Deserts of Fire
Speculative Fiction and the Modern War
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
In 1987, the New York Times published their first front-page review of a science fiction anthology for a collection called In the Field of Fire, themed around the war in Vietnam. “Vietnam was science fiction,” the reviewer wrote, and writing about it through that lens found meaning in a war few understood.
This idea, that speculative fiction is a vital tool to understanding the inexplicable, is just as relevant nearly thirty years later. Deserts of Fire is a war-inspired anthology for the new millennium, because for many, the recent wars in the deserts of Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Middle East are just as slippery to grasp and difficult to understand as Vietnam was two generations earlier.
Inside Deserts of Fire are stories from a variety of bestselling and award-winning authors that start with the simple and modest ambition of making the reader feel strange about the recent past. Because when there are too many explanations, the truth won’t be found by merely choosing one side or the other. But rather, the truth is in the existence of the confusion itself.
Skyhorse Publishing, under our Night Shade and Talos imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of titles for readers interested in science fiction (space opera, time travel, hard SF, alien invasion, near-future dystopia), fantasy (grimdark, sword and sorcery, contemporary urban fantasy, steampunk, alternative history), and horror (zombies, vampires, and the occult and supernatural), and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller, a national bestseller, or a Hugo or Nebula award-winner, we are committed to publishing quality books from a diverse group of authors.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Grouped in categories named with the rhetoric of modern warfare "Weapons of Mass Destruction," "Shock, Awe, and Combat," "Terrorism," etc. the 21 stories in this anthology ably demonstrate the imaginative possibilities of war as a theme in contemporary speculative fiction. The best selections explore the emotional and psychological impact of war on its participants. Ken Liu's "In the Loop" concerns a roboticist who programs drones; her conscientiousness paradoxically makes them more effective killers. In Linda Nagata's haunting "Light and Shadow," a soldier discovers that her combat telemetry is suppressing violent emotions that later erupt at home. In James Morrow's mordantly satirical "Arms and the Woman," a frantic Helen of Troy discovers the folly of trying to prevent war between armies who believe that "any pretext for war can be made to seem reasonable." In his introductory notes, Lain (After the Saucers Landed) sometimes overexplains what the stories are "about," but his selections prove that the best speculative fiction, no matter how futuristic, is always about the here and now.
