Modern cities are vast, wondrous, awe-inspiring things. The soaring heights, the play of light over the buildings, the constant energy in the streets—and each with its own unique ambience. But isn’t all good: cities contain secrets, and pain, and hidden pockets of rot and disrepair—whether through abandonment or willful neglect by the powerful, there are […]
As Philip K. Dick’s influence on modern SFF grows more evident with each passing year—today would’ve been his 90th birthday; he died at 53—it seems that it simply took all of us a few decades to wrap our heads around the radical things the author accomplished throughout his fractured career. Aside from the fact that a […]
We’ve all dreamed of being a character in our favorite stories—who wouldn’t want the chance to experience a life filled with adventure, danger, and impossibilities like magic and time travel, with the added bonus of knowing it’s only a story, and that we are never at real risk? After leaving the night-and-day city of his […]
Jeff Noon has always been one for assembling hallucinatory images into vibrant worlds, and is his latest, the surrealist sci-fi noir A Man of Shadows, he’s created perhaps his most vivid setting yet—a city as disorienting as anything you’d encounter in a lucid dream. In fact, with a plot that hides clues to its solutions early on […]