Terry Bisson
The Left Left Behind
By Terry Bisson
ISBN: 978-1-60486-086-3
Pub Date October 2009
Format: Paperback
Page Count: 128 pages
Size: 7.5 by 5
Subjects: Fiction, Religion
$12.00
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 books in the US, describing in lurid detail the adventures of those “left behind” to battle the Anti-Christ. Put Bisson and the Born-Agains together, and what do you get? The Left Left Behind--a sardonic, merciless, tasteless, take-no-prisoners satire of the entire apocalyptic enterprise that spares no one--predatory preachers, goth lingerie, Pacifica radio, Indian casinos, gangsta rap, and even “art cars” at Burning Man.
Plus: "Special Relativity," a one-act drama that answers the question: When Albert Einstein, Paul Robeson, J. Edgar Hoover are raised from the dead at an anti-Bush rally, which one wears the dress? As with all Outspoken Author books, there is a deep interview and autobiography: at length, in-depth, no-holds-barred and all-bets off: an extended tour though the mind and work, the history and politics of our Outspoken Author. Surprises are promised.
About the Author:
Terry Bisson, who was for many years a Kentuckian living in New York City, is now a New Yorker living in California. In addition to his Hugo and Nebula award winning science fiction, he has written bios of Mumia Abu-Jamal and Nat Turner. He is also the host of a popular San Francisco reading series (SFinSF) and the Editor of PM’s new Outspoken Authors pocketbook series.
Praise:
"Bisson is a national treasure!"
--John Crowley, author of Little Big
"Bisson can charm your toes off!”
--The Washington Post
"Bisson's prose is a wonder of seemingly effortless control and precision; he is one of science fiction's most promising short story practitioners, proving that in the genre, the short story remains a powerful, viable and evocative form."
--Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Kim Stanley Robinson
The Lucky Strike
By Kim Stanley Robinson
ISBN: 978-1-60486-085-6
Pub Date October 2009
Format: Paperback
Page Count: 128 pages
Size: 7.5 by 5
Subjects: Fiction
$12.00
Combining dazzling speculation with a profoundly humanist vision, Kim Stanley Robinson is known as not only the most literary but also the most progressive (read “radical”) of today’s top rank SF authors. His bestselling Mars Trilogy tells the epic story of the future colonization of the red planet, and the revolution that inevitably follows. The Years of Rice and Salt is based on a devastatingly simple idea: If the medieval plague had wiped out all of Europe, what would our world look like today? His latest novel, Galileo’s Dream, is a stunning combination of historical drama and far-flung space opera, in which the ten dimensions of the universe itself are rewoven to ensnare history’s most notorious torturers.
The Lucky Strike, the classic and controversial story Robinson has chosen for PM’s new Outspoken Authors series, begins on a lonely Pacific island, where a crew of untested men are about to take off in an untried aircraft with a deadly payload that will change our world forever. Until something goes wonderfully wrong …
Plus: A Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions, in which Robinson dramatically deconstructs “alternate history” to explore what might have been if things had gone differently over Hiroshima that day. As with all Outspoken Author books, there is a deep interview and autobiography: at length, in-depth, no-holds-barred and all-bets off: an extended tour though the mind and work, the history and politics of our Outspoken Author. Surprises are promised.
Reviews:
"The foremost writer of literary utopias."
--Time
“The best nature writer in the U.S. today also happens to write science fiction.”
--The Ends of the Earth
“It’s no coincidence that one of our most visionary science fiction writers is also a profoundly good nature writer.”
--Los Angeles Times
“If I had to choose one writer whose work will set the standard for science fiction in the future, it would be Kim Stanley Robinson.” --The New York Times
About the Author:
Born in 1952, a Californian through and through, Kim Stanley Robinson grew up in Orange County, surfed his way through UC San Diego (writing his doctoral thesis on Philip K. Dick), and now lives in Davis with two kids and a beautiful scientist wife. He spends several weeks a year above 11,500 feet in the high Sierras. Not surprisingly, he’s a good friend of Gary Snyder.
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Gary Phillips
The Underbelly
By Gary Phillips
Published: June 2010
ISBN: 978-1-60486-206-5
Format: Paperback
Page Count: 128
Dimensions: 7.5 by 5
Subjects: Fiction
$14.00
The explosion of wealth and development in downtown L.A. is a thing of wonder. But regardless of how big and shiny our buildings get, we should not forget the ones this wealth and development has overlooked and pushed out. This is the context for Phillips’ novella The Underbelly, as a semi-homeless Vietnam vet named Magrady searches for a wheelchair-bound friend gone missing from Skid Row – a friend who might be working a dangerous scheme against major players. Magrady’s journey is a solo sortie where the flashback-prone protagonist must deal with the impact of gentrification; take-no-prisoners community organizers; an unflinching cop from his past in Vietnam; an elderly sexpot out for his bones; a lusted-after magical skull; chronic-lovin’ knuckleheads; and the perils of chili cheese fries at midnight. Combining action, humor and a street level gritty POV, Underbelly is illustrated with photos and drawings.
Plus: a rollicking interview wherein Phillips riffs on Ghetto Lit, politics, noir and the proletariat, the good negroes and bad knee-grows of pop culture, Redd Foxx and Lord Buckley, and wrestles with the future of books in the age of want.
About the Author:
Phillips was born in Los Angeles in 1955, the son of a mechanic and a librarian. Early on he discovered the writers Arthur Conan Doyle, Ellery Queen, Ross Macdonald, Richard Wright, Rod Serling, comic book artist Jack Kirby, Zora Neale Hurston, Donald Goines, Joyce Carol Oates, and pulp writers Kenneth Robeson ( creator of Doc Savage) Walter Gibson (creator of the Shadow). He attended San Francisco State University from 1972 to 1973 and earned a bachelor of arts degree from California State University, Los Angeles, in 1978. He has worked as a union organizer, political campaign coordinator, radio talk show host and teacher. He has written op-ed pieces for the L.A. Times Magazine, San Francisco Examiner, Washington Post, Baltimore Sun, Miami Herald and other newspapers. He has served as co-director of the MultiCultural Collaborative. He is an impressive author with a number of titles and series including, Violent Spring, and the rest of the Monk private detective series, High Hand, The Perpetrators, Bangers, The Jook, The Underbelly, and he is currently the co-editor of the Switchblade imprint with PM Press which recently released Send My Love and a Molotov Cocktail!: Stories of Crime, Love and Rebellion, which Gary not only edited but is a contributing author.
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Eleanor Arnason
Mammoths of the Great Plains
By Eleanor Arnason
ISBN: 978-1-60486-075-7
Published May 2010
Format: Paperback
Page Count: 144 Pages
Size: 7.5 by 5
Subjects: Science Fiction
$12.00
When President Thomas Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark to explore the West, he told them to look especially for mammoths. Jefferson had seen bones and tusks of the great beasts in Virginia, and he suspected--he hoped!--that they might still roam the Great Plains. In Eleanor Arnason’s imaginative alternate history, they do: shaggy herds thunder over the grasslands, living symbols of the oncoming struggle between the Native peoples and the European invaders. And in an unforgettable saga that soars from the badlands of the Dakotas to the icy wastes of Siberia, from the Russian Revolution to the AIM protests of the 1960s, Arnason tells of a modern woman’s struggle to use the weapons of DNA science to fulfill the ancient promises of her Lakota heritage.
PLUS: “Writing During World War Three,” a politically un-correct take on multiculturalism from an SF point-of-view; and an Outspoken Interview that takes you straight into the heart and mind of one of today’s edgiest and most uncompromising speculative authors.
About the Author:
Ever since her first story was published in the revolutionary New Worlds in 1972, Eleanor Arnason has been acknowledged as the heir to the feminist legacy of Russ and Le Guin. The first winner of the prestigious Tiptree Award, she has been short listed for both the Nebula and the Hugo.
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Michael Moorcock
Modem Times 2.0
Author: Michael Moorcock
Publisher: PM Press
ISBN: 978-1-60486-308-6
Published: January 2011
Format: Paperback
Page Count: 128
Size: 7.5 by 5.5
Subjects: Fiction
$12.00
As the editor of London’s revolutionary New Worlds magazine in the swinging sixties, Michael Moorcock has been credited with virtually inventing modern Science Fiction: publishing such figures as Norman Spinrad, Samuel R. Delany, Brian Aldiss and J.G. Ballard.
Moorcock’s own literary accomplishments include his classic Mother London, a romp through urban history conducted by psychic outsiders; his comic Pyat quartet, in which a Jewish antisemite examines the roots of the Nazi Holocaust; Behold The Man, the tale of a time tourist who fills in for Christ on the cross; and of course the eternal hero Elric, swordswinger, hellbringer and bestseller.
And now Moorcock’s most audacious creation, Jerry Cornelius--assassin, rock star, chronospy and maybe-Messiah--is back in Modem Times 2.0, a time twisting odyssey that connects 60s London with post-Obama America, with stops in Palm Springs and Guantanamo. Modem Times 2.0 is Moorcock at his most outrageously readable--a masterful mix of erudition and subversion.
Plus: a non-fiction romp in the spirit of Swift and Orwell, Fields of Folly; and an Outspoken Interview with literature’s authentic Lord of Misrule.
About the Author:
Voted by the London Times one of the best fifty writers since 1945, Michael Moorcock was shortlisted with Salman Rushdie and Bruce Chatwynd for the Whitbread Prize (Mother London) and won the Guardian Fiction Prize for The Condition of Muzak. He has won almost all major SF and Fantasy awards and several lifetime achievement awards including the ‘Howie’, the Prix Utopiales and the Stoker.
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Ursula K. Le Guin
The Wild Girls
Author: Ursula K. Le Guin
Publisher: PM Press
ISBN: 978-1-60486-403-8
Published May 2011
Format: Paperback
Size: 7.5 by 5
Length: 112 Pages
Subjects: Science Fiction
$12.00
Nebula winner The Wild Girls, newly revised and presented here in book form for the first time, tells of two captive “dirt children” in a society of sword and silk, whose determination to enter “that possible even when unattainable space in which there is room for justice” leads to a violent and loving end.
Plus: Le Guin’s scandalous and scorching Harper’s essay, "Staying Awake While We Read," (also collected here for the first time) which demolishes the pretensions of corporate publishing and the basic assumptions of capitalism as well. And, of course, our Outspoken Interview which promises to reveal the hidden dimensions of America’s best-known SF author. And delivers.
Praise:
“Idiosyncratic and convincing, Le Guin’s characters have a long afterlife.” —Publishers Weekly
“Her worlds are haunting psychological visions molded with firm artistry.” —The Library Journal
About the Author:
Ursula K. Le Guin is the one modern science fiction author who truly needs no introduction. In the forty years since The Left Hand of Darkness, her works have changed not only the face but the tone and the agenda of Science Fiction, introducing themes of gender, race, socialism and anarchism, all the while thrilling readers with trips to strange (and strangely familiar) new worlds. She is our exemplar of what fantastic literature can and should be about.
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Cory Doctorow
The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow
Author: Cory Doctorow
Publisher: PM Press
ISBN: 978-1-60486-404-5
Published: November 2011
Format: Paperback
Size: 7.5 by 5
Page count: 144 Pages
Subjects: Science Fiction
$12.00
Doctorow’s activism and artistry are both on display in this Outspoken Author edition. The crown jewel is his novella, The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow the high velocity adventures of a trans-human teenager in a Disney-dominated Tomorrow, battling wireheads and wumpuses (and having fun doing it!) until he meets the “meat girl” of his dreams, and is forced to choose between immortality and sex.
Plus a live transcription of Cory’s historic address to the 2010 World SF Convention, “Creativity vs. Copyright,” dramatically presenting his controversial case for open-source in both information and art.
Also included is an international Outspoken Interview (skyped from England, Canada, and the U.S.) in which Doctorow reveals the surprising sources of his genius.
About the Author:
Cory Doctorow burst on the SF scene in 2000 like a rocket, inspiring awe in readers (and envy in other writers) with his bestselling novels and stories, which he insisted on giving away via Creative Commons. Meanwhile, as coeditor of the wildly popular Boing Boing, he became the radical new voice of the Web, boldly arguing for internet freedom from corporate control.
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