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In Douglas Lain's debut novel set during the turbulent year of 1968, Christopher Robin Milne, the inspiration for his father's fictional creation, struggles to emerge from a manufactured life, in a story of hope and transcendence. Billy Moon was Christopher Robin Milne, the son of A. A. Milne, the world-famous author of Winnie the Pooh and other beloved children's classics. Billy's life was no fairy-tale, though. Being the son of a famous author meant being ignored and even mistreated by famous parents; he had to make his own way in the world, define himself, and reconcile his self-image with the image of him known to millions of children. A veteran of World War II, a husband and father, he ...
NOMINATED FOR THE 2016 PHILIP K. DICK AWARD “When the alien gets around to unzipping her jumpsuit it’ll be impossible to see what’s underneath.” UFOlogist Harold Flint is heartbroken and depressed that the aliens that have landed on the White House lawn appear to be straight out of an old B movie. They wave to the television cameras in their sequined jumpsuits, form a nonprofit organization offering new age enlightenment, and hover their saucers over the streets of New York looking for converts. Harold wants no part of this kitschy invasion until one of the aliens, a beautiful blonde named Asket, begs him to investigate the saucers again and write another UFO book. The aliens and the...
In the Shadow of the Towers compiles nearly twenty works of speculative fiction responding to and inspired by the events of 9/11, from writers seeking to confront, rebuild, and carry on, even in the face of overwhelming emotion. Writer and editor Douglas Lain presents a thought-provoking anthology featuring a variety of award-winning and best-selling authors, from Jeff VanderMeer (Annihilation) and Cory Doctorow (Little Brother) to Susan Palwick (Flying in Place) and James Morrow (Towing Jehovah). Touching on themes as wide-ranging as politics, morality, and even heartfelt nostalgia, today's speculative fiction writers prove that the rubric of the fantastic offers an incomparable view into how we respond to tragedy. Each contributor, in his or her own way, contemplates the same question: How can we continue dreaming in the shadow of the towers?
"It’s legitimate SF, and it’s ‘mainstream,’ and it’s metafiction: I don’t know anyone else doing quite what Lain is doing; fascinating work, moving, strikingly honest, powerful.”—Rich Horton, Locus Magazine Gore Vidal meets Philip K. Dick in this collection of “lit-fabulist” stories. Douglas Lain’s work has been attracting high profile attention throughout the genre, and this collection features some of his finest and most controversial fiction. These stories present electric messiahs, identity constructs, the Beatles, and even nuclear Armageddon as comic foils for Lain’s everyman characters. Here is an America where the packets of Sea Monkeys that arrive in the mail contain secret messages and the girl next door can breathe underwater. With Last Week’s Apocalypse, Douglas Lain arrives with a punch line and a warning.
Advancing Conversations is a line of interview books documenting conversations with artists, authors, philosophers, economists, scientists, and activists whose works are aimed at the future and at progress. The biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey, as the world's pre-eminent longevity advocate, is nothing if not future oriented. De Grey is the founder of the SENS Research Foundation, an organization developing medical interventions to repair the damage the body does to itself over time. Stated more directly, Aubrey de Grey and his organization aim to defeat aging. In 2005 a panel of scientists and doctors from MIT, Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Microsoft, and the Venter Institute participated in a contest to judge whether de Grey's "Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence" were worthy of debate and verification or whether these ideas were wrong on their face. The panel found that de Grey's proposals for intervening in the aging process, while speculative, often "ran parallel to existing research" and were not "demonstrably wrong."
Tells the story of how foraging from neighborhood fruit trees can lead to a radical encounter. Explains psychogeography, which is a way of wandering through urban landscapes and being attracted and repulsed by the built environments you find along the way. Douglas Lain has written a book about urban foraging as a psychogeographic wander. It is a philosophy book, a memoir, and a radical self-help book for people living during an epoch when the self is under siege. This is a book that aims to derail the reader and the author. "Pick Your Battle" was successfully funded through Kickstarter on July 13th, 2010. Using the foraging of fruit trees and blackberry bushes as the jumping off point, this surreal effort towards an event or an act that might change the coordinates of our collective situation shows that, during a time of economic collapse, limitless war, and peak insanity just stepping outside and getting to know the plant life in your neighborhood can constitute a radical break.
The bastard-offspring of They Live and The Day the Earth Stood Still, as told by Jean Paul Sartre. Shape-changing aliens may have landed on the Whitehouse lawn and subsequently integrated into human society, but humanity is still full of self-centered and self-absorbed individuals. Laura’s just scraping by on her art teacher’s salary. Donald, a bestselling author and UFOlogist who provided counseling to abductees, has tried to distance himself from the saucer landings and is looking to move on with his life. But everything changes when Shelly, an alien enrolled in Laura’s art class, mysteriously switches places with Laura. Life begins to unravel. Laura then realizes this isn’t the fi...
Despite creating vast inequalities and propping up reactionary world regimes, capitalism has many passionate defenders—but not because of what it withholds from some and gives to others. Capitalism dominates, Todd McGowan argues, because it mimics the structure of our desire while hiding the trauma that the system inflicts upon it. People from all backgrounds enjoy what capitalism provides, but at the same time are told more and better is yet to come. Capitalism traps us through an incomplete satisfaction that compels us after the new, the better, and the more. Capitalism's parasitic relationship to our desires gives it the illusion of corresponding to our natural impulses, which is how ca...
With a taut, poetic style, Lippit produces speculative readings of secret and shadow archives and visual structures or phenomenologies of the inside, charting the materiality of what both can and cannot be seen in the radioactive light of the twentieth century.
This classic work of science fiction is widely considered to be the ultimate time-travel novel. When Daniel Eakins inherits a time machine, he soon realizes that he has enormous power to shape the course of history. He can foil terrorists, prevent assassinations, or just make some fast money at the racetrack. And if he doesn't like the results of the change, he can simply go back in time and talk himself out of making it! But Dan soon finds that there are limits to his powers and forces beyond his control.