by Terry Bisson
PLUS: “Writing SF During World War III,” and an Outspoken Interview that takes you straight into the heart and mind of one of today’s edgiest and most uncompromising speculative authors.
About the Author:
Ever since her first story was published in the revolutionary New Worlds in 1972, Eleanor Arnason has been acknowledged as the heir to the feminist legacy of Russ and Le Guin. The first winner of the prestigious Tiptree Award, she has been short listed for both the Nebula and the Hugo.
PM PRESS
OUTSPOKEN AUTHORS
The Left Left Behind
Terry Bisson
978-1-60486-086-3 $12
Hugo and Nebula award-winner Terry Bisson is best known for his short stories, which range from the southern sweetness of “Bears Discover Fire” to the alienated aliens of “They’re Made out of Meat.” He is also a 1960s’ New Left vet with a history of activism and an intact (if battered) radical ideology.
The Left Behind novels (about the so-called “Rapture” in which all the born-agains ascend straight to heaven) are among the best-selling Christian books in the U.S., describing in lurid detail the adventures of those “left behind” to battle the Anti-Christ. Put Bisson and the Born-Agains together, and what do you get? The Left Left Behind-a sardonic, merciless, tasteless, take-no-prisoners satire of the entire apocalyptic enterprise that spares no one-predatory preachers, goth lingerie, Pacifica radio, Indian casinos, gangsta rap, and even “art cars” at Burning Man.
Plus: “Special Relativity,” a one-act drama that answers the question: When Albert Einstein, Paul Robeson, J. Edgar Hoover are raised from the dead at an anti-Bush rally, which one wears the dress? As with all Outspoken Author books, there is a deep interview and autobiography: at length, in-depth, no-holds-barred and all-bets off: an extended tour though the mind and work, the history and politics of our Outspoken Author. Surprises are promised.
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OUTSPOKEN AUTHORS
The Lucky Strike
Kim Stanley Robinson
978-1-60486-085-6 $12
Combining dazzling speculation with a profoundly humanist vision, Kim Stanley Robinson is known as not only the most literary but also the most progressive (read “radical”) of today’s top rank SF authors. His bestselling “Mars Trilogy” tells the epic story of the future colonization of the red planet, and the revolution that inevitably follows. His latest novel, Galileo’s Dream, is a stunning combination of historical drama and far-flung space opera, in which the ten dimensions of the universe itself are rewoven to ensnare history’s most notorious torturers.
The Lucky Strike, the classic and controversial story Robinson has chosen for PM’s new Outspoken Authors series, begins on a lonely Pacific island, where a crew of untested men are about to take off in an untried aircraft with a deadly payload that will change our world forever. Until something goes wonderfully wrong.
Plus: A Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions, in which Robinson dramatically deconstructs “alternate history” to explore what might have been if things had gone differently over Hiroshima that day.
As with all Outspoken Author books, there is a deep interview and autobiography: at length, in-depth, no-holds-barred and all-bets off: an extended tour though the mind and work, the history and politics of our Outspoken Author.
PM PRESS
OUTSPOKEN AUTHORS
The Wild Girls
Ursula K. Le Guin
978-1-60486-403-8 $12
Ursula K. Le Guin is the one modern science fiction author who truly needs no introduction. In the forty years since The Left Hand of Darkness, her works have changed not only the face but the tone and the agenda of SF, introducing themes of gender, race, socialism and anarchism, all the while thrilling readers with trips to strange (and strangely familiar) new worlds. She is our exemplar of what fantastic literature can and should be about.
Her Nebula winner The Wild Girls, newly revised and presented here in book form for the first time, tells of two captive “dirt children” in a society of sword and silk, whose determination to enter “that possible even when unattainable space in which there is room for justice” leads to a violent and loving end.
Plus: Le Guin’s scandalous and scorching Harper’s essay, “Staying Awake While We Read”, (also collected here for the first time) which demolishes the pretensions of corporate publishing and the basic assumptions of capitalism as well. And of course our Outspoken Interview which promises to reveal the hidden dimensions of America’s best-known SF author. And delivers.
“If you want excess and risk and intelligence, try Le Guin.”
—The San Francisco Chronicle
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OUTSPOKEN AUTHORS
Modem Times 2.0
Michael Moorcock
978-1-60486-308-6 $12
As the editor of London’s revolutionary New Worlds magazine in the swinging sixties, Michael Moorcock has been credited with virtually inventing modern Science Fiction: publishing such figures as Norman Spinrad, Samuel R. Delany, Brian Aldiss and J.G. Ballard.
Moorcock’s own literary accomplishments include his classic Mother London, a romp through urban history conducted by psychic outsiders; his comic Pyat quartet, in which a Jewish antisemite examines the roots of the Nazi Holocaust; Behold The Man, the tale of a time tourist who fills in for Christ on the cross; and of course the eternal hero Elric, swordswinger, hellbringer and bestseller.
And now Moorcock’s most audacious creation, Jerry Cornelius–assassin, rock star, chronospy and maybe-Messiah–is back in Modem Times 2.0, a time twisting odyssey that connects 60s London with post-Obama America, with stops in Palm Springs and Guan-tanamo. Modem Times 2.0 is Moorcock at his most outrageously readable–a masterful mix of erudition and subversion.
Plus: a non-fiction romp in the spirit of Swift and Orwell, Fields of Folly; and an Outspoken Interview with literature’s authentic Lord of Misrule.
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FOUND IN TRANSLATION
Calling All Heroes:
A Manual for Taking Power
Paco Ignacio Taibo II
Translated by Gregory Nipper
978-1-60486-205-8 $12
The euphoric idealism of grassroots reform and the tragic reality of revolutionary failure are at the center of this speculative novel that opens with a real historical event. On October 2, 1968, 10 days before the Summer Olympics in Mexico, the Mexican government responds to a student demonstration in Tlatelolco by firing into the crowd, killing more than 200 students and civilians and wounding hundreds more. The massacre of Tlatelolco was erased from the official record as easily as authorities washing the blood from the streets, and no one was ever held accountable.
It is two years later and Nestor, a journalist and participant in the fateful events, lies recovering in the hospital from a knife wound. His fevered imagination leads him in the collection of facts and memories of the movement and its assassination in the company of figures from his childhood. Nestor calls on the heroes of his youth—Sherlock Holmes, Doc Holliday, Wyatt Earp and D’Artagnan among them—to join him in launching a new reform movement conceived by his intensely active imagination.
“The real enchantment of Mr. Taibo’s storytelling lies in the wild and melancholy tangle of life he sees everywhere.” —New York Times Book Review
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OUTSPOKEN AUTHORS
The Underbelly
Gary Phillips
978-1-60486-206-5 $14
The explosion of wealth and development in downtown L.A. is a thing of wonder. But regardless of how big and shiny our buildings get, we should not forget the ones this wealth and development has overlooked and pushed out. This is the context for Phillips’ novella The Underbelly, as a semi-homeless Vietnam vet named Magrady searches for a wheelchair-bound friend gone missing from Skid Row—a friend who might be working a dangerous scheme against major players. Magrady’s journey is a solo sortie where the flashback-prone protagonist mus
t deal with the impact of gentrification; take-no-prisoners community organizers; an unflinching cop from his past in Vietnam; an elderly sexpot out for his bones; a lusted-after magical skull; chronic-lovin’ knuckleheads; and the perils of chili cheese fries at midnight. Combining action, humor and a street level gritty POV, The Underbelly is illustrated with photos and drawings.
Plus: a rollicking interview wherein Phillips riffs on Ghetto Lit, politics, noir and the proletariat, the good negroes and bad knee-grows of pop culture, Redd Foxx and Lord Buckley, and wrestles with the future of books in the age of want.
“Magrady’s adventures, with a distinctive noir feeling and appreciation for comic books, started as an online, serialized mystery. Drawings and an interview with Phillips enhance the package, offering a compelling perspective on race and class issues in South Central L.A.” —Booklist
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SPECTACULAR FICTION
Sensation
Nick Mamatas
978-1-60486-084-9 $14.95
Love. Politics. Parasitic manipulation. Julia Hernandez left her husband, shot a real-estate developer out to gentrify Brooklyn, and then vanished without a trace. Well, perhaps one or two traces were left… With different personal and consumption habits, Julia has slipped out of the world she knew and into the Simulacrum—a place between the cracks of our existence from which human history is both guided and thwarted by the conflict between a species of anarchist wasp and a collective of hyperintelligent spider. When Julia’s ex-husband Raymond spots her in a grocery store he doesn’t usually patronize, he’s drawn into an underworld of radical political gestures and Internet organizing looking to overthrow a ruling class it knows nothing about—and Julia is the new media sensation of both this world and the Simulacrum.
Told ultimately from the collective point of view of another species, Sensation plays with the elements of the Simulacrum we all already live in: media reports, businessspeak, blog entries, text messages, psychological evaluation forms, and the always fraught and kindly lies lovers tell one another.
About the Author:
Nick Mamatas is the author of three novels, including Move Under Ground and Under My Roof, which have been translated into German, Italian, and Greek and nominated for the Bram Stoker and International Horror Guild awards and the Kurd Lasswitz Prize. Many of his sixty short stories were recently collected in You Might Sleep… As co-editor of Clarkesworld, the online magazine of the fantastic, he was nominated for the World Fantasy award and for science fiction’s Hugo award, and with Ellen Datlow he is co-editor of the anthology Haunted Legends. Nick’s reportage and essays on radical politics, digital society, pop culture and everyday life have appeared in the Village Voice, In These Times, Clamor, The New Humanist, The Smart Set and many other venues, including various Disinformation and Smart Pop Books anthologies. A native New Yorker, Nick now lives in the California Bay Area.
PM Press was founded at the end of 2007 by a small collection of folks with decades of publishing, media, and organizing experience. PM Press co-conspirators have published and distributed hundreds of books, pamphlets, CDs, and DVDs. Members of PM have founded enduring book fairs, spearheaded victorious tenant organizing campaigns, and worked closely with bookstores, academic conferences, and even rock bands to deliver political and challenging ideas to all walks of life. We’re old enough to know what we’re doing and young enough to know what’s at stake.
We seek to create radical and stimulating fiction and non-fiction books, pamphlets, t-shirts, visual and audio materials to entertain, educate, and inspire you. We aim to distribute these through every available channel with every available technology, whether that means you are seeing anarchist classics at our bookfair stalls; reading our latest vegan cookbook at the café; downloading geeky fiction e-books; or digging new music and timely videos from our website.
PM Press is always on the lookout for talented and skilled volunteers, artists, activists and writers to work with. If you have a great idea for a project or can contribute in some way, please get in touch.
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PO Box 23912
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510-658-3906
www.pmpress.org
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