The Wergens: a highly sophisticated alien race biochemically infatuated with humans. They crave us, they need us, while we need their technology. Humanity does what it always does. We exploit them. Until, that is, the Wergens find a way to circumvent their addiction... From the towering skyscrapers of Earth to the methane lakes of Titan, from the ice-plains of Pluto to distant alien gas giants with steel-crushing gravity, Wergen: The Alien Love War explores personal stories of unrequited love set against the cosmic backdrop of the conflict between the two species. Mercurio D. Rivera's Wergen stories have wowed readers and critics alike. Now, for the first time, the full arc of the human/Wergen relations is revealed: the conflict, cooperation, love, betrayal, and more. "Mindblowing hard science fiction" - N.K. Jemisin, Hugo Award Winning Author "Rivera gradually introduces a surprising level of ambivalence and complexity. What initially seems benevolent becomes quite the opposite, before evolving again. There are twists followed by more twists, heightening a powerful sense of alienation and menace. The conceptual and ethical switchbacks... are dizzying." - Tor.com "Fascinating and satisfying... exploring the nature of love. Is love something deeply spiritual or simply the result of chemical reactions in the brain?" - The Fix "The mystery of love's origins and endings are universal for humans and aliens alike, something that transcends mere biochemistry." - Tangent Online "Rivera has shown great invention here and written something that will touch you deeply." - SF Revu
If you got a mysterious box that said, Do Not Open, would you open it? If your fingers revolted and wanted a different job, would you agree? If you came from a race of giants, or thought about becoming Death’s lover, or couldn’t get rid of a lover no matter how hard you tried, what would you do? These stories contain unusual problems, like finding your world growing dark after eating a piece of cake—and maybe wanting more cake. It’s not hard to find yourself one step outside the normal, as these characters do. The trick is to make it work.
From Hugo Award-Winning Editor Neil Clarke, the Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year Collected in a Single Paperback Volume Keeping up-to-date with the most buzzworthy and cutting-edge science fiction requires sifting through countless magazines, e-zines, websites, blogs, original anthologies, single-author collections, and more—a task that can be accomplished by only the most determined and voracious readers. For everyone else, Night Shade Books is proud to present the latest volume of The Best Science Fiction of the Year, a yearly anthology compiled by Hugo and World Fantasy Award–winning editor Neil Clarke, collecting the finest that the genre has to offer, from the biggest names in the field to the most exciting new writers. The best science fiction scrutinizes our culture and politics, examines the limits of the human condition, and zooms across galaxies at faster-than-light speeds, moving from the very near future to the far-flung worlds of tomorrow in the space of a single sentence. Clarke, publisher and editor-in-chief of the acclaimed and award-winning magazine Clarkesworld, has selected the short science fiction (and only science fiction) best representing the previous year’s writing, showcasing the talent, variety, and awesome “sensawunda” that the genre has to offer.
Nordic Gothic traces Gothic fiction in the Nordic region from its beginnings in the nineteenth century, with a main focus on the development of Gothic from the 1990s onwards in literature, film, TV and new media. The volume gives an overview of Nordic Gothic fiction in relation to transnational developments and provides a number of case studies and in-depth analyses of individual narratives. It creates an understanding of this under-researched cultural phenomenon by showing how the narratives make visible cultural anxieties haunting the Nordic countries, their welfare systems, identities and ideologies. Nordic Gothic examines how figures from Nordic folklore function as metaphorical expressions of Gothic themes and Nordic settings are explored from perspectives such as ecocriticism and postcolonialism. The book will be of interest to researchers and post- and- undergraduate students in various fields within the Humanities.
A Room in Dodge City follows a nameless drifter into an American heart of darkness. In this nightmarish version of the historic Dodge City, mythic beasts crawl out of the woodwork; bizarre rituals are enacted; and death is never the end. Equal parts humor and horror-show, David Leo Rice's novel combines the mundaneness of modern life-motels, strip malls, temp jobs-with something stranger, darker, and more eternal. Told through linked vignettes that read like metaphoric fairytales gone wrong, Dodge City consumes the reader just as it slowly consumes the drifter, leaving all to wonder whether any of us can ever truly escape this world-or our own. Winner of the Electric Book Award Each chapter is fully illustrated by Christina Collins. "David Lynch meets Neil Gaiman meets Samuel Beckett and the Theater of the Absurd. Just as Dodge City is a place the narrator can never leave, Rice's book sucks you in and doesn't let you walk out of it intact, either." -Nick Antosca, author of The Girlfriend Game, Midnight Picnic, & Fires "With a draftsman's hand and a psychonaut's eye, Rice has mapped the alien precinct in which we already live. I've never encountered a book so strange yet so familiar. Writers such as William Burroughs and Samuel Delany may have helped prepare the ground, but this high-speed, controlled drift across it is all Rice's own." -Joanna Ruocco, author of Dan & A Compendium of Domestic Incidents "A vivid, precisely described nightmare filled with jokes for people who think nothing is funny anymore. Rice imagines American pop culture as a Hieronymus Bosch painting come to life, and he gives us a carnival barker's tour through a disturbing landscape of lost souls, vain ambitions, and distorted identities, ultimately finding a path to redemption through the spiritual wreckage." -Mark Beauregard, author of The Whale: A Love Story "Rice cares deeply about his characters and this comes out in every vignette. He doesn't follow the nihilistic postmodern structure by declaring that life is meaningless or hopeless. What we find is the presence of hope in all things, no matter how run-down they might appear on the surface." -Joe Halstead, author of West Virginia "Dodge City is a walk on the dark side of the contemporary imagination that reworks the post-realist storytellings of Donald Barthelme or Henri Michaux into a voice that is unique. A picaresque novel for the age of the Darknet and Tor." -Simon Pummell, director of Bodysong & Identicals "In his mind-boggling debut novel, Rice conjures a series of seemingly unassuming vignettes that read like a revelatory prose poem written by the Zodiac Killer. A celebration of what it means to know that you know that you can never know everything." -Mike Kleine, author of Kanley Stubrick "Don't enter into Rice's terrifying and hilarious fictional multiverse looking for causality, continuity, or logic, as we know them. A Room in Dodge City will plunge you into a nightmarish warren-maze where somewhere, amid the numberless trapdoors, inner chambers and branching halls on branching halls, a literary orgy is going down among the imaginative intellects of Blake Butler, Kathryn Davis, Haruki Murakami, Livia Llewellyn, and Robert Coover, refereed by Cronenberg and Lynch." -Adrian Van Young, author of Shadows in Summerland & The Man Who Noticed Everything "A Room in Dodge City warps the serial format to its own uncanny ends. Briskly paced with elegantly streamlined prose, the book follows its own impeccably strange and addictive dream logic." -Jeff Jackson, author of Mira Corpora & Novi Sad "Unsettling and unsettled, reading A Room in Dodge City is like reading Jakob von Gunten's dream journal the day after he'd stayed up late to watch High Plains Drifter and Videodrome." -Gabriel Blackwell, author of Madeleine E. Find out more about Alternating Current Press at alternatingcurrentarts.com.
Anthropological Explorations in Queer Theory offers a wide ranging fusion of queer theory with anthropological theory, shifting away from the discussion of gender categories and identities that have often constituted a central concern of queer theory and instead exploring the queer elements of contexts in which they are not normally apparent. Engaging with a number of apparently 'non-sexual' topics, including embodiment and fieldwork, regimes of value, gifts and commodities, diversity discourses, biological essentialisms, intersectionality, the philosophy of Bergson and Deleuze, and the representation of heterosexuality in popular culture, this book moves to discuss central concerns of contemporary anthropology, drawing on both the latest anthropological research as well as classic theories. In broadening the field of queer anthropology and opening queer theory to a number of new themes, both empirical and theoretical, Anthropological Explorations in Queer Theory will appeal not only to anthropologists and queer theorists, but also to geographers and sociologists concerned with questions of ontology, materiality and gender and sexuality.
Aron's collection of essays begins with Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of perestroika and continues through Vladimir Putin's increasingly authoritarian rule. He examines the enormity of the changes in the fabric of the life of millions of Russians, and looks at the emergence of a new middle class and at the popularity of a series of mystery novels that embodies middle class values. He also examines legal and political reforms and corruption. With rich color and detail, Aron puts his finger on the pulse of the new Russia.
A unique analysis of the intensive interest in Jewish culture of early modern Christian Humanists as a part of their comprehensive program of study of Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. The book focuses on how that interest was particularly manifested in a score of treatises on Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Yiddish language and literature.
