Combining dazzling speculation with a profoundly humanist vision, Kim Stanley Robinson, is known as not only the most literary, but also the most progressive (read "radical") of today's top rank SF authors. His bestselling Mars Trilogy tells the epic story of the future colonization of the red planet, and the revolution that inevitably follows. The Years of Rice and Salt, is based on a devastatingly simple idea: If the medieval plague had wiped out...

White ex-convict Cal Winter returns to his home in Oakland, California, one day to find his gorgeous, young, black wife, Prudence, drowned in the swimming pool. Prudence couldn't swim, and Cal concludes she didn't go in the water willingly. Though theirs was a marriage of convenience, he takes the murder personally. Along with his prison homie Red Eye, Cal sets out to find out who did Prudence in. His convoluted and often darkly humorous journey takes...

We live in catastrophic times. The world is reeling from the deepest economic crisis since the Great Depression, with the threat of further meltdowns ever-looming. Global warming and myriad dire ecological disasters worsen-with little if any action to halt them-their effects rippling across the planet in the shape of almost biblical floods, fires, droughts, and hurricanes. Governments warn that there is no alternative to the bitter medicine they prescribe,...

All across North America, people are looking to make better choices, but also eat healthier, more environmentally friendly and, most of all, great-tasting food. New American Vegan breaks from a steady stream of cookbooks inspired by fusion and California cuisines that put catchy titles and esoteric ingredients first in their efforts to cater to a cosmopolitan taste. Instead, Vincent goes back to his Midwestern roots to play a humble but important...

Ken MacLeod is one of the brightest and most progressive of Britain's "Hard SF" stars who navigate exciting new futures to the delight of legions of fans around the world. His works combine cutting-edge scientific speculation, socialist and anarchist themes, and a deeply humanistic vision. Described by fans and adversaries alike as a "techno-utopian socialist," MacLeod thrusts his characters into uncanny encounters that have included AI singularities,...

Patty Hearst and The Twinkie Murders is darkly satiric take on two of the most famous cases of our era: the kidnapping of heiress Patty Hearst and the shocking assassination of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and gay leader Harvey Milk. As a reporter for the Berkeley Barb, Paul Krassner was ringside at the spectacular California trials, and his hilarious deadpan style captures the nightmare reality behind the absurdities of the courtroom circus....

Since his debut in Terry Carr's legendary Ace Specials of the 1980s, Carter Scholz has occupied an enviable, if demanding, position on the cutting edge of modern speculative literature (vulgarly called SF). Proudly debuting in this volume, Gypsy is his first major work since his 2002 nuclear thriller Radiance. An interstellar adventure grounded in the hard science of accurate physics and biology, Gypsy soars far beyond the heliosphere of conventional...

Hand, Elizabeth, or Liz as she's known to her colleagues, students, and devoted fans, is a maverick in modern fiction: a fearless literary sojourner whose award-winning novels and short stories mix murder and magic, high fantasy and post-punk noir in extravagant and unforgettable new ways. The title story, "Fire.", written especially for this volume, is a harrowing post-apocalyptic adventure in a world threatened by global conflagration. Based on...

John Crowley's all-new essay "Totalitopia" is a wry how-to guide for building utopias out of the leftovers of modern science fiction. "This Is Our Town," written especially for this volume, is a warm, witty, and wonderfully moving story about angels, cousins, and natural disasters based on a parochial school third-grade reader. One of Crowley's hard-to-find masterpieces, "Gone" is a Kafkaesque science fiction adventure about an alien invasion that...