenger sent from the future to save us from ourselves. Together with Tex they polish Ralf's television persona to captivate America. The problem is that Ralf never goes out of character. He truly believes he is a prophet. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Spinrad examines one of his most compelling obsessions - the possible "futures" of America. Street Meat: In New York City, streeties, zonies and subway cannibals are locked in a nighmarish scrabble for rat meat, sex - and survival. The Lost Continent: group of African tourists visit the ruins of Space Age America - a surreal landscape of abandoned skyscrapers, empty streets and dead, rusted machinery. World War Last: The hashish-smoking Sheik of Koram has a plan to trick America and Russia into war. La Vie Continue: In Paris exiled science-fiction author Norman Spinrad ignores a lucrative - but dangerous - bidding war between the KGB and the CIA for the film rights to his story "Riding the Torch".
A collection of short stories from the acclaimed author of 'Bug Jack Barron'. Includes "No Direction Home" which depicts a drug dystopia, and "Sierra Maestra." A violent rock group with maniacal music boils up a craze for a nuclear blast. A man finds himself blown into a ghastly world by a bolt of lightning.
It's just another sleazy, smoggy day at KLAX: But today is anything but normal. Green Army Commandos is what they call themselves. They're violent ecoterrorists, they're armed to the teeth, and they haven't just taken over the station - they're hijacking the news itself. The Bad News Is they've wired themselves and the station with enough high explosives to blow a significant hole in the planet they're trying to save - and they're ready to do it unless their entirely impossible demands are met. The Good News Is the KLAX Action News Team has an exclusive on the most explosive story of the decade - their own kidnapping - and the ratings are going through the roof.
As an ambitious, alienated, and awesomely talented kid from the Bronx, Norman Spinrad rode the revolutionary “New Wave” of 1960s science fiction to fame, if not fortune. His usually angry, often hilarious, and always radical novels changed the field forever. Once devoted to interplanetary adventure, SF began to explore the uneasy intersection between today’s illusions and tomorrow’s dystopian disasters. It grew dark, grew wild, grew up. An all-new novella designed to take a poke at both Christian fundamentalists and corporate CEOs, Raising Hell is a rousing account of the fight to improve working conditions in Hell, for both demons and the damned, with the help of such deceased immortals as Jimmy Hoffa, John L. Lewis, and César Chávez. Plus… “The Abnormal New Normal,” an impolite inquiry into today’s high-finance low-jinks, which unmasks the manipulations of the 1% and proposes a radical fix. And Featuring: our Outspoken Interview, the usual mix of intimate revelation, gossip, and tales from the front lines of writing and publishing.
The Great Tyrant rules the solar system with absolute terror. Only one man dares to fight back. The time is the 24th century. Humankind populates the entire solar system from icy Pluto to boiling Mercury. Great domed cities, humming factories, hordes of workers, all feed the power of the dictatorship that controls all life. Only a small group among the cowed population dares rebel in a struggle that pits democracy against tyranny. But there is a third force at work as well. A mysterious band of assassins whose final solution to the problem of humanity's fate is as terrifying as it is irresistible - one of them is known as the AGENT OF CHAOS.
The Plague's origins were mysterious, but its consequences were all too obvious: quarantined cities, safe-sex machines, Sex Police, the outlawing of old-fashioned love. Four people hold the fate of humanity in their hands...A sexual mercenary condemned to death as a foot soldier in the Army of the Living Dead; a scientist who's devoted his whole life to destroying the virus and now discovers he has only ten weeks to succeed; a God-fearing fundamentalist on his way to the presidency before he accepts a higher calling; and a young infected coed from Berkeley on a bizarre crusade to save the world with a new religion of carnal abandon. Each will discover that the only thing more dangerous than the Plague is the cure.
He was Clear Blue Lou, perfect master of the Clear Blue Way, at one with the law of muscle, sun, wind and water governing Aquaria. She was Sunshine Sue, always in a hurry in a world that was too slow, Queen of Word of Mouth. Their meeting had been arranged - but by whom? and why? Beyond the beginning of where the world ended, beyond the highest peaks of its primeval majesty, lay a radio active hell and the lairs of the black sorcerers, the Spacers. The black scientists had not forgotten man's old dream of touching the stars: they wanted the Age of Space reborn. But they needed a little help.
Norman Spinrad's 1972 alternate history, gives us both a metafictional what-if novel and a cutting satire of one of the 20th century's most evil regimes . . . In 1919, a young Austrian artist by the name of Adolf Hitler immigrated to the United States to become an illustrator for the pulp magazines and, eventually, a Hugo Award-winning SF author. This volume contains his greatest work, Lord of the Swastika: an epic post-apocalyptic tale of genetic 'trueman' Feric Jagger and his quest to purify the bloodline of humanity by ruthlessly slaughtering races of the genetically impure - a quest Norman Spinrad expertly skewers through ironic imagery and over-the-top rhetoric. Spinrad hoped to expose some unpalatable truths about much of SF and Fantasy literature and its uncomfortable relationship with fascist ideologies - an aim that was not always apparent to neo-fascist readers. In order to make his aims clear to the hard-of-understanding, Spinrad added an imaginary critical analysis by a fictional literary scholar, Homer Whipple, of New York University.
In the near future, the debt-laden U.S. owns a technology that renders it "the world's best-defended Third World country." The only real outer-space planning is in Common Europe, so young American "space cadet" Jerry Reed goes to work in Paris. He falls in love with and marries Soviet career bureaucrat Sonya Gagarin and the story jumps ahead 20 years, blending world events with a focus on their family. Sonya's star has risen with the Euro-Russians' while Jerry has been stymied by pervasive anti-Americanism. Daughter Franja has her father's space fever and enrolls in a Russian space school; son Bob, fiercely curious about an earlier, admired America before it was run by xenophobic "Gringos," enters Berkeley. Ten years later the U.S. is a pariah, Euro-Russia the pet of the civilized world and the Reeds scattered - politics forced Jerry and Sonya's divorce, Franja speaks only to her mother and Bob is trapped in "Festung Amerika." A series of odd, occasionally tragic events brings the family (and the world) together. Despite some tech-talk this is not science fiction: the first two-thirds of this hefty book is chillingly logical, if sometimes very funny, and while the "happy" ending may seem forced, Spinrad ( Bug Jack Barron ) gives us a wild, exhilarating ride into the next century.
American Dream or American Nightmare? Norman Spinrad describes The Star-Spangled Future: "America is something new under the sun. not so much a nation at all as a precog flash of the future of the species . . . I wrote believing that I was simply writing disconnected science fiction stories from whatever came into my head . . . And they all turned out to be about America, the leading edge of all possible futures unfolding around us . . . After all, that was what was coming into my head, that's the mother lode of science fiction realities - the American fusion plasma of which we are creatures - and all we have to do is keep ourselves open to it . . . that's my definition of science fiction. We have seen the future and it is us.
Norman Spinrad, a National Book Award finalist for his short fiction collection The Star-Spangled Future, has now written The People's Police, a sharp commentary on politics with a contemporary, speculative twist. Martin Luther Martin is a hard-working New Orleans cop, who has come up from the gangland of Alligator Swamp through hard work. When he has to serve his own eviction notice, he decides he's had enough and agrees to spearhead a police strike. Brothel owner and entrepreneur J. B. Lafitte also finds himself in a tight spot when his whorehouse in the Garden District goes into foreclosure. Those same Fat Cats responsible for the real estate collapse after Katrina didn't differentiate between social strata or vocation. MaryLou Boudreau, aka Mama Legba, is a television star and voodoo queen—with a difference. The loa really do ride and speak through her. These three, disparate people are pulled together by a single moment in the television studio when Martin, hoping for publicity and support from the people against the banks, corporate fat cats, and corrupt politicians. But no one expects Papa Legba himself to answer, and his question changes everything. "What do you offer?" At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Earth was programmed for destruction in the mad war of the computer worlds - unless the Solarians could stop the machines! Three hundred years ago the Solarians retreated to the safety of their Fortress as Earth became embroiled in the first of the computer wars with the dread Duglaari Empire. The Solarians' final word to all humanity was a promise to reappear one day and bring it to victory. Suddenly, with Earth on the verge of becoming a helpless victim of the merciless Duglaars, the Solarians made contact with Fleet Commander Jay Palmer. It was an offer of aid. But the Solarians' plan was so cunning, so fraught with danger, that Jay faced the greatest decision of his life - and that of Earth's: Accept their ingenious strategy as a stroke of genius or reject it as a trick designed to destroy human life forever.
Welcome aboard the sex-drive void ship . . . Captain Genro commands the giant spaceship Dragon Zephyr - on board are ten thousand passengers in electrocoma, a smaller number of conscious passengers eagerly utilising the ship's dream chambers - and a Pilot. In the context of space travel, the Pilot is merely a biological component in the machine. Always a woman, her function is to launch the ship into the Jump by means of a cosmic orgasm. She is a pariah, shunned by all. Void Captain Genro should never even have spoken to his Pilot, let alone tried to embark on a relationship with her. When he did so, the result was every space traveller's nightmare. A Blind Jump into the Void . . .
In the exotic interstellar civilization of the Second Starfaring Age, youthful wanderers are known as Children of Fortune. This is the tale of one such wanderer, who seeks her destiny on an odyssey of self-discovery amid humanity's many worlds.
THE NOVEL DEEMED TOO DANGEROUS TO BE PUBLISHED IN AMERICA--IS FINALLY PUBLISHED IN AMERICA! In this thought-provoking work set in the near future and first published in 2007, Spinrad (Raising Hell) traces the course of his protagonist’s life from naive youth to veteran soldier... At its core, the book is about a young man struggling with his faith and the politics that are rightly or wrongly attached to that faith, and his choices feel plausible even to readers who would make very different ones. -- Publishers Weekly, Starred Review OSAMA THE GUN, set in a not-so-far future when the "Sons of Osama" have established a powerful Islamic Caliphate with Pakistani nuclear weapons and Arabian oil money, is the story of one of those "sons" of the martyr, a naive and sincere young man who becomes a Caliphate secret agent to escape its closed confines and see the world -- and finds himself becoming the reluctant hero of the title. Osama the Gun becomes a terrorist leader on a small scale by happenstance, a mercenary used by Islamic forces fighting an American proxy invasion in the oil lands of Nigeria, an iconic figure in the manner of "El Che." All the while he charms the reader as a likable, sincere, idealistic, and sympathetic human doing very unsympathetic things to the interests of the United States of America. "I wanted the reader to hate the sin, but love the sinner, because I felt it had to be done, and since no one else seemed to be willing to do it, I had to try to do it myself, come what may. Because Islam was being confused with its radical Middle Eastern jihadhis, and Arabs in general with terrorists, and it seemed to me that the alien jihadhist consciousness had to be experienced from within and empathetically understood. Which was why OSAMA THE GUN had to be written, and why, as one foaming at the mouth rejection letter predicted, no American publisher would touch this book." -- Norman Spinrad
The world of the future is in a lot of trouble. Pollution, overpopulation, and ecological disasters have left the rich nations still rich, and the poor nations dying. Still, for international businesses it is business as usual. It is better to be rich. But is it all coming to a terrible end? A scientist has predicted Condition Venus, the sudden greenhouse end of the planet - but she can't say when. So the attention of the world is on a UN conference in Paris, where all hell is about to break loose.
A major triumph of historical fiction, The Druid King, is a masterly retelling of the life of the legendary general Vercingetorix and his brilliant crusade against the Roman invasion of Gaul.Vercingetorix was both a man of myth and a real historical figure—he managed, where others had failed, to unite the tribes of Gaul and lead them against the might of the entire Roman empire. After watching his father’s harrowing death, young Vercingetorix retreats to the forest where he learns the ways of the druids. Soon he must return to civilization to reclaim his birthright and his father’s honor, but the city of his birth has changed. Now, he must confront the greatest military power the world has even known--the Roman legions of Julius Ceasar. This is the story of Vercingetorix, Druid King of Gaul.
Our 74th issue features an essay from Norman Spinrad, the sort of non-fiction feature I’d like to see more of here in the future. (In fact, we do have an interesting essay from Harlan Ellison coming up in an issue or two, too.) And I plan to resume running author interviews shortly as well. This issue features an original story by Neil Plakcy, plus more recent tales by James A. Heart and Phyllis Ann Karr, plus classics by Norbert Davis, Ray Bradbury, Frank Belknap Long, and Edmond Hamilton. And no issue would be complete without a Hal Charles solve-it-yourself mystery. Here’s this issue’s lineup: Mysteries / Suspense / Adventure: “Flaking Out in Wilton Manors,” by Neil Plakcy [Michael Bracken Presents short story] “A Conundrum In Winter,” by Hal Charles [Solve-It-Yourself Mystery] “Trip Among the Bluebonnets,” by James A. Hearn [short story] “A Knotty Problem,” by Hal Meredith [short story] “Dead Man’s Chest,” by Norbert Davis [novelet] Non-Fiction: “An SF Manifesto,” by Norman Spinrad [essay] Science Fiction & Fantasy: “Two Days Out of Sludgepocket,” by Phyllis Ann Karr [short story] “The Shape of Things,” by Ray Bradbury [short story] “Galactic Heritage,” by Frank Belknap Long [short story] “Regulations,” by Murray Leinster [short story] “Transuranic,” by Edmond Hamilton [novelet]
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