Bøger udgivet af Subterranean Press

Aliette de Bodard adds to her acclaimed Xuya Universe with a brand new novella, In the Shadow of the Ship. Nightjar, sentient ship and family matriarch, looms large in Khuyên's past. Disappearances drove teenage Khuyên from it, but death will steer her back. Now an adult and a magistrate, Khuyên came for her maternal grandmother's funeral but finds herself unwittingly reliving her past on the decaying Nightjar. Children are still disappearing as her childhood friends once did; and worse, her beloved Cousin Anh vanishes after pleading for her help. Khuyên sets out to save Anh alongside Thảo, a beautiful and mysterious woman who seems to know more than she should about Khuyên and the ship. But saving Anh requires doing what Khuyên couldn't do before: face her family, face the ship, face her own hopes and fears for the future--a future that might well include Thảo, but only if Khuyên can stop listening to the critical voice in her head. A voice that sounds an awful lot like Nightjar's...

Kevin Hearne, author of the acclaimed Iron Druid Chronicles, returns with an otherworldly new novella! Newly widowed and trying to cope with her grief, Winnie Mae Chisholm moves from Tennessee with her teenage son, Pax, to Oregon, hoping the change will let them both heal and move on. She's warned when buying their new home that the next door neighbor, Mr. Fisher, is a famous recluse and no one has seen him in years, but that's fine with her--she's looking for quiet. She's not going to get it, however, because when Pax meets the neighbor, he discovers that the reason Mr. Fisher hides from the world is that he isn't actually from this world. He's been stranded for decades and he's trying to get home, and he could really use some help. Abruptly part of the best-kept secret on the planet, Winnie Mae and Pax have to protect Mr. Fisher from a nosy neighbor who would ruin his work and doom him to die among aliens, but they also have to ask themselves: How far would they go to escape their grief? Would another world be far enough?

A MAN INVISIBLE Any revival, rediscovery, or reappraisal of the singular work of John Wyndham is cause for celebration, and Logical Fantasy: The Many Worlds of John Wyndham brings treasures aplenty to the table ― a rich sampler of the variant voices of a single writer who remains a lynchpin in the genre of the fantastic, including several which have not seen print since their original publication. John Wyndham Lucas Parkes Beynon Harris was long considered the "invisible man" of science fiction due to his reclusive nature and disinclination toward publicity. Distinctly British yet with breakthrough appeal to American readers matched only by George Orwell, Wyndham thrived trans-Atlantically during the heyday of the digest-sized magazines, under his own name as well as a variety of recombinant pseudonyms which allowed him to "collaborate with himself" as he first planted boots in the sci-fi pulps of the 1930s. As "John Beynon" (or John B.) Harris, he debuted this collection's first tale, "The Lost Machine," in Amazing Stories, and followed with sales to Wonder Stories, Fantasy, and New Worlds up until World War II provided an interruption and hiatus. After the war years, Wyndham wholly recreated himself. The 1950s brought a decade-long run of novels that made him globally famous and redefined science fiction. Through it all, the short stories continued, always startling, always thought-provoking. The seed of his all-time classic The Day of the Triffids is found here in "Spheres of Hell" (also known as "The Puffball Menace."). By the 1960s he was firing on all cylinders ― cogent, innovative stuff such as "Odd" (which debuted in the spellbinding Consider Her Ways and Others) and "The Asteroids, 2194" (part of his pastiche novel of the space-faring Troon dynasty, The Outward Urge). It is the magazines, pulps and digests, from Thrilling Wonder Stories to Argosy, that provide the bulk of these oddities and rediscoveries, now gathered under one roof here for your pleasure ― including seven previously uncollected tales. Only five collections were published during Wyndham's lifetime. Following his death in 1969 a number of short fiction assemblies appeared, the most recent of these coming twenty years ago. Thus, the time has come for Logical Fantasy as primer, tribute, and reminder of one of the genre's major, lasting talents.

Mars is an old world, one that has been mapped by science fiction writers for over a century. The late Nebula and Locus Award winning writer Kage Baker was among the most skilled cartographers to render the Red Planet as full of life and love, hope and heroism. Gathered together here for the first time are all of Baker's Mars stories, beginning with "The Empress of Mars," for which she won the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. It was in this story that Baker first laid out her vision of our neighboring planet, with its patchwork quilt of societies based in part on the history of the British Empire. Here are Celts and colonialists side by side with adventuring Haulers who bring ice from the poles and missionaries who bring the message of their goddess from Luna. These tales are all part of an imaginatively worked out near future, where raucous frontier people intermingle with devoted terraformers in an uneasy mix overseen by Areco, Baker's version of the British East India Company. Turn by turn, each story sets its protagonists the task of understanding and altering a world that resists change. In "The Empress of Mars," a woman gathers her family--her children along with outcast Eccentrics--and turns an unexpected windfall into the founding of a place they can be proud to call their own. "Plotters and Shooters" recounts a series of incidents in an orbital defense station involving characters who may be delightfully familiar. In the "Maelstrom," one of the Eccentrics remakes himself into a theatrical impresario, founding a theater that serves as "a cathedral to pure weirdness." Finally, in "Attlee and the Long Walk," a young child of the agricultural tunnels takes a journey through both her physical and emotional worlds, making unexpected discoveries in both. Maelstrom and Other Martian Tales stands as a testament to the gritty and glorious imagination of a writer gone too soon. These are remarkable stories by a remarkable author.

"You wake up and the world is different. Not in the disaster movie sense, but much more painful and purposeful--almost sinister. Imagine waking up, as normal, but today the world is different: There aren't any people in it. How do you behave? What do you do? How do you change?"--

"At the age of seven, in a London workhouse, newly-orphaned James meets ten-year-old Peter. Mysterious, mercurial, thoughtless to the point of cruelty, Peter nonetheless takes a liking to James. The two forge a strange friendship, bound together by their shared love of stories. But one fateful night, Peter vanishes from his bed, and in the morning James is found lying alone and broken in the courtyard outside. Over twenty years later, on the deck of a whaling ship in the frozen wastes of the Arctic, James's obsession with finding his childhood friend will lead him to mutiny and murder, beyond the edges of the world, and finally to an island that shouldn't exist"--

Michael Blumlein was one of the most singular writers to be associated with the science fiction genre. Active from the 1980s until his death in 2019, he produced a body of work notable for its literary ambition, its urbanity, its depth and breadth of subject matter, and its sly deadpan humor. A medical doctor and San Francisco native, Blumlein's profession and locale deeply informed his fiction. The physician and the author were fascinated by the human body, mind, and spirit, and their always complex connections. These two perspectives on the same subject, clinical and compassionate, created a unique parallax. He wrote several novels, but the short story and the novella were central to his art. Long includes all of the longer stories and novellas Blumlein published in his lifetime. They come from the last decade of his long career, displaying his mature mastery of craft, generosity of spirit, and unbounded imagination. "California Burning" concerns a son's attempt to come to terms with his father's difficult, perhaps alien, legacy. "Longer" is a brilliant, penetrating short novel about an alien artifact that interrogates the nature of life, and how much is enough. Also included are a previously unpublished one-act play, "No Fast Dancing," and a brilliant, moving essay, "Thoreau's Microscope," in which the author confronts his own mortality.

Michael Blumlein was one of the most singular writers to be associated with the science fiction genre. Active from the 1980s until his death in 2019, he produced a body of work notable for its literary ambition, its urbanity, its depth and breadth of subject matter, and its sly deadpan humor. A medical doctor and San Francisco native, Blumlein's profession and locale deeply informed his fiction. The physician and the author were fascinated by the human body, mind, and spirit, and their always complex connections. These two perspectives on the same subject, clinical and compassionate, created a unique parallax. He wrote several novels, but the short story and the novella were central to his art. Short includes all of the shorter fiction Blumlein published in his lifetime, spanning four decades. It includes one previously unpublished story, "Passenger," and one never before reprinted, "Softcore". Arranged chronologically, the stories afford a clear view of Blumlein's evolution as a writer. The earlier stories from the '80s are tinged with horror, viewed with a clinical eye; "The Brains of Rats," "Tissue Ablation," and "Shed His Grace" are legendary for their power to disturb. The later stories, like "The Big One," "Isostasy," "Know How Can Do," and "Twenty Two and You" reveal a mastery of craft and a generosity of heart toward every variation of the human (and nonhuman) condition.

"When retired FBI Agent Patrick Henderson calls in an 'X-Ray Sierra India' incident, the operator doesn't understand. He tells them to pass it up the chain till someone does. That person is FBI Special Agent Kimberley Reynolds. Leaving Quantico for snowbound Northern Wisconsin, she finds that a tornado has flattened half the town--and there's no sign of Henderson. Things soon go from weird to worse, as neighbors report unsettling sightings, key evidence goes missing, and the snow keeps rising--cutting off the town, with no way in or out ... Something terrible is awakening. As the clues lead to the coldest of cold cases--a cursed expedition into the frozen wilderness--Reynolds follows a trail from the start of the American nightmare, to the horror that still lives on today"--

Find out what sort of game the Senior Girls Bayonet Drill Team play. Discover haunted toilets, strange beasts, the hungry dead, weird off-trail shops that sell unique hats and twisted dreams. Spend time with a courageous barber, meet a mythological being that may be part of all our myths, and is well-versed in the various games of shooting marbles. Ghostly cars, ghostly hotels, a shrinking world, gorillas in the yard, a brave and industrious mouse and a less than noble elephant are also here. If that's not enough, meet a highly intelligent monkey with an email account who is desperate to meet his human kinfolk. There are skull collectors, gun slinging demons, a Wendigo, a serial killer, and just to smooth things out, stories of romance. Or failed romance. Certainly, stories of new beginnings. The usual wicked potpourri of Lansdale tales and story notes.

Though Caitlín R. Kiernan is known primarily as a preeminent author of the weird and the macabre, and is often cited as Lovecraft's successor, during the three-decades of their career they have also been a prolific author of science fiction. Indeed, Kiernan's first SF tales appeared in print before any of their weird fiction ("Persephone" and "Between the Flatirons and the Deep Green Sea," both 1995). And while their science fiction has often been praised by critics, the author has only ever released a single collection specifically devoted to their SF--A is for Alien (2009). Finally, with the publication of Bradbury Weather, almost all of Kiernan's science-fiction short stories and novellas have been collected in one volume. These twenty-eight tales paint a picture of dystopian futures, first contacts gone horribly awry, the limits and dangers of technology, and encounters with the alien within us all. From Earth to Mars to distant exoplanets, from the past to the present to the future, Kiernan surveys a cosmos that is strange and marvelous and oftentimes inimical to human life. A paleontologist by training, they bring to their SF a deep understanding of science, its methods, and its limits, with their scientific background often informing and lending an authenticity to their tales of deep time, deep space, extraterrestrial life, and things that might be.

"Expanding upon the world of The Books of Babel, this collection of short works builds upon the Tower in directions both acquainted and strange. Herein, readers will find a heartbreaking account of the Sphinx as she prepares to receive expected but unwelcome guests. Intrepid bibliophiles will be dazzled by Byron's bravery as he charges headlong into a paperwork labyrinth and locks horns with a misanthropic minotaur. Sensitive witnesses will delight in John Tarrou's evolution from romantic nïaf into sickly waif languishing upon porcelain shores in the grips of a theatrical cure. Devotees of poetic justice will find satisfaction in Finn Goll's grasp for redemption with hands caked in gun powder and book glue. In addition to these familiar sagas, this volume contains a number of new meditations upon the spire's innumerable facets: a bookseller tries his hand at racing airships; a youthful orphan seeks sanctuary in a ruin; an ambitious vendor of fleece is reacquainted with the value of his own pelt; and two explorers of the cruising Nebos stumble upon an unexpected stowaway. To guide visitors, the author supplies a preamble in which he attempts to account for these tales that seek to enrich tourists, zealots, and hods alike."--Provided by publisher.

"The Autobiography of Matthew Scudder takes us back to the very beginning, long before the books began, and gives us our first glimpse of Scudder's childhood, his family tragedies, his upbringing--and a powerful new perspective on how he first got drawn to police work and how, eventually, painfully, he left it. Even longtime readers who think they know Scudder's story will be startled by how much they don't and powerfully moved as the aging Scudder reflects on his life from the vantage point of a man drawing ever nearer to the end."--

"Bernie Rhodenbarr may be New York's most charming bookseller (by day) and its most skillful burglar (by night), but the modern world isn't kind to either of his vocations. How is a bookseller supposed to make ends meet in a world where Amazon will deliver any title right to your doorstep? And how is a burglar to ply his trade in a city filled with security cameras and unpickable electronic locks? The answer, as Bernie will discover in the pages of this wildly imaginative new novel--the twelfth in MWA Grandmaster Lawrence Block's acclaimed series, and the first in a nearly a decade--is that the world can sometimes change in the most unexpected ways"--

Continuing their quest for the Seven Swords, legendary warrior Guyime and his companions must brave these perilous tides to find the mythic Spectral Isle, where once a demon named Lakorath was captured by a sorcerer of great power. Here ancient plans will be unveiled and the secret purpose of the seven demon cursed blades may finally be revealed... Continuing the saga of The Seven Swords, Across the Sorrow Sea is a fast-moving tale of seafaring adventure and dramatic revelations from the New York Times bestselling author of the Raven's Shadow and the Covenant of Steel trilogies.

"'London's exorcists! I have a reward for all of you, a job for one of you. Come to Brierley House, 20th April, 9.00am.' The newspaper ad is a baited hook and it smells like a three-day old corpse. But hey, it's a grand in hand just for turning up so Felix Castor goes in anyway, alongside the curdled cream of his dubious profession. And once he's in it's hard to get out again. Brierley House is the home of Russian oligarch Gavril Ustinov, now missing, his driven daughter Ksenia Ustinova and their staff of taciturn, sinister domestics. It also hosts an invisible force that attacks exorcists and negates their abilities--a force that seems to be centuries old. Ksenia wants Castor to locate her missing father, alive or dead. Castor wants to find out who set a trap for exorcists back in the late Middle Ages and what else they were up to. For a job this big he's got friends he can call on: zombie data-fence Nicky Heath, reformed succubus Juliet Salazar, jaded cop Gary Coldwood and Trudie Pax, the Anathemata's finest warrior. But the ghosts of Brierley are many, and they won't give up their secrets lightly..."--Jacket flap.

Recently, the Wall Street Journal called Michael Swanwick "the finest world-builder since Tolkien." His first two published stories in 1980 were both Nebula Award finalists. In the decades since, he has won the Nebula, Theodore Sturgeon, World Fantasy, and five Hugo Awards. He also has the pleasant distinction of having lost more of these awards than any other fiction writer. In a literary generation that includes William Gibson, Connie Willis, Bruce Sterling, Nancy Kress, James Patrick Kelly, and John Kessel, Swanwick stands out. Not only as the author of such outstanding novels as Stations of the Tide and the Iron Dragon trilogy but as possibly the finest and most prolific short fiction writer of his time. The Best of Michael Swanwick, Volume Two not only matches the brilliance of the previous collection but surpasses it in invention and literary brilliance. These exemplary works are among the best short fiction of our time, whether it be genre or mainstream. If you doubt, read this book and be convinced. It contains more than three dozen stories ranging from hard science fiction to extreme fantasy. They include the heartwarming "The Scarecrow's Boy" and the harrowing "Huginn and Muninn and What Came Next." The adventures of Postutopian con artists Darger and Surplus continue in "There was an Old Woman..." and those of Kapitänleutnant Franz-Karl Ritter begin in "The Mongolian Wizard." An adolescent girl follows her father to Hell in "Of Finest Scarlet Was Her Gown." New York City is revealed to be built upon mist and illusion in "Cloud." And Trickster steals everything there is in "Universe Box." From the hellish surface of Venus in "Tin Marsh" to the shifting lands of Chaos in "The Last Days of Old Night," these are the works of a man whose "towering creativity," Gene Wolfe wrote, "seems so effortless...so effortless, and so immense." The Best of Michael Swanwick, Volume Two captures the dazzling variety of an acknowledged master of fantasy and science fiction.

World Fantasy Life Achievement Award winner Howard Waldrop's career highlights include classic stories like "Night of the Cooters," "Mary Margaret Road-Grader," "Heirs of the Perisphere," the Nebula-winning "The Ugly Chickens," and dozens of other fantastic tales that have delighted readers for over fifty years. But where did he come from? Did Howard Waldrop spring forth fully formed, as if from the forehead of Zeus, with his first professional story in 1972? Or were his origins more arcane, and perhaps messier? H'ard Starts: The Early Waldrop answers these questions with over 100,000 words that reveal the genesis of an author now considered a National Treasure--including six fanzine stories and five professional stories that have never appeared in any other collection. Here you'll find long-lost Waldroppian gems such as: -Sword-and-sorcery adventures from 1960s fanzines, plus a hardboiled alien-fighter story first published (in an edition of twenty-five copies) by a nineteen-year-old Waldrop himself... -Howard's two personal essays from Crawdaddy!, his first professional sale to Analog, and previously uncollected stories of deep-space quests and time-travel tragedies... -Shocking reports from 1970s conventions and communes, describing twisted costume contests, magic-chili-fueled escapades, Howard's first in-person meeting with pen-pal George R. R. Martin, and the bizarre screenplays of M.M. Moamrath... -And, finally, a sketch submitted to The Red Skelton Show (but rejected by CBS), two one-act plays, and a never-before-seen novelette, "Davy Crockett Shoots the Moon." Each of these four sections is introduced by part of a new 20,000-word interview in which Howard reveals every secret (well, most of them) about how his career began, and spills the beans about the writers, editors, fans, and other real-or-imagined characters who were there at the start. In short: If you've ever wondered how a legendary, one-of-a-kind author like Howard Waldrop emerged from the primordial soup-- H'ard Starts: The Early Waldrop is the prequel you've been waiting for.

Gathered here for the first time is all of Reamy's professional short fiction, including two previously uncollected pieces: the story "M is for the Millions" and the screenplay "Sting!", as well as a previously unpublished novella.

Pioneering science fiction writer Alice Sheldon, who found fame using the pseudonym James Tiptree, Jr., among others, left behind a remarkable body of short fiction, much of it uncollected or out of print. Now The Voice That Murmurs in the Darkness, co-edited by Jeffrey D. Smith and two-time Booker Prize nominee Karen Joy Fowler, brings new light to some of Tiptree's best and overlooked stories. The stories represented span Tiptree's career, and were primarily selected from a list made by Sheldon which she called "the cream of Tiptree," none of which were included in Her Smoke Rose Up Forever. With a title drawn from Sheldon's description of Tiptree as "the voice that murmurs in the darkness," among the wonders featured here are... In "Excursion Fare," Dag and Philippa are about to be lost at sea in the wreckage of their balloon Sky-Walker, their grand adventure a failure, when a hospice ship called Charon rescues them, and they find themselves on a cruise exclusively for the dying--which may be carrying far stranger passengers. A surreal evening ensues in "The Man Doors Said Hello To," when a tall man enters a bar, carrying miniature girls as tenants in his pockets, and takes the narrator with him on a strange rescue mission through secrets hiding in the corners and ledges of the city. At nineteen, Jolyone Schram cries out in "Time-Sharing Angel," despairing when she glimpses a vision of overpopulation and resulting planetary devastation, only to be heard by an interstellar angel who produces a shocking, simple fix that affects children across Earth and changes the future. And, in "Yanqui Doodle," a soldier undergoes a harrowing detox treatment from specialized drugs given to soothe the conscience during combat--a process that might itself be as painful as the memories of atrocities committed under their influence--and grows ever more unstable. The Voice That Murmurs in the Darkness encompasses thirteen exceptional stories and one essay ("How to Have an Absolutely Hilarious Heart Attack"), covering the years 1968 to 1987, and includes an exclusive introduction from Karen Joy Fowler. Throughout this landmark new collection is Tiptree's remarkable prose, shot through with invention and big ideas, exploring classic themes of identity, politics, what it is to be human, and the miraculous oddity of life--from what lies inside us out to the very edges of the universe.

"From furthest reaches of deep space in "The Memory Artist" to the jungles of Yucatan in "Lamagica," and from the strange suburbia of "Stuff" to a Vatican where a dying pope awaits deliverance in "Sin Eater," the worlds mapped out by these stories range far and wide. As, from the mythic ancient city of "The God of Nothing" to the post-human futures of "Ephemera" and "The Fall of the House of Kepler," via alternate pasts and some very twisted presents in such tales as "Selkie," "The Mrs Innocents" and "The Chronologist," do the times. What holds all these pieces together, including the gripping long new novelette "Downtime" and its vision of a near-future penal system, are vivid writing, strong characters and a sense of awe and surprise. On travels that will take you from cluttered attics and strange shorelines to star-flung civilisations and beyond, let Ian R. MacLeod be your guide. Ian R. MacLeod is the author of seven novels and five short story collections spanning the entire spectrum of fantastic fiction which have been critically acclaimed, widely anthologised and translated into many languages. His work has won the Arthur C Clarke award for the Year's Best Novel, along with the Sidewise Award for Alternative-World Fiction (twice), the World Fantasy Award (again twice), the John W Campbell Memorial Award and the Locus Award for the Year's Best First Novel. He lives in the riverside town of Bewdley in England."--Provided by publisher.

"Hugo Award winner Scalzi has a good deal of fun in his hard-boiled third Dispatcher adventure (after The Dispatcher: Murder By Other Means), returning to an alternate present in which people who are murdered reappear in a place they feel safe and professional "dispatchers" kill those dying of natural causes to give them a second chance. Dispatcher Tony Valdez is called into the emergency room to save Mason Schilling, a fellow dispatcher with a more dubious approach to the work who has just thrown himself out of a moving car, and reluctantly accepts a secret handoff of a cryptocurrency wallet before dispatching Mason. Around the same time, a crypto entrepreneur dies apparently by suicide at a party for the rich and famous. Now police and one-percenters alike are after information--and Valdez and Mason are in the crosshairs. This episode extends to novel length, but the feeling is still of a novella: the pacing is fast, the dialogue is crisp, and Scalzi's expectation that his readers understand tech keeps exposition to a minimum. The cast largely plays within the roles established in previous stories, so those hoping for more growth or forward momentum may be disappointed. Still, many series fans will be content with more of the same under this unusual premise."--Provided by publisher.

AT CARDS AND WITH WOMEN, BILL MAYNARD KNEW HOW TO CHEAT On the mend after getting run out of Chicago, professional cardsharp Bill Maynard is hungry for some action--but not nearly as hungry as Joyce Rogers, the tantalizing wife of Bill's latest mark. Together they hatch an ingenious scheme to get rid of her husband. But in life as in poker, the other player sometimes has an ace up his sleeve...

The only favor the aliens do for Clint Beecham when they abduct him is give him a shirt that says DO NOT EAT on it in their language. He's told that as a physicist, he is to be reserved, along with five other scientists, for a mysterious purpose. But fifty thousand other humans on board the interstellar scout ship are scheduled to be butchered and frozen, a food supply for the long journey to the alien homeworld. Clint and the other Reserves can't stand by and let that happen. Ayesha is a biologist and Deepali a geologist; Oscar is a meteorologist and Gregory specializes in robotics; Hanh is a researcher in marine biology. Together they're humanity's last unlikely hope. Because if they don't find a way to stop the ravenous aliens from reporting that they've found a planet full of delicious creatures to eat, the fifty thousand humans on board will only be the first of billions: the entire earth will become an all-you-can-eat buffet.