Shuteye for the Timebroker
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
"A colorful palette of ideas and approaches . . . Most of the stories percolate with the author's trademark gushes of wit and humor" (Publishers Weekly).
You can try to escape from the mundane, or with the help of Paul Di Filippo, you can take a short, meaningful break from it. In the vein of George Saunders or Michael Chabon, Di Filippo uses the tools of science fiction and the surreal to take a deep, richly felt look at humanity. His brand of funny, quirky, thoughtful, fast-moving, heart-warming, brain-bending stories exist across the entire spectrum of the fantastic from hard science fiction to satire to fantasy and on to horror, delivering a riotously entertaining string of modern fables and stories from tomorrow, now and anytime. After you read Paul Di Filippo, you'll no longer see everyday life quite the same.
If you're allergic to surprises, Paul Di Filippo is not the writer for you. With a total of fifteen stories including two original to this volume, Di Filippo delivers conventional stories unconventionally and unconventional ones straightforwardly. With a magic imagination he transforms traditional science fiction formulas into strange coruscating gems. Many of the tales in Shuteye for the Timebroker mix scientific rigor with wild and hilariously weird fantasy, producing delightful alloys of the surreal and the mundane.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The 15 stories in Di Filippo's latest collection (after 2005's The Emperor of Gondwanaland) show his command of a colorful palette of ideas and approaches. The title tale is an amusing satire of a sleepless 24/7 near-future in which time is traded like a commodity by professional (if sometimes incompetent) brokers. In the screwball fantasy "The Secret Sutras of Sally Strumpet," a male writer hires an actress to play the pseudonymous female "author" of his bestselling chick lit novel then finds himself getting absorbed like one of his feckless male characters into her far too authentic performance. The book also features respectful homages to the fiction of Edgar Allan Poe, Lord Dunsany and Jules Verne. Most of the stories percolate with the author's trademark gushes of wit and humor, but several of the best are deadly earnest, including "Underground," a spooker set in the New York City subway system, and "Shadowboxer," a tale of a psychic assassin fighting "the war on terror" that brilliantly captures the moral ambiguity of attitudes in post-9/11 America.
