The Future Is Blue
-
- $5.99
-
- $5.99
Publisher Description
Subterranean Press is thrilled to present a major new collection from one of the most dazzling, distinctive voices in the literary world. Catherynne M. Valente, the New York Times bestselling and multiple-award-winning author of The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making and other acclaimed novels, now brings readers fifteen stories unlike any others.
In the title story, Theodore Sturgeon Award-winning novelette “The Future Is Blue,” an outcast girl named Tetley lives on floating Garbagetown, in a world that dreams of the long lost land. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos is explored and reinvented in style in “Down and Out in R’lyeh.” In the novelette “The Limitless Perspective of Master Peek, or, the Luminescence of Debauchery,” Perpetua masquerades as a man in order to continue her father’s business as a glassblower and must fashion a special eye for a queen. And in “The Beasts Who Fought for Fairyland Until the Very End and Further Still,” the wyvern A-Through-L, the warrior Green Wind and his giant cat the Leopard of Little Breezes cope with their broken-hearted disappointment over politicks as the evil Marquess ascends to rule.
Of her previous collection, The Bread We Eat in Dreams, the New York Times said, “Valente’s writing DNA is full of fable, fairy tale and myth drawn from deep wells worldwide.” With The Future Is Blue she continues to build and invent unforgettable worlds and characters with lyrical abandon, creating stories that feel old and new at once.
The Future Is Blue also includes three never-before-printed stories, for almost 30,000 words of work exclusive to this collection: “Major Tom,” “Two and Two Is Seven,” and the long novelette “Flame, Pearl, Mother, Autumn, Virgin, Sword, Kiss, Blood, Heart, and Grave.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this challenging collection of 15 reprints and originals with a variety of tones, themes, and styles, Valente's unique knack for bending genres and confounding the senses is on full display. Her approach is dreamlike, even hallucinatory, leaping from one idea to the next with dizzying frequency and skill. Her multilayered, complicated narratives require careful, in-depth reading to grasp their full meaning. In the title story, set on a drowned Earth, the last humans dwell on floating cities of garbage, forever holding out vain hope for dry land. "Two and Two Is Seven" gleefully plays with alliteration as it examines the lives of ancient machines resigned to life in a hidden valley. "Down and Out in R'lyeh" reads like a hybrid of H.P. Lovecraft, George Orwell, and Hunter S. Thompson as it asks just what the Elder Gods are waiting for. "Major Tom" focuses on the intersection of humanity and artificial intelligence. Even the most straightforward offerings are often beautiful and sometimes frustrating, and some, such as "The Long Goodnight of Violet Wild," are almost impenetrable in their surreal language and artistic construction. This collection is best suited for completists and devoted fans of Valente's short works.
