A novel about death and grieving, about Afro-Caribbean culture and Voodoo and about the four waves of Nanotechnology development.The world of CRESCENT CITY RHAPSODY is a world that is being changed by the day by advances in nanotechnology; it is a world where radio has died, of vastly increased lifespans and where extra terrestrials will play a pivotal role in everyone's life.
Short novels are movie length narratives that may well be the perfect length for science fiction stories. This audio collection showcases the best-of-the-best science fiction novellas published in 2017 by current and emerging masters of this vibrant form of story-telling. A very cool heist on Mars pays homage to the classic film, The Italian Job, in “The Martian Job,” by Jaine Fenn. In “The Tale of the Alcubierre Horse,” by Kathleen Ann Goonan, a group of highly gifted children steals a luxury spaceship and kidnaps a physicist for a voyage to a new planet far outside the solar system. A human living in a crowded city on an alien planet risks her life to gather information on enigmatic aliens while also investigating the death of an exterminator in “How Sere Picked Up Her Laundry,” by Alexander Jablokov. In “Proof of Concept,” by Gwyneth Jones, scientists must partner with a reality show to attract funding for an experiment to achieve instantaneous transport from a dying Earth to another planet. A problem with the local birds threatens the rebuilding of Bikini Island as sea-levels rise due to global warming in “The Proving Ground,” by Alec Nevala-Lee. Finally, in “The Speed of Belief,” by Robert Reed, three diplomats are sent by the Great Ship to a planet of intelligent rivers to negotiate for worlds to colonize.
Kathleen Ann Goonan burst into prominence with Queen City Jazz, the start of her Nanotech Quartet. The Bones of Time, her widely acclaimed second novel, was a finalist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2000. In War Times is deeply, satisfying SF. Sam, the protagonist, is a young enlisted man in 1941 when his older brother Keenan is killed at Pearl Harbor. Seduced by a mysterious woman, Sam gives her plans for a device that will end not just the war, but perhaps even the human predilection for war. Sam spends his war years trying to construct the device and discovers only later that it worked. Sam falls in love with a spy, and they both become involved in preventing the JFK assassination in the 1960s. Over the decades it becomes deeply meaningful that his world is strangely transformed by the enigmatic device.
In Verity's world, nanotech plagues decimated the population after an initial renaissance of utopian nanotech cities. Verity has been raised, an orphan, in a tiny Shaker revival community where all are forbidden contact with the Enlivened Cities. Yet as she grows up on the isolated farm, she is often drawn to the City of Dayton, abandoned nearby, and to its self-contained and still-functioning library. Her happy life is suddenly destroyed when the Shakers, in spite of their precautions, contract a nanotech plague that possesses them. Blaze, the only young man in the community and Verity's best friend, is shot by a crazed elder. And so Verity, with her dog Cairo - and the body of Blaze wrapped in a nanotech cocoon - sets off on a quest to the Enlivened City of Cincinnati. It is a place of legend, walled off from the rest of the world, where huge bio-engineered bees carry information through the streets and enormous nanotech flowers burst from the tops of strange buildings. It is the place where Blaze might be brought back from the brink of death. But Cincinnati is a city of dreams turned into nightmares, endlessly reliving the fantasies of its creator, a city that Verity must rule - or die.