Vacuum Flowers

A cyberpunk thriller from Nebula Award winner Michael Swanwick that explores bioengineering, wetware, and the riddle of personality Rebel Elizabeth Mudlark is a recorded personality owned by corporate giant Deutsche Nakasone. When Rebel’s personality is uploaded to persona tester Eucrasia Walsh and burned into her brain, Rebel escapes the corporation and takes off across an exotically transformed solar system, hijacking Eucrasia’s body and becoming the most wanted fugitive in existence. A fast-paced technological thriller, Vacuum Flowers allows the reader to consider the implications of bioengineering while providing an entertaining and dynamic story. Reminiscent of the innovative work of Philip K. Dick, William Gibson, and Bruce Sterling, this high-tech work of science fiction carves out a niche all its own with themes as relevant today as when it was first published.

This "utterly spectacular" book weighs the impact modern medical technology has had on the author's life against the social and environmental costs inevitably incurred by the mining that makes such innovation possible (Rachel Louise Snyder, author of No Visible Bruises). What if a lifesaving medical device causes loss of life along its supply chain? That's the question Katherine E. Standefer finds herself asking one night after being suddenly shocked by her implanted cardiac defibrillator. In this gripping, intimate memoir about health, illness, and the invisible reverberating effects of our medical system, Standefer recounts the astonishing true story of the rare diagnosis that upended her rugged life in the mountains of Wyoming and sent her tumbling into a fraught maze of cardiology units, dramatic surgeries, and slow, painful recoveries. As her life increasingly comes to revolve around the internal defibrillator freshly wired into her heart, she becomes consumed with questions about the supply chain that allows such an ostensibly miraculous device to exist. So she sets out to trace its materials back to their roots. From the sterile labs of a medical device manufacturer in southern California to the tantalum and tin mines seized by armed groups in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to a nickel and cobalt mine carved out of endemic Madagascar jungle, Lightning Flowers takes us on a global reckoning with the social and environmental costs of a technology that promises to be lifesaving but is, in fact, much more complicated. Deeply personal and sharply reported, Lightning Flowers takes a hard look at technological mythos, healthcare, and our cultural relationship to medical technology, raising important questions about our obligations to one another, and the cost of saving one life.

A New York Times Notable Book: “Combining cyberpunk’s grit with dystopic fantasy, this iconoclastic hybrid is a standout piece of storytelling” (Library Journal). Jane is trapped as a changeling in an industrialized Faerie ruled by aristocratic high elves and populated by ogres, dwarves, night-gaunts, and hags. She is the only human in a factory where underage forced labor builds cybernetic, magical dragons that are weaponized and sent off to war. When the damaged dragon Melanchthon tempts Jane with promises of freedom, the stage is set for a daring escape that will shake the foundations of existence. Combining alchemy and technology, a coming-of-age story like no other, The Iron Dragon’s Daughter takes place against a dystopic mindscape of dark challenges and class struggles that force Jane to make costly decisions at every turn. A finalist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel, and the 1994 Locus Award, The Iron Dragon’s Daughter a is one-of-a-kind melding of grimdark fantasy and cyberpunk grit from the Nebula Award–winning author of Stations of the Tide. It engages the reader in a nihilistic world in which nothing is as it seems and everything comes at a steep and often horrific price.

We’ve all seen red roses, blue irises, and yellow daffodils. But when we really look closely at a flower, whole new worlds of beauty and intricacy emerge. Using a unique process that far surpasses conventional macro photography, Robert Llewellyn shows us details that few of us have ever seen: the amazing architecture of stamens and pistils; the subtle shadings on a petal; the secret recesses of nectar tubes. Complementing Llewellyn’s stunning photographs are Teri Dunn Chace’s lyrical, illuminating essays. By highlighting the features that distinguish twenty-eight of the most common families of flowering plants, Chace gives us fascinating insights into the natural history of flowers, such as the relationship between pollinators and floral form and color. At the same time she gives us a deeper appreciation of why and how flowers have become so deeply embedded in human culture. Whether you’re a nature lover, a gardener, a photography buff, or someone who simply responds to the timeless beauty and variety of the floral world, Seeing Flowers will be a source of enduring delight.

The Fantastic Other is a carefully assembled collection of essays on the increasingly significant question of alterity in modern fantasy, the ways in which the understanding and construction of the Other shapes both our art and our imagination. The collection takes a unique perspective, seeing alterity not merely as a social issue but as a biological one. Our fifteen essays cover the problems posed by the Other, which, after all, go well beyond the bounds of any single critical perspective. With this in mind, we have selected studies to show how insights from deconstruction, Marxism, feminism, and Freudian, Jungian and evolutionary psychology help us understand an issue so central to the act of reading.

Here are the short story collaborations of legendary editor and multiple Nebula Award winning author Gardner Dozois with some of the greatest writers of modern science fiction. Each story is followed by an essay by the collaborator discussing Dozois and his influence on science fiction and beyond. Includes collaborative stories and appreciations by: Michael Bishop Pat Cadigan Michael Swanwick Jack Dann Jack C. Haldeman, II Susan Casper At the publisher's request, this title is sold without DRM (Digital Rights Management).

Long after the wars, there are things abroad in the world—things more than human. And they have scores to settle with one another. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

This book is a collection of essays that considers the continuing cultural relevance of the cyberpunk genre into the new millennium. Cyberpunk is no longer an emergent phenomenon, but in our digital age of CGI-driven entertainment, the information economy, and globalized capital, we have never more been in need of a fiction capable of engaging with a world shaped by information technology. The essays in explore our cyberpunk realities to soberly reconsider Eighties-era cyberpunk while also mapping contemporary cyberpunk. The contributors seek to move beyond the narrow strictures of cyberpunk as defined in the Eighties and contribute to an ongoing discussion of how to negotiate exchanges among information technologies, global capitalism, and human social existence. The essays offer a variety of perspectives on cyberpunk’s diversity and how this sub-genre remains relevant amidst its transformation from a print fiction genre into a more generalized set of cultural practices, tackling the question of what it is that cyberpunk narratives continue to offer us in those intersections of literary, cultural, theoretical, academic, and technocultural environments.

Change the pastãand the future may come undone. An outstanding collection of time-traveling alternate history stories from 16 major science fiction writers, both old and new. Every day, a thousand possible futures die unborn around us-corners not turned, paths not taken. But if one could go back into the past and change it, the outcome could be unimaginable. _Aristotle and the GunÓ by L. Sprague de Camp _SitkaÓ by William Sanders _The Only Game in TownÓ by Poul Anderson _Playing the GameÓ by Gardner Dozois and Jack Dann _Killing the MorrowÓ by Robert Reed _The We Frustrate CharlemagneÓ b R. A. Lafferty _The Game of Blood and DustÓ by Roger Zelazny _Calling Your NameÓ by Howard Waldrop _What Rough Beast?Ó by Damon Knight _O Brave Old World!Ó by Avram Davidson _Radiant DoorsÓ by Michael Swanwick _The Hotel at Harlans LandingÓ by Kage Baker _Mozart in MirorshadesÓ by Bruce Sterling and Lewis Shiner _Under SiegeÓ by George R. R. Martin At the publisher's request, this title is sold without DRM (Digital Rights Management).