Invaders
22 Tales from the Outer Limits of Literature
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
The invasion of the future has begun.
Literary legends including Steven Millhauser, Junot Diáz, Amiri Baraka, and Katharine Dunn have attacked the borders of the every day. Like time traveling mad-scientists, they have concocted outrageous creations from the future. They have seized upon tales of technology gone wrong and mandated that pulp fiction must finally grow up.
In these wildly-speculative stories you will discover the company that controls the world from an alley in Greenwich Village. You'll find nanotechnology that returns memories to the residents of a nursing home. You'll rally an avian-like alien to become a mascot for a Major League Baseball team.
The Invaders are here. But did science fiction colonize them first?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this very fine reprint anthology, Weisman has brought together 22 SF stories by authors who, although not generally associated with the genre, are clearly fellow travelers (not the ominous invaders suggested by the title). Among the major names are Pulitzer Prize winner Junot D az, George Sanders, Katherine Dunn, Jonathan Lethem, Amiri Baraka, W.P. Kinsella, Steven Millhauser, Robert Olen Butler, and Molly Gloss. Among the best of the consistently strong stories are D az's "Monstro," the horrifying tale of a disease outbreak in Haiti; Gloss's near-perfect first-contact story, "Lambing Season"; Kinsella's totally bizarre "Reports Concerning the Death of the Seattle Albatross Are Somewhat Exaggerated"; Ben Loory's fable-like "The Squid Who Fell in Love with the Sun"; and Saunders's "Escape from Spiderhead," a deeply sexy tale of wild experimental science. In general, the stories tend toward satire and emphasize fine writing more than hitting genre beats technology is usually a means to an end rather than the center of the story but most of them could easily have found homes in SF magazines. This volume is a treasure trove of stories that draw equally from SF and literary fiction, and they are superlative in either context.
