Introducing Outspoken Authors

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. 

Buy this book now | Download PDF now 

Reviews:

"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.

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.

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.

Buy this book now | Download PDF now  

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.

2009 Events

Saturday, October 17th, 6pm - SF in SF, with Terry Bisson interviewing Kim Stanley Robinson and Eric Simmons, San Francisco

Sunday, October 18th, 2pm - Kim Stanley Robinson and Terry Bisson @ the Avid Reader, The Tower, Sacramento

Tuesday, October 20th, 7:30pm - Kim Stanley Robinson and Terry Bisson @ Pegasus Books, Berkeley

Wednesday, October 21st, 7pm - Kim Stanley Robinson and Terry Bisson @ the Green Arcade, San Francisco

Tuesday, October 22nd, 7:30 pm - Kim Stanley Robinson and Terry Bisson @ Moe's Books, Berkeley

Friday, October 23rd, 7:30pm -Kim Stanley Robinson and Terry Bisson @ the Avid Reader, Davis CA

Saturday, October 24th, 3pm - Kim Stanley Robinson and Terry Bisson @ Borderlands Books, San Francisco

October 29th - Nov 1st - Terry Bisson at World Fantasy Con

Upcoming Titles:

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
$12.00

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.

Mammoths of the Great Plains
By Eleanor Arneson
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.