Meet Me in the Future
Stories
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Description
A Book Riot 5 Fantastic Speculative Titles for Fall
Amazon Best Books of the Month: Science Fiction & Fantasy
Barnes & Noble Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Books of August 2019
A Vernacular Best Short Story Collection of 2019
2019 Locus Recommended Reading List
“One of the best story collections of the past few years.” —Booklist, starred review
“16 hard-edged pieces that gleam like gems in a mosaic.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Kameron Hurley is a badass.” —Annalee Newitz, author of Autonomous
When renegade author Kameron Hurley (The Light Brigade; The Stars Are Legion) takes you to the future, be prepared for the unexpected. Yes, it will be dangerous, frequently brutal, and often devastating. But it’s also savagely funny, deliriously strange, and absolutely brimming with adventure.
In these edgy, unexpected tales, a body-hopping mercenary avenges his pet elephant, and an orphan falls in love with a sentient starship. Fighters ally to power a reality-bending engine, and a swamp-dwelling introvert tries to save the world—from her plague-casting former wife.
So come meet Kameron Hurley in the future. The version she's created here is weirder—and far more hopeful—than you could ever imagine.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
With snapshots of futures that haunt, obsess, or tantalize, this collection from Hugo-winner Hurley (The Light Brigade) offers 16 hard-edged pieces that gleam like gems in a mosaic. Undermining the admiration for military adventure that pervades much science fiction, "The Red Secretary" presents a world that indulges in war and then purges all its practitioners, cyclically. In "The War of Heroes," underdogs who rise up to defeat the oppressor discover that " Hero is one who not only slays monsters, but creates monsters to slay." The stories that celebrate fighting monsters acknowledge that losing is no shame (in "Our Faces, Radiant Sisters, Our Faces Full of Light!", a callback to the work of SF legend James Tiptree Jr.) and that identity is a matter of choice more than genetics (in "The Fisherman and the Pig"). Hurley works at the edges of genres, mixing SF with detective noir ("The Sinners and the Sea," "Garda"), military adventure ("The Light Brigade," "The Improbable War"), and fantasy quest ("The Plague Givers") in ways that refresh the motifs of the mixed fictions. In "Tumbledown," the benefit of making hard choices is getting to tell the stories "about the world we'll make together," and readers will eagerly follow Hurley into these possible worlds and many more.
