Four Futures By Kit Reed

Four speculative near futures by Kit Reed, author of Where and Mormama, showcasing her sharp and transgressive social dystopias where characters are pushed to their psychological limits. @Expectations Jenny lives a typical suburban life and stumbles upon an online community where people create their own lives through words. Soon she becomes so far removed from her life that she can no longer see the line between reality and fantasy. Thinner Than Thou In a world where religion says everyone must look young and perfect, the ultimate heresy is being too fat, too thin, or too old. The Baby Merchant Precipitously falling fertility rates (due to viruses and other biological complications) allow Tom Starbird to make a living finding the perfect "unwanted" baby for the perfect, very wealthy, parents. Enclave The compelling story of an isolated community under pressure, Enclave shows how men, women, and teenagers react when their hermetically-sealed mountaintop community is attacked by biological and electronic viruses. Some become heroes, some become villains . . . and some confound their own and others' expectations. This ebook contains the full text of four novels by Kit Reed. @Expectations Thinner Than Thou The Baby Merchant Enclave At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

MORMAMA is a riveting supernatural, southern gothic tale from Kit Reed, the author of Where. *2018 LOCUS AWARD FINALIST FOR BEST HORROR* *Locus 2017 Recommended Reading List* One of io9's 20 Amazing New Scifi and Fantasy Books for May Kirkus' the Best Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Reads for May Dell Duval has been living on the street since his accident. He can't remember who he was or where he came from. All he has is a tattered note in his pocket with an address for the Ellis house, a sprawling, ancient residence in Jacksonville. He doesn't know why he's been sent here. In the house, Lane and her son Theo have returned to the ancient family home—their last resort. The old house is ruled by an equally ancient trio of tyrannical aunts, who want to preserve everything. Nothing should ever leave the house, including Lane. Something about the house isn't right. Things happen to the men and boys living there. There are forces at work one of which visits Theo each night—Mormama, one mama too many. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

TV says it. Magazines say it. American society commands it. You must be thin. You must be young. Fad diets. Fat-purging pills. Fitness clubs. Liposuction. Breast implants. Steroids. In the tomorrow of Thinner Than Thou, the cult of the body has become the one true religion. The Dedicated Sisters are a religious order sworn to help anorexic, bulimic, and morbidly obese youth. Throughout the land, houses of worship have been replaced by the health clubs of the Crossed Triceps. And through hypnotically powerful evangelical infomercials, the Reverend Earl preaches the heaven of the Afterfat, where you will look like a Greek god and eat anything you want. Just sign over your life savings and come to Sylphania, the most luxurious weight-loss spa in the world, where the Reverend himself will personally supervise your attainment of physical perfection. But the glory of youth and thinness that America worships conceals a hidden world where teens train for the competitive eating circuit, where fat porn and obese strippers feed people's dark desires, and where an underground railroad of rebellious religions remember when people worshipped God instead of the Afterfat. As Annie, an anorexic, and her friend Kelly, who is so massive she can barely walk, find out, the tender promises of the Dedicated Sisters are fulfilled by forced feedings and enforced starvation in hidden prisons. As middle-aged Jeremy discovers, Sylphania is a concentration camp where failure to lose weight and tone up leads to brutal punishment. The Rev. Earl's public sympathy for the overweight conceals a private contempt . . . and, beneath that, a terrible longing known only to a select few. The inevitable decay of old age is the only thing keeping mankind from reaching perfection. Luckily, Reverend Earl has a plan that will take care of that . . . . At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Inside the Castertown MegaMall, the biggest mall in the world, live the night children—runaways, abandoned kids, kids who got lost and were never found. They only come out at night, after all the shoppers are gone. When thirteen-year-old Jule Devereaux visits the mall after the mysterious disappearance of her aunt, she becomes a pawn in the war between two gangs of night children: the Castertown Crazies, led by the stalwart Tick Stiles, and the Dingos, whose leader is the batty Burt Arno. What the night children don't realize is that the megalomaniacal owner of the MegaMall, billionaire Amos Zozz, knows all about them. To him, they are vermin—"rats" living in his beautiful mall—and he has plans to exterminate them. Julie, Tick, and Burt must join forces if they want to survive.... At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

It is easier to imagine the end of the world,' the theorist Fredric Jameson has remarked, 'than to imagine the end of capitalism.' 'Jacobin' Editor Peter Frase argues that technological advancements and environmental threats will inevitably push our society beyond capitalism, and 'Four Futures' imagines just how this might look. Extrapolating possible futures from current changes the world is now experiencing, and drawing upon speculative fictions to illustrate how these futures might be realized, 'Four Futures' examines communism, rentism, socialism, and exterminismor in other words, the socialisms we may reach if a resurgent Left is successful and the barbarisms we may be consigned to if those movements fail.

Future and Fantastic Worlds embodies an unusual approach to the field of bibliographic research, including over 700 annotations of every DAW book published through mid-1987, with indexes by author, artist, and title, providing a massive guide to modern SF writers and their works, with much background data. Interspersed throughout the book are numerous wry, irreverent, and amusing observations offered by the late and highly respected researcher in this extremely valuable genre tool.