Patty Hearst & The Twinkie Murders is a darkly satiric take on two of the most famous cases of our era: the kidnapping of heiress, Patty Hearst, and the shocking assassination of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and gay leader Harvey Milk. As a reporter for the Berkeley Barb, Paul Krassner was ringside at the spectacular California trials. Krassner's deadpan, hilarious style captures the nightmare reality behind the absurdities of the courtroom...

The innovative novels and stories of Michael Blumlein, MD, have introduced new levels of both terror and wonder into the fiction of scientific speculation. His work as a medical researcher and internist at San Francisco's UCSF Medical Center informs his tales of biotech, epigenetics, brain science, and what it means to be truly if only temporarily human. Our title piece, "Thoreau's Microscope," inspired by a historic High Sierra expedition with Kim...

In a candid and intimate new collection of essays, poems, memoirs, reviews, rants, and railleries, Piercy discusses her own development as a working-class feminist, the highs and lows of TV culture, the ego-dances of a writer's life, the homeless and the housewife, Allen Ginsberg and Marilyn Monroe, feminist utopias (and why she doesn't live in one), why fiction isn't physics; and of course, fame, sex, and money, not necessarily in that order. The...

Hugo and Nebula award-winner Terry Bisson is best known for his short stories, which range from the southern sweetness of "Bears Discover Fire" to the alienated aliens of "They're Made Out of Meat." He is also a 1960's New Left vet with a history of activism and an intact (if battered) radical ideology. The Left Behind novels (about the so-called "Rapture" in which all the born-agains ascend straight to heaven) are among the bestselling Christian...

Widely respected in the so-called "mainstream" for her New York Times bestselling novels, Karen Joy Fowler is also a formidable, often controversial, and always exuberant presence in Science Fiction. Here she debuts a provocative new story written especially for this series. Set in the days of Darwin, "The Science of Herself" is a marvelous hybrid of SF and historical fiction: the almost-true story of England's first female paleontologist who took...

Wry, dark humor burnishes visionary SF in these often prophetic, sometimes troubling, but always fascinating tales that combine and masterfully conflate the disparate worlds of corporate tech and literary art. "After the Thaw" is a hi-tech take on an ancient idea: immortality. "Terrible Trudy on the Lam" based on actual events, is a modern fable about a zoo escape, a private eye, a vaudeville act and keeping your mouth shut. "Night Shift at NanoGobblers,"...

White ex-convict Cal Winter returns to his home in Oakland, California, one day to find his gorgeous, young, black wife, Prudence, drowned in the swimming pool. Prudence couldn't swim, and Cal concludes she didn't go in the water willingly. Though theirs was a marriage of convenience, he takes the murder personally. Along with his prison homie Red Eye, Cal sets out to find out who did Prudence in. His convoluted and often darkly humorous journey takes...

The title novella, "The Atheist in the Attic," appearing here in book form for the first time, is a suspenseful and vivid historical narrative, recreating the top-secret meeting between the mathematical genius Leibniz and the philosopher Spinoza caught between the horrors of the cannibalistic Dutch Rampjaar and the brilliant "big bang" of the Enlightenment. Plus, equal parts history, confession, complaint, gossip, and personal triumph, Delany's "Racism...

Nisi Shawl's steampunk-flavored alternate history of the "Belgian" Congo, Everfair, has taken the science fiction and fantasy world by storm. No surprise there. Their swift, sure, and savvy short stories had already established them as a cutting-edge Afrofuturist icon whose politically charged fiction is in the grand feminist tradition of Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler, and Suzy McKee Charnas. In these previously uncollected stories, Shawl explores...

Hand, Elizabeth, or Liz as she's known to her colleagues, students, and devoted fans, is a maverick in modern fiction: a fearless literary sojourner whose award-winning novels and short stories mix murder and magic, high fantasy and post-punk noir in extravagant and unforgettable new ways. The title story, "Fire.", written especially for this volume, is a harrowing post-apocalyptic adventure in a world threatened by global conflagration. Based on...