Life is traditionally arduous, constrained and tedious for the average university graduate student, even in the exotic Linear City: that fathomless construction—natural or artificial,who can tell?—which stretches infinitely in a narrow ribbon of buildings and street, bounded on one side by an enigmatic Heaven beyond a wide River, and on the other by an equally nebulous Hell beyond the Tracks of a common train. So it is no surprise that the smart and ambitious young woman named Merritt Abraham, lacking a steady boyfriend, stuck laboring in the bowels of a dusty museum, frustrated in her profession and short on cash, yearns for some excitement in her studious, mundane life. But she little reckons what fate has in store for her: a sweaty descent into the dangerous wilderness of the savage Jungle Blocks, where weird natives worship a little-seen barbaric queen! But first Merritt must satisfy her mentor at the museum, navigate the pitfalls of romance, and narrowly escape a fatal encounter with two collegiate ghouls. Only then will she find her talents appreciated by an Indiana-Jones-style professor named Arturo Scoria. Forced by politics to link up with his rival, Professor Durian Vinnagar, Scoria soon assembles an expedition’s worth of queer characters, including Merritt, and our young female adventurer eagerly leaves behind the humdrum collegiate Borough of Wharton for the walled enclave of rampant, furious greenerythat might well be the very Omphalos of the Linear City. There, she will meet a Burroughsian destiny that is simultaneously frightening, glorious and astonishing.

Paul Di Filippo delivers a thrilling and thought-provoking adventure through the multiverse in Vangie's Ghosts, a compelling science fiction novel about one girl with extraordinary powers.Three-year-old Vangie is mute and unresponsive. She shows no interest in the people or world around her, much to the frustration of her callous adoptive parents. Little do they know, Vangie is otherwise occupied observing "ghosts"—an infinite number of versions of herself, in an infinite number of parallel universes.When a tornado hits their trailer and Vangie is severely injured, she makes a desperate leap into another timeline where she survives the tornado, but her adoptive parents do not. So begins a life of shuttling through various foster homes, cultivating her abilities to seek out alternate timelines, and making jumps calculated to better her circumstances in order to avoid the exploitation of adults who seek to harness her powers for their own means.Vangie...

From the swarming, last-redoubt towers of the polar regions, where humanity huddles from the savage heat of Greenhouse Earth, to the dusty refugee camps of a shattered America; from the virtual reality landscape where teenagers seek to repair a wounded planet, to the post-human globe populated by wily transgenic heirs to mankind; and, lastly, across the ideology-splintered ruins of the U.S.A… a cast of dedicated survivors tries to make the best of what’s left behind, picking up the pieces of their lives and arranging them in new patterns of hope and dreaming. Here are six riveting tales of life during the hard-luck times of a post-holocaust planet.

An outrageous trio of novellas that bizarrely and brilliantly twists the Victorian era out of shape, by a master of steampunk alternate history Welcome to the world of steampunk, a nineteenth century outrageously reconfigured through weird science. With his magnificent trilogy, acclaimed author Paul Di Filippo demonstrates how this unique subgenre of science fiction is done to perfection—reinventing a mannered age of corsets and industrial revolution with odd technologies born of a truly twisted imagination. In “Victoria,” the inexplicable disappearance of the British monarch-to-be prompts a scientist to place a human-lizard hybrid clone on the throne during the search for the missing royal. But the doppelgänger queen comes with a most troubling flaw: an insatiable sexual appetite. The somewhat Lovecraftian “Hottentots” chronicles the very unusual adventure of Swiss naturalist and confirmed bigot Louis Agassiz as his determined search for a rather grisly fetish plunges him into a world of black magic and monsters. Finally, in “Walt and Emily,” the hitherto secret and quite steamy love affair between Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman is revealed in all its sensuous glory—as are their subsequent interdimensional travels aboard a singular ship that transcends the boundaries of time and reality. Ingenious, hilarious, ribald, and utterly remarkable, Di Filippo’s The Steampunk Trilogy is a one-of-a-kind literary journey to destinations at once strangely familiar and profoundly strange.Amazon.com ReviewQueen Victoria as a trollop-in-training whose newt-human clone serves as stand-in during Victoria's trysts? Walt Whitman as lusty seducer of an only partly reticent Emily Dickinson who loses the "Keys to the Inner Chambers of her Heart" to him? This fine and funny madness is "steampunk," a branch of cyberpunk fiction that locates itself in historical venues rather than in the future. Paul Di Filippo has certainly done his homework: the settings as well as the language emulate the times and, in Dickinson's and Whitman's cases, their poetic language, which asserts itself into their conversational dialogue and thoughts at most unusual but appropriate moments. Dickinson's "Universe Entire" is disrupted by a naked Whitman bathing in her rain barrel and singing his "body electric." But will Dickinson's "White Election" remain intact? From Publishers WeeklyThe term "steampunk" has come to intimate a subgenre of work set in a fantastic 19th century characterized by the inhumanity wrought by bogus science and a fanatical embrace of scientific method. Di Filippo's first book is a collection of three novellas that jumbles science and pseudoscience into an interesting, if not always completely successful, melange. The narratives are united not only by their reliance on the occult?mysticism dominates "Walt and Emily" while Lovecraft's monsters appear in the previously published "Hottentots"?but also by their focus on female sexuality. "Victoria" replaces the Queen of England with a licentious salamander, while "Walt and Emily" features a robust poetic encounter between Ms. Dickinson and Mr. Whitman. Even the weakest of the pieces here?"Hottentots," in which nothing is learned while much credulity is stretched?features amusing faux-Victorian prose worthy of Anne Rice ("Like a Maine sawmill, like an asthmatic platypus... like a Michigan beaver... uneasily winter-dreaming of Ojibway hunters led by a wild Chief Snapping Turtle, Mister Dogberry roughly rasped and snorted through the night, making it nigh impossible for Agassiz to get any rest") and enough "scientific" pasquinades to satisfy the Luddite in anyone. Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

This collectionÖstands as the fieldís madcap DUBLINERS of the biogenetic revolution. One simply has to read itÖî óMichael Bishop You can try to escape from the mundane, or with the help of Paul Di Filippo, you can take a brief, meaningful break from it. In the vein of George Saunders or Michael Chabon, Di Filippo uses the tools of science fiction and the surreal to take a deep, richly felt look at humanity. His brand of funny, quirky, thoughtful, fast-moving, heart-warming, brain-bending stories exist across the entire spectrum of the fantastic from hard science fiction to satire to fantasy and on to horror, delivering a riotously entertaining string of modern fables and stories from tomorrow, now and anytime. After you read Paul Di Filippo, youíll no longer see everyday life quite the same. RIBOFUNK contains eleven masterful and surprising works of imagination. In all of them, biology is the science that drives the engine of life and of story...

WikiWorld contains a choice assortment of Di Filippo’s best and most recent work. The title story, a radical envisioning of near-future sociopolitical modes, received accolades from both Cory Doctorow and Warren Ellis. In addition, there are alternate history adventures such as “Yes We Have No Bananas” (which critic Gary Wolfe called “a new kind of science fiction”); homages to icons such as Stanislaw Lem (“The New Cyberiad”); collaborations with Rudy Rucker and Damien Broderick; and a posthuman odyssey (“Waves and Smart Magma”). WikiWorld is the best of the best from this British Science Fiction Association Award-winning and Nebula, Hugo, Sturgeon, and World Fantasy Award-nominated author.

A disbarred lawyer and an ex-arsonist cross paths and find themselves organizing an elaborate real estate scam to bilk a shady rich speculator out of twenty million dollars. The sting is personal for ex-arsonist Stan and for a woman named Vee, who plays an essential role in the caper. Glen, the narrator and former lawyer, finds himself at first just along for the money. Eventually, as bonds deepen among the conspirators, Glen too discovers he has a lot more at stake than simply the loot.This cast of lively eccentrics discovers along the way that getting to the big payoff might just be more scary fun than the monetary prize itself.