Quirky Sci-Punk-Fiction
Explore a handpicked list of quirky sci-punk fiction books—wild, imaginative tales blending punk edge with sci-fi weirdness. Discover your next offbeat read!
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Fractal Paisleys
by Paul Di Filippo
Ten funny, off-the-wall tales--examples of what the author calls his "trailer park science fiction"--reveal the real reason for the dinosaurs' disappearance and explain the appearance of a talking moosehead in Providence, Rhode Island. IP.
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Gnarl!
by Rudy Rucker
Though he is also a mathematician, computer scientist, and essayist, Rudy Rucker is best known for his ground-breaking science fiction. The companion volume to Seek!, Rucker's selected nonfiction, Gnarl! brings together three dozen of the writer's best science fiction short stories. His first major story collection in 17 years, the volume includes a number of previously unanthologized stories, including tales cowritten with Marc Laidlaw, Paul Di Filippo, and Bruce Sterling. Classics such as "The Fifty-Seventh Franz Kafka," a timely meditation on the paradoxes of cloning, are side by side with works of pseudomemoir like "The Indian Rope Trick Explained." The Rucker formula - cutting-edge physics, a wild but perversely logical imagination, and a decidedly punk attitude - illuminates this new collection.
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Amnesiascope
by Steve Erickson
A portrait of early-twenty-first-century Los Angeles and an American asylum is seen from the perspective of a narrator who lives on the edge of reality and brings together such characters as nomadic artists, reluctant pornographers, and alienated movie critics
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Cobralingus
by Jeff Noon
This novel traces the conception of cobralingus, a way of changing language to a mutated, liquid state that can then be transformed into something entirely different. Illustrations.
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Ambient
by Jack Womack
Combining the nightmarish vision of J. G. Ballard and the linguistic brilliance of Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, Ambient is Jack Womack's stunning first novel. Set in a decaying and violent twenty-first-century New York, Ambient tells the story of O'malley, a very special bodyguard for an outrageously ruthless CEO named Dryden, and of his attempts to woo Dryden's personal femme fatale, Avalon. But what begins as a simple case of unrequited love quickly turns into a complicated deathtrap involving corporate intrigue, murderous family rivalries, and perverse subcultures. A stylish and brilliantly inventive novel, Ambient creates a world that is powerful, convincing, and prophetically real.
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Gun, With Occasional Music
by Jonathan Lethem
Twenty-first-century private detective Conrad Metcalf has a dead doctor on his hands, a monkey on his back, and a kangaroo in his waiting room in a first novel with a sharp-edged, funny vision of the future.
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The Dogs of Winter
by Kem Nunn
Jack Fletcher is hired to take pictures of a dangerous, premier mysto surf spot off the Pacific Northwest. But disaster soon strikes when an Indian boy drowns--and the men from his reservation seek vengeance.
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Cities of the Red Night
by William S. Burroughs
Clem Snide, a private detective, has to solve a case of ritual murder. In the Gobi Desert 100,000 years ago, a red virus has erupted. And in the 18th century, gay pirates have set up their own republics in South America and are at war with the conquistadors. All three stories are merged at the end in a giant trans-time, trans-space battle.
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Writing on Drugs
by Sadie Plant
The author explores the intimate and often fruitful relationship between drugs--narcotics, stimulants, and hallucinogens--and the quest for knowledge by focusing on the writers who used them well--Coleridge, Freud, and Burroughs among them.