New Wave Speculative Fiction
Explore the best New Wave Speculative Fiction books—innovative, thought-provoking stories that redefine the genre. Discover groundbreaking authors and visionary tales today.
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Stranger on the Loose
by D. Harlan Wilson
In this collection of stories, D. Harlan Wilson deconditions the boundaries of reality with the same offbeat methodology that energized his first book The Kafka Effekt. Stranger on the Loose is an absurdist account of urban and suburban social dynamics, and of the effects that contemporary image-culture has on the (in)human condition. These stories operate on a plane of existence that resists, and in many cases breaks, the laws of causality. Parrots teach college courses. Fl?neurs impersonate bowling pins. Bodybuilders sneak into people's homes and strike poses at their leisure. Passive-aggressive glaciers and miniature elephant-humans antagonize the seedy streets of Suburbia. Apes disguised as scientists reincarnate Walt Disney, who discovers that he is a Chinese box full of disguised Walt Disneys . . . Wilson's imagination is a rare specimen. The acorns of his fiction are planted in the soil of normalcy, but what grows out of that soil is a dark, witty, otherworldly jungle.
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Ten One
by Lance Olsen
Fiction. You're sitting in a darkened theater, waiting for the movie to begin when American culture explodes all around in I-Max, Sensurround, Technicolor--this is the experience of reading Lance Olsen's brilliant 10:01, a novel in frames that unreels the random thoughts of a random movie audience: a screening of our own moment that Olsen lights with the white heat of a a projector beam. Be sure to check out Lance Olsen's other titles at SPD, including SEWING SHUT MY EYES.
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Girl Imagined by Chance
by Lance Olsen
A critifictional novel about a couple who create a make-believe daughter
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Tonguing the Zeitgeist
by Lance Olsen
In the not-too-distant future, musicians are forced to sell their souls to MTV and take on a glitzy media image to have a chance at stardom.
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Hideous Beauties
by Lance Olsen
HIDEOUS BEAUTIES is a collection of a dozen outrageous fictions, each basedon a photograph, painting, sketch, collage, or assemblage by an equallyoutrageous artist (Hans Bellmer, Ed Kienholz, Joel-Peter Witkin, et alia),that explores the amphibious edge where language and image splice.Death is a village of mermaids, suburbia a hunchbacked dwarf at the door whojust won't go away, identity a self that can't stop cleaving, millennial sexa radical form of digestion.In other words, Lance Olsen is at it again, and with a vengeance, invitingus into his absurd, unsettling, tender, and formally disruptive fever-dreamworlds so that we might wake up, and wake up changed.
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Terror-dot-gov
by Harold Jaffe
As in Harold Jaffe's two previous "docufiction" collections, False Positive and 15 Serial Killers, the author of Terror-Dot-Gov selects then "treats" his texts such that the reader is incapable of distinguishing between fact and fiction. That ambiguity permits Jaffe to cunningly tease out the contradictions and subtexts of official "news" or "information" and torque it into what it so often is fundamentally: jingoism, xenophobia and propaganda. Jaffe's subject in Terror-Dot-Gov is not the everywhere-represented "illicit" terrorism so much as "licit," institutionalized terrorism, and he assaults his subject from multiple angles: razor-sharp satire, precisely cadenced rhetoric, faux-reportage, and "unsituated" dialogues (Jaffe's term, referring to his trademark talking heads with perfect pitch). The result is virtuosic and paradoxical: a prodigious display of firepower-in the cause of peace.
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15 Serial Killers
by Harold Jaffe
Exploring dangerous territory, Jafee uses illustrations, letters, monologues, interviews, and "unsituated dialogues" to bring to life some of the most infamous serial killers of all time.
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Straight Razor
by Harold Jaffe
Time: 20 minutes into the future Setting: The treacherous margins of post-industrial society Cast: Sexual outlaws, serial murderers, techno-freaks, gender benders, rogue cops, punk anarchists Content: Horror, outrage, razor-sharp satire, virtuosic writing and visual beauty by two of the most original contemporary American artists, in collaboration In this uncanny collection of 12 stories, Harold Jaffe-author of Eros Anti-Eros, Beasts, and Madonna & Other Spectacles and Norman Conquest, artist illustrator extraordinaire, have produced a book with the precision of a laser and the charge of a land mine.
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The Kafka Chronicles
by Mark Amerika
Tells the stories of young artists, the drug underworld, a couple victimized by government harassment, and the officers assigned to control the media during the Gulf War.
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Sexual Blood
by Mark Amerika
"In Sexual Blood, Amerika tracks the bohemian life of his main character, Mal, an alternative rock musician whose strange encounter with the Medicine Woman causes him to hallucinate a fantasy land populated by all of his former lovers. Mal, hoping to repent for all the emotional damage he's caused in the past, seeks a magic transfusion that will turn him into a compassionate human being: this is when he enters the realm of the Sexual Blood"--From back cover.
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Fishnet
by Paul A. Toth
Maurice Melnick's imagination has forever painted an underwater world more exotic yet safer than the one above. Now he sees in wife Shelia's smile all the years he spent swimming away from her. He decides to fix that smile on canvas, stopping time but the painting only drives him deeper into his imagination.
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Fizz
by Paul A. Toth
Meet Ray Pulaski. With no real personality of his own, Pulaski reinvents himself as Ray Style, rock star and neighborhood gigolo...only the neighborhood isn't buying his story. Soon Ray sets off across the country in search of the reasons for his derangement, but neither Ray Style nor another new personality, consumate gentleman Ray Proper, are about to give up the fight for Ray's soul. Can Ray put his jigsaw puzzle of a life together?
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Mop Men
by Alan Emmins
Emmins offers a profile of the successful and extremely eccentric Crime Scene Cleaners--the men who step in and clean up after the police finish their investigation of a homicide, suicide, or accidental death.
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Lint
by Steve Aylett
A funny mock biography traces the life and career of Jeff Lint--a marginally successful but brilliantly original science fiction writer--through the 1960s, close encouters with the Star Trek series, and finally, success in Hollywood. Original.
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Toxicology
by Steve Aylett
Some stories in this new collection take place in Beerlight, the city of heroic criminals and villainous cops Steve Aylett introduced in Slaughtermatic. Others are set in unique worlds, creations of Aylett's twisted vision and sardonic sense of humor. "If Armstrong Was Interesting" is a series of scenarios imagining how the American hero might have jazzed up his voyage to the moon. In "Gigantic," corpses rain from the sky as payback for the massacres of our century.
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The Crime Studio
by Steve Aylett
In Steve Aylett's irreverent world, crime is the last innovative art form. Lawyers drop in by parachute, gun shops stay open all night, and bulletproof underwear is the rage. Hip, smart, outrageous, The Crime Studio was praised by The Guardian as "a distressingly brilliant debut."
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Pollen
by Jeff Noon
The bestselling author of Vurt spins another audaciously inventive tales of reality gone soft and dreams become real. As an enormous cloud of pollen descends upon a city, people begin to literally sneeze themselves to death. When a cop, one of the few who is immune, sets out to find the source of the plague, what she discovers will forever alter the ancient relationship between people and the myths they create to make sense of the world.
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Nymphomation
by Jeff Noon
Set both in a real and imaginary Manchester, Jeff Noon's story concerns a sinister corporate takeover of the City of Manchester in the form of a revolutionary lottery game that is engulfing the people in a tide of gambling fever.
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Automated Alice
by Jeff Noon
This is an eclectic retelling of the classic Alice in Wonderland. When Alice steps into the grandfather clock she is transported in time from 1860 to 1998, to an automated age inhabited by strange man/animal characters.
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Cobralingus
by Jeff Noon
This novel traces the conception of cobralingus, a way of changing language to a mutated, liquid state that can then be transformed into something entirely different. Illustrations.
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Up
by Ronald Sukenick
The author himself is the main character of this book, in which he glides undisturbed from present to future, from reality to fantasy. Sometimes he's an adolescent Brooklynite, at other times a part-time English teacher, a struggling writer living in a Lower East Side tenement, or a fantasist deftly moving in and out of numerous alter egos. **Lightning Print On Demand Title
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Mosaic Man
by Ronald Sukenick
A fantasy novel on a Jew seeking his identity, following him in various situations. In one, he participates in a bombing raid on present-day France, which is controlled by fascists, in another he is in Israel seeking the Golden Calf.