Stranger Things Happen (29 page)

Magic for
Beginners
,
Kelly Link

Link's engaging and funny second collection -- call it
kitchen-sink magical realism -- riffs on haunted convenience
stores, husbands and wives, rabbits, zombies, weekly apocalyptic
poker parties, witches, superheroes, marriage, and cannons -- and
includes several new stories.

The Ant King
and Other Stories
,
Benjamin Rosenbaum

A dazzling, postmodern debut collection of pulp and surreal
fictions: a writer of alternate histories defends his patron’s
zeppelin against assassins and pirates; a woman transforms into
hundreds of gumballs; an emancipated children’s collective goes
house hunting.

Butcher
Bird
,
Richard Kadrey

Spyder Lee is a happy man who lives in San Francisco and owns a
tattoo shop. One night an angry demon tries to bite his head off
before he's saved by a stranger. The demon infected Spyder with
something awful - the truth. He can suddenly see the world as it
really is: full of angels and demons and monsters and
monster-hunters. A world full of black magic and mysteries. These
are the Dominions, parallel worlds full of wonder, beauty and
horror. The Black Clerks, infinitely old and infinitely powerful
beings whose job it is to keep the Dominions in balance, seem to
have new interests and a whole new agenda. Dropped into the middle
of a conflict between the Black Clerks and other forces he doesn't
fully understand, Spyder finds himself looking for a magic book
with the blind swordswoman who saved him. Their journey will take
them from deserts to lush palaces, to underground caverns, to the
heart of Hell itself.

Down and Out in
the Magic Kingdom
,
Cory Doctorow

Jules is a young man barely a century old. He's lived long
enough to see the cure for death and the end of scarcity, to learn
ten languages and compose three symphonies...and to realize his
boyhood dream of taking up residence in Disney World.Disney World!
The greatest artistic achievement of the long-ago twentieth
century. Now in the keeping of a network of "ad-hocs" who keep the
classic attractions running as they always have, enhanced with only
the smallest high-tech touches.Now, though, the "ad hocs" are under
attack. A new group has taken over the Hall of the Presidents, and
is replacing its venerable audioanimatronics with new, immersive
direct-to-brain interfaces that give guests the illusion of being
Washington, Lincoln, and all the others. For Jules, this is an
attack on the artistic purity of Disney World itself. Worse: it
appears this new group has had Jules killed. This upsets him. (It's
only his fourth death and revival, after all.) Now it's war....

Password
Incorrect
,
Nick Name

25 short, sometimes funny and sometimes mean stories ideal to
rediscover the joy of reading a book as shiny and beautiful as a
brand new cell phone.
A look from a distance at the absurdity of our present day lives:
fights with the less and less comprehensible equipment, pursuit of
the latest technological news, pitfalls of our modern lifestyle,
useless inventions and issues racing in all directions at a
breakneck speed.
A lot of entertainment and a little food for thought. Just perfect
for the moment when you're finally bored with exploring the alarm
settings on your new iPhone.

Just so
Stories
,
Rudyard Kipling

The stories, first published in 1902, are pourquoi stories,
fantastic accounts of how various phenomena came about. A
forerunner of these stories is "How Fear Came" in The Second Jungle
Book (1895), in which Mowgli hears the story of how the tiger got
his stripes.

The Book of
Dragons
,
Edith Nesbit

Eight madcap tales of unpredictable dragons — including one made
of ice, another that takes refuge in the General Post Office, and a
fire-breathing monster that flies out of an enchanted book and eats
an entire soccer team!

Blindsight
,
Peter Watts

Two months since sixty-five thousand alien objects clenched
around the Earth like a luminous fist, screaming to the heavens as
the atmosphere burned them to ash. Two months since that moment of
brief, bright surveillance by agents unknown.

Two months of silence, while a world holds its breath.

Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past
Neptune's orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system:
a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam.
Whatever's out there isn't talking to us. It's talking to some
distant star, perhaps. Or perhaps to something closer, something en
route.

So who do you send to force introductions on an intelligence
with motives unknown, maybe unknowable? Who do you send to meet the
alien when the alien doesn't want to meet?

You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain
surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores.
You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he
sees x-rays and tastes ultrasound, so compromised by grafts and
splices he no longer feels his own flesh. You send a pacifist
warrior in the faint hope she won't be needed, and the fainter one
she'll do any good if she is. You send a monster to command them
all, an extinct hominid predator once called vampire, recalled from
the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of
sociopaths. And you send a synthesist—an informational topologist
with half his mind gone—as an interface between here and there, a
conduit through which the Dead Center might hope to understand the
Bleeding Edge.

You send them all to the edge of interstellar space, praying you
can trust such freaks and retrofits with the fate of a world. You
fear they may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to
find.

But you'd give anything for that to be true, if you only knew
what was waiting for them...

Little
Brother
,
Cory Doctorow

Marcus, a.k.a “w1n5t0n,” is only seventeen years old, but he
figures he already knows how the system works–and how to work the
system. Smart, fast, and wise to the ways of the networked world,
he has no trouble outwitting his high school’s intrusive but clumsy
surveillance systems.

But his whole world changes when he and his friends find
themselves caught in the aftermath of a major terrorist attack on
San Francisco. In the wrong place at the wrong time, Marcus and his
crew are apprehended by the Department of Homeland Security and
whisked away to a secret prison where they’re mercilessly
interrogated for days.

When the DHS finally releases them, Marcus discovers that his
city has become a police state where every citizen is treated like
a potential terrorist. He knows that no one will believe his story,
which leaves him only one option: to take down the DHS himself.

I, Robot
,
Cory Doctorow

"I, Robot" is a science-fiction short story by Cory Doctorow
published in 2005.
The story is set in the type of police state needed to ensure that
only one company is allowed to make robots, and only one type of
robot is allowed.
The story follows single Father detective Arturo Icaza de
Arana-Goldberg while he tries to track down his missing teenage
daughter. The detective is a bit of an outcast because his wife
defected to Eurasia, a rival Superpower.