Heroes and Villains; Three Short Novels and a Fable
Orla Swift (author photograph), and Ken Laager (du Burton, MI: Subterranean Press, 2017. Special signed edition is limited to 750 numbered copies. This is copy 608. Hardcover. [10], 315, [5] pages. Contents are Introduction, The Black Sun, The Next, Doglandia, Doctor Helios and Author Notes. Lewis Shiner (born December 30, 1950 in Eugene, Oregon) is an American writer. Shiner began his career as a science fiction writer, and then identified with cyberpunk. He later wrote more mainstream novels, often with magical realism and fantasy elements. Shiner graduated from Southern Methodist University in 1973. Several of his novels have rock music as a theme or main focus, especially the musicians of the late 1960s; for example, Shiner's 1993 novel Glimpses considers the great never-recorded albums of The Doors, Brian Wilson, The Beatles and Jimi Hendrix. Say Goodbye: The Laurie Moss Story (1999) focuses on a fictional up-and-coming female musician and her subsequent fall back down. Slam (1990) is immersed in skate punk and anarchist culture. Perhaps because novels with music as a major theme are not generally considered mainstream genre material, his work has frequently been overlooked. He is a contributing author to the George R. R. Martin-edited anthology Wild Cards, notably creating that universe's most powerful character, the tantric sex magic wielding pimp, Fortunato. In July 2007 Shiner created the web site Fiction Liberation Front (FLF) as a venue for his short stories. The stories are released under the Creative Commons license and are available in HTML and PDF formats. On July 22, 2007, The News & Observer began publishing a weekly column by Shiner, titled "Graphic Scenes", about comics. Tales of adventure and suspense: - Five stage magicians set out to topple Hitler in 1934; - A middle-aged lawyer finds himself battling new, predatory species; - A hate-filled demagogue threatens the peaceful existence of the cats and dogs at the city dump; - A secret agent in 1963 Egypt must stop a madman bent on world domination. The four long pieces in this volume show Lewis Shiner writing hard edged, often political genre fiction at its finest, as Publishers Weekly said about his Collected Stories. These are some of the most accessible stories Shiner has ever written, featuring, as he says in his introduction, car chases, ticking clocks, and things blowing up in slow motion. At the same time, all four stories deal with the abuse of power in a way that has never been more timely. For those new to Shiner's work, Heroes and Villains is an ideal starting point, offering the complex characters and moral issues of his acclaimed novels in condensed and action-packed form. The Black Sun was nominated for the Sidewise Award for Alternate History. What Shiner is doing with these familiar elements is neither emulation nor parody but deconstruction... This is a political and an ethical work, dark-shaded, more in the spirit of Le Carré than Fleming...a love letter to Egypt, at least to the Egypt that was in 1963, and the Egypt that might have been. --Lois Tilton, Locus, on Doctor Helios. . Condition: Very good / Very good.
Keywords: Black Sun, Doctor Helios, Doglandia, The Next, Short Stories, Novella, Fable, Alternate History, Car Chase, Ticking Clock, Slow Motion, Abuse of Power, Action-packed
[Book #84946]
Price: $375.00