Speculative Los Angeles

The debut title in a new city-based anthology series featuring all-new stories with speculative, sci-fi, and paranormal themes—each using distinct neighborhood settings as a launching pad. “A stimulating anthology of 14 futuristic L.A. fables . . . Some of the best of these tales seem illumined by the humanistic spirit of the late Ray Bradbury, poet laureate of Southern California fantasy literature.” —Wall Street Journal As an incubator of the future, Los Angeles has long mesmerized writers from Aldous Huxley to Octavia E. Butler. With its natural disasters, Hollywood artifice, staggering wealth and poverty, and urban sprawl, one can argue that Los Angeles is already so weird, surreal, irrational, and mythic that any fiction emerging from this place should be considered speculative. So, bestselling author Denise Hamilton commissioned fourteen stories (including one of her own) and did exactly that. In Speculative Los Angeles, some of the city’s most prophetic and diverse voices reimagine the metropolis in very different ways. In these pages, you’ll encounter twenty-first-century changelings, dirigibles plying the suburban skies, black holes and jacaranda men lurking in deep suburbia, beachfront property in Century City, walled-off canyons and coastlines reserved for the wealthy, psychic death cults, robot nursemaids, and an alternate LA where Spanish land grants never gave way to urbanization. As with our city-based Akashic Noir Series, each story in Speculative Los Angeles is set in a distinct neighborhood filled with local color, landmarks, and flavor. Since the best speculative fiction provides a wormhole into other worlds while also commenting on our own, that is exactly what you’ll find here. Featuring brand-new stories by: Charles Yu, Aimee Bender, Lisa Morton, Alex Espinoza, Ben H. Winters, Denise Hamilton, Lynell George, Stephen Blackmoore, Francesca Lia Block, Duane Swierczynski, Luis J. Rodriguez, A.G. Lombardo, Kathleen Kaufman, and S. Qiouyi Lu.

“This entry, with its high-quality stories from such genre masters as Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain, outshines the typical all-original anthology.”—Publishers Weekly In Akashic Books’s acclaimed series of original noir anthologies, each book comprises all new stories, each one set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the respective city. This collection of classic stories—the sequel to the award-winning, bestselling Los Angeles Noir—“reaffirm[s] that the shadows cast by the Southland’s sun, and its gloomy ocean fog, have proved some of noir’s most fertile territory” (Los Angeles Times). This anthology features stories by Raymond Chandler, Paul Cain, James Ellroy, Leigh Brackett, James M. Cain, Chester Himes, Ross MacDonald, Walter Mosley, Naomi Hirahara, Margaret Millar, Joseph Hansen, William Campbell Gault, Jervey Tervalon, Kate Braverman, and Yxta Maya Murray. “If you love either mysteries or tales about our corner of the world, pick up Noir 2 . . . Hey, the concept of ‘noir’—dark, steamy mystery stories—was invented here.”—Los Angeles Daily News

A forensic examination of the mutual relationship between art and real estate in a transforming Los Angeles Underlying every great city is a rich and vibrant culture that shapes the texture of life within. In The Speculative City, Susanna Phillips Newbury teases out how art and Los Angeles shaped one another's evolution. She compellingly articulates how together they transformed the Southland, establishing the foundation for its contemporary art infrastructure, and explains how artists came to influence Los Angeles's burgeoning definition as the global city of the twenty-first century. Pairing particular works of art with specific innovations in real estate development, The Speculative City reveals the connections between real estate and contemporary art as they constructed Los Angeles's present-day cityscape. From banal parking lots to Frank Gehry's designs for artists' studios and museums, Newbury examines pivotal interventions by artists and architects, city officials and cultural philanthropists, concluding with an examination of how, in the wake of the 2008 global credit crisis, contemporary art emerged as a financial asset to fuel private wealth and urban gentrification. Both a history of the transformation of the Southland and a forensic examination of works of art, The Speculative City is a rich complement to the California chronicles by such writers as Rebecca Solnit and Mike Davis.

Twenty-six new short stories representing the state of the art in international science fiction. 'Rare and wonderful' The Times 'The most important anthology of SF short fiction since Dangerous Visions' Adam Roberts 'Fizzes with great ideas and wonderful writing... Now this book exists, it feels absurd it didn't exist sooner' SFX The future is coming. It knows no bounds, and neither should science fiction. They say the more things change the more they stay the same. But over the last hundred years, science fiction has changed. Vibrant new generations of writers have sprung up across the globe, proving the old adage false. From Ghana to India, from Mexico to France, from Singapore to Cuba, they draw on their unique backgrounds and culture, changing the face of the genre one story at a time. Prepare yourself for a journey through the wildest reaches of the imagination, to visions of Earth as it might be and the far corners of the universe. Along the way, you will meet robots and monsters, adventurers and time travellers, rogues and royalty. In The Best of World SF, award-winning author Lavie Tidhar acts as guide and companion to a world of stories, from never-before-seen originals to award winners, from twenty-three countries and seven languages. Because the future is coming and it belongs to us all. Stories: 'Immersion' by Aliette de Bodard; 'Debtless' by Chen Qiufan (trans. from Chinese by Blake Stone-Banks); 'Fandom for Robots' by Vina Jie-Min Prasad; 'Virtual Snapshots' by Tlotlo Tsamaase; 'What The Dead Man Said' by Chinelo Onwualu; 'Delhi' by Vandana Singh; 'The Wheel of Samsara' by Han Song (trans. from Chinese by the author); 'Xingzhou' by Yi-Sheng Ng; 'Prayer' by Taiyo Fujii (trans. from Japanese by Kamil Spychalski); 'The Green Ship' by Francesco Verso (trans. from Italian by Michael Colbert); 'Eyes of the Crocodile' by Malena Salazar Maciá (trans. from Spanish by Toshiya Kamei); 'Bootblack' by Tade Thompson; 'The Emptiness in the Heart of all Things' by Fabio Fernandes; 'The Sun From Both Sides' by R.S.A. Garcia; 'Dump' by Cristina Jurado (trans. from Spanish by Steve Redwood); 'Rue Chair' by Gerardo Horacio Porcayo (trans. from Spanish by the author); 'His Master's Voice' by Hannu Rajaniemi; 'Benjamin Schneider's Little Greys' by Nir Yaniv (trans. from Hebrew by Lavie Tidhar); 'The Cryptid' by Emil H. Petersen (trans. from Icelandic by the author); 'The Bank of Burkina Faso' by Ekaterina Sedia; 'An Incomplete Guide...' by Kuzhali Manickavel; 'The Old Man with The Third Hand' by Kofi Nyameye; 'The Green' by Lauren Beukes; 'The Last Voyage of Skidbladnir' by Karin Tidbeck; 'Prime Meridian' by Silvia Moreno-Garcia; 'If At First You Don't Succeed' by Zen Cho

Can social theories forge new paths into an uncertain future? The future has become increasingly difficult to imagine. We might be able to predict a few events, but imagining how looming disasters will coincide is simultaneously necessary and impossible. Drawing on speculative fiction and social theory, Theory for the World to Come is the beginning of a conversation about theories that move beyond nihilistic conceptions of the capitalism-caused Anthropocene and toward generative bodies of thought that provoke creative ways of thinking about the world ahead. Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer draws on such authors as Kim Stanley Robinson and Octavia Butler, and engages with afrofuturism, indigenous speculative fiction, and films from the 1970s and ’80s to help think differently about the future and its possibilities. Forerunners: Ideas First Short books of thought-in-process scholarship, where intense analysis, questioning, and speculation take the lead

A TIME 100 Must-Read Book of 2021 A New York Times Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Book of 2021 The Stonewall Book Award winner of 2022 Named a Best Book of 2021 by NPR, The New York Public Library, Publishers Weekly and more! A triumphant, genre-bending breakout novel from one of the boldest new voices in contemporary fiction. Vern—seven months pregnant and desperate to escape the strict religious compound where she was raised—flees for the shelter of the woods. There, she gives birth to twins, and plans to raise them far from the influence of the outside world. But even in the forest, Vern is a hunted woman. Forced to fight back against the community that refuses to let her go, she unleashes incredible brutality far beyond what a person should be capable of, her body wracked by inexplicable and uncanny changes. To understand her metamorphosis and to protect her small family, Vern has to face the past, and more troublingly, the future—outside the woods. Finding the truth will mean uncovering the secrets of the compound she fled but also the violent history in America that produced it. Rivers Solomon’s Sorrowland is a genre-bending work of Gothic fiction. Here, monsters aren’t just individuals, but entire nations. It is a searing, seminal book that marks the arrival of a bold, unignorable voice in American fiction.

Octavia E. Butler said, “There’s nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns.” New Suns 2 brings you fresh visions of the strange, the unexpected, the shocking—breakthrough stories, stories shining with emerging truths, stories that pierce stale preconceptions with their beauty and bravery. Like the first New Suns anthology (winner of the World Fantasy, Locus, IGNYTE, and British Fantasy awards), this book liberates writers of many races to tell us tales no one has ever told. Many things come in twos: dualities, binaries, halves, and alternates. Twos are found throughout New Suns 2, in eighteen science fiction, fantasy, and horror stories revealing daring futures, hidden pasts, and present-day worlds filled with unmapped wonders. Including stories by Daniel H. Wilson, K. Tempest Bradford, Darcie Little Badger, Geetanjali Vandemark, John Chu, Nghi Vo, Tananarive Due, Alex Jennings, Karin Lowachee, Saad Hossain, Hiromi Goto, Minsoo Kang, Tlotlo Tsamaase, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, Malka Older, Kathleen Alcalá, Christopher Caldwell and Jaymee Goh with a foreword by Walter Mosley and an afterword by Dr. Grace Dillon.

Sisters of the Revolution gathers a highly curated selection of feminist speculative fiction (science fiction, fantasy, horror, and more) chosen by one of the most respected editorial teams in speculative literature today, the award-winning Ann and Jeff VanderMeer. Including stories from the 1970s to the present day, the collection seeks to expand the conversation about feminism while engaging the reader in a wealth of imaginative ideas. From the literary heft of Angela Carter to the searing power of Octavia Butler, Sisters of the Revolution gathers daring examples of speculative fiction’s engagement with feminism. Dark, satirical stories such as Eileen Gunn’s “Stable Strategies for Middle Management” and the disturbing horror of James Tiptree Jr.’s “The Screwfly Solution” reveal the charged intensity at work in the field. Including new, emerging voices like Nnedi Okorafor and featuring international contributions from Angelica Gorodischer and many more, Sisters of the Revolution seeks to expand the ideas of both contemporary fiction and feminism to new fronts. Moving from the fantastic to the futuristic, the subtle to the surreal, these stories will provoke thoughts and emotions about feminism like no other book available today. Contributors include: Angela Carter, Angelica Gorodischer, Anne Richter, Carol Emshwiller, Catherynne M. Valente, Eileen Gunn, Eleanor Arnason, Elizabeth Vonarburg, Hiromi Goto, James Tiptree Jr., Joanna Russ, Karin Tidbeck, Kelley Eskridge, Kelly Barnhill, Kit Reed, L. Timmel Duchamp, Leena Krohn, Leonora Carrington, Nalo Hopkinson, Nnedi Okorafor, Octavia Butler, Pamela Sargent, Pat Murphy, Rachel Swirsky, Rose Lemberg, Susan Palwick, Tanith Lee, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Vandana Singh.