Venomous Lumpsucker

Venomous Lumpsucker
Author: Ned Beauman
Publisher: Soho Press
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2022-07-12
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1641294132

A dark and witty story of environmental collapse and runaway capitalism from the Booker-listed author of The Teleportation Accident. The near future. Tens of thousands of species are going extinct every year. And a whole industry has sprung up around their extinctions, to help us preserve the remnants, or perhaps just assuage our guilt. For instance, the biobanks: secure archives of DNA samples, from which lost organisms might someday be resurrected . . . But then, one day, it’s all gone. A mysterious cyber-attack hits every biobank simultaneously, wiping out the last traces of the perished species. Now we’re never getting them back. Karin Resaint and Mark Halyard are concerned with one species in particular: the venomous lumpsucker, a small, ugly bottom-feeder that happens to be the most intelligent fish on the planet. Resaint is an animal cognition scientist consumed with existential grief over what humans have done to nature. Halyard is an exec from the extinction industry, complicit in the mining operation that destroyed the lumpsucker’s last-known habitat. Across the dystopian landscapes of the 2030s—a nature reserve full of toxic waste; a floating city on the ocean; the hinterlands of a totalitarian state—Resaint and Halyard hunt for a surviving lumpsucker. And the further they go, the deeper they’re drawn into the mystery of the attack on the biobanks. Who was really behind it? And why would anyone do such a thing? Virtuosic and profound, witty and despairing, Venomous Lumpsucker is Ned Beauman at his very best.

The Teleportation Accident

The Teleportation Accident
Author: Ned Beauman
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 398
Release: 2013-02-26
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1620400243

Long-listed for the 2012 Man Booker Prize, The Teleportation Accident is a hilarious sci-fi noir about sex, Satan, and teleportation devices. When you haven't had sex in a long time, it feels like the worst thing that could ever happen. If you're living in Germany in the 1930s, it probably isn't. But that's no consolation to Egon Loeser, whose carnal misfortunes will push him from the experimental theaters of Berlin to the absinthe bars of Paris to the physics laboratories of Los Angeles, trying all the while to solve two mysteries: Was it really a deal with Satan that claimed the life of his hero, Renaissance set designer Adriano Lavicini, creator of the so-called Teleportation Device? And why is it that a handsome, clever, modest guy like him can't-just once in a while-get himself laid? Ned Bauman has crafted a stunningly inventive, exceptionally funny, dangerously unsteady and (largely) coherent novel about sex, violence, space, time, and how the best way to deal with history is to ignore it.

The Routledge Handbook of Fiction and Belief

The Routledge Handbook of Fiction and Belief
Author: Alison James
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 815
Release: 2023-12-22
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1000993361

The Routledge Handbook of Fiction and Belief offers a fresh reevaluation of the relationship between fiction and belief, surveying key debates and perspectives from a range of disciplines including narrative and cultural studies, science, religion, and politics. This volume draws on global, cutting edge research and theory to investigate the historically variable understandings of fictionality, and allows readers to grasp the role of fictions in our understanding of the world. This interdisciplinary approach provides a thorough introduction to the fundamental themes of: Theoretical and Philosophical Perspectives on Fiction Fiction, Fact, and Science Social Effects and Uses of Fiction Fiction and Politics Fiction and Religion Questioning how fictions in fact shape, mediate or distort our beliefs about the real world, essays in this volume outline the state of theoretical debates from the perspectives of literary theory, philosophy, sociology, religious studies, history, and the cognitive sciences. It aims to take stock of the real or supposed effects that fiction has on the world, and to offer a wide-reaching reflection on the implications of belief in fictions in the so-called “post-truth” era.

Steel Beach

Steel Beach
Author: John Varley
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 652
Release: 1993-08-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1101656093

A science fiction epic from "the best writer in America" (Tom Clancy)—Hugo and Nebula award-winning author John Varley. Fleeing Earth after an alien invasion, the human race stands on the threshold of evolution. Their new home is Luna, a moon colony blessed with creature comforts, prolonged lifespans, digital memories, and instant sex changes. But the people of Luna are bored, restless, suicidal—and so is the computer that monitors their existence...

Girl in Landscape

Girl in Landscape
Author: Jonathan Lethem
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2011-04-13
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0307791777

Girl in Landscape is a daring exploration of the violent nature of sexual awakening, a meditation on language and perception, and an homage to the great American tradition of the Western. • "Jonathan Lethem's imagination [is]...marvelously fertile." --Newsday The heroine is young Pella Marsh, whose mother dies just before her family flees a post-apocalyptic Brooklyn for the frontier of a recently discovered planet. Hating her ineffectual father, and troubled by a powerful attraction to a virile but dangerous loner who holds sway over the little colony, Pella sets out on a course of discovery that will have tragic and irrevocable consequences for the humans in the community and the ancient inhabitants, known only as archbuilders. Girl in Landscape finds Jonathan Lethem twisting forms and literary conventions to create a dazzling, completely unconventional tale.

Glow

Glow
Author: Ned Beauman
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2015-01-20
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0385352611

South London, May 2010: foxes are behaving strangely, Burmese immigrants are going missing, and everyone is trying to get hold of a new party drug called Glow. A young man suffering from a rare sleep disorder will uncover the connections between all these anomalies in this taut, riveting new novel by a young writer hailed by The Guardian as “playful, arresting, unnerving, opulent, rude and—above all—deliciously, startlingly, exuberantly fresh.” Twenty-two-year-old Raf spends his days walking Rose, a bull terrier who guards the transmitters for a pirate radio station, and his nights at raves in warehouses and launderettes. When his friend Theo vanishes without a trace, Raf’s efforts to find him will lead straight into the heart of a global corporate conspiracy. Meanwhile, he’s falling in love with a beautiful young woman he met at one of those raves, but he’ll soon discover that there is far more to Cherish than meets the eye. Combining the pace, drama, and explosive plot twists of a thriller with his trademark intellectual, linguistic, and comedic pyrotechnics, Glow is Ned Beauman’s most compelling, virtuosic, and compulsively readable novel yet.

Do Not Resuscitate

Do Not Resuscitate
Author: Nicholas Ponticello
Publisher: Nicholas Ponticello
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2015-04
Genre: Adventure stories
ISBN: 9780990824732

Jim Frost thinks that when you're dead, you're dead. Gone. Finished. Kaput. But on the eve of his seventy-third birthday, his daughter suggests he have his brain downloaded to a microchip for safekeeping, and Jim is forced to consider what it really means to die--and what it might mean to live forever.Do Not Resuscitate is the firsthand account of Jim Frost, an aging misanthropist who witnessed the rise and fall of the United States as a world power, the digitalization of the planet, the advent of the water wars, and the near collapse of the global economy. Yet he remains impervious to it all. Concerned more with his plasma TV, high-speed Internet, and continual supply of hash, twentysomething Jim takes an under-the-table job off Craigslist delivering mysterious red coolers to strangers in cafés in an effort to pay the bills. But when Jim's enigmatic employer asks him to fly to North Korea for a delivery, Jim starts to wonder what he's gotten himself into.

Battle of the Linguist Mages

Battle of the Linguist Mages
Author: Scotto Moore
Publisher: Tordotcom
Total Pages: 361
Release: 2022-01-11
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1250767695

“This is a stand-alone novel with material enough for six... By the halfway point, it had blown my mind twice... an audacious, genre-bending whirlwind.” —New York Times “It reads like Snow Crash had a dance-off with Gideon the Ninth, in a world where language isn't a virus from outer space, it's a goddamn alien invasion.” —Charles Stross In modern day Los Angeles, a shadowy faction led by the Governor of California develops the arcane art of combat linguistics, planting the seeds of a future totalitarian empire. Isobel is the Queen of the medieval rave-themed VR game Sparkle Dungeon. Her prowess in the game makes her an ideal candidate to learn the secrets of "power morphemes"—unnaturally dense units of meaning that warp perception when skilfully pronounced. But Isobel’s reputation makes her the target of a strange resistance movement led by spellcasting anarchists, who may be the only thing stopping the cabal from toppling California over the edge of a terrible transformation, with forty million lives at stake. Time is short for Isobel to level up and choose a side—because the cabal has attracted much bigger and weirder enemies than the anarchist resistance, emerging from dark and vicious dimensions of reality and heading straight for planet Earth! At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Zoey Punches the Future in the Dick

Zoey Punches the Future in the Dick
Author: Jason Pargin
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2021-10-05
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9781250833488

THE NATIONAL BESTSELLER New York Times bestselling author Jason Pargin's Zoey Punches the Future in the Dick is the latest—and arguably greatest—sci-fi thriller in the Zoey Ashe Series. In the futuristic city of Tabula Ra$a, Zoey Ashe is like a fish so far out of water that it has achieved orbit. After inheriting a criminal empire, the twenty-three year-old finds herself under threat from all sides as a rogue's gallery of larger-than-life enemies think they smell weakness. On the eve of the world's most lavish and ridiculous Halloween celebration, a steamer trunk-sized box arrives at Zoey's door and she is shocked to find that it contains a disemboweled corpse. She is even more shocked when that corpse, controlled by an unknown party, rises and goes on a rampage through the house. Speaking in an electronic voice, it publicly accuses Zoey of being its murderer. This is the kind of thing that almost never happened at her old job. The city was already a ticking time bomb of publicity-hungry vigilantes with superhuman enhancements and Zoey knows this turn of events is unlikely to improve the situation. Now, she and her team of high-tech tricksters have to solve this bizarre murder while simultaneously keeping Tabula Ra$a from descending into chaos. “Biting humor and blatant digs at modern society overlay a subtly brilliant and thoughtful plot” (Publishers Weekly) in John Dies at the End author Jason Pargin’s first installment of the Zoey Ashe Series, Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits. Now, “one of today’s great satirists” (Nerdist) is back with Zoey Punches the Future in the Dick, the second installment in a “Technicolor tomorrowland.” (Kirkus Reviews)