Rejoice! The Deliverer has come back to help mankind against the nightly threat of the demonic corelings that rise out of the earth every night. But there are two men that might be the Deliverer. How can there be two? Is it Arlen Boles, the so called Painted Man, who travels between the cities of [...]
Homeland, Cory Doctorow‘s sequel to Little Brother, revisits San Francisco several years after the Bay Bridge is destroyed in the worst terrorist attack on U.S. Soil. Marcus Yallow and his girlfriend, Ange, are still together, making technology with scrap parts and a bit of ingenuity. But when Marcus is given a USB stick with secret [...]
In Little Brother, Cory Doctorow paints a dystopian near future when the rights of citizens are taken away in the name of National Security. Marcus Yallow is an ordinary teenager attending High School, bristling under the technological surveillance imposed by his school. Smart and tech savvy, he skips school along with his friends to participate [...]
Consumption by Patrick Hester is a charmingly creepy short story of life beyond death in the Wild West. John Henry has just arrived from Georgia to attend the Pennsylvania College of Dental Surgery when he hears about the exhibition of a newly discovered mummy. While attending the display with his schoolmates, one of them claims [...]
On the planet of Jeroun, every ten years, the followers and detractors of the god Adrash meet in a grand martial arts tournament in the city of Danoor. It is an opportunity to present and show the superiority of one’s point of the view in the most visceral way possible–grand combat. The world of Jeroun [...]
The Rise of Ransom City by Felix Gilman takes us into a world torn apart by war between two immortal forces, the Line and the Gun. Amid the chaos, Harry Ransom seeks to escape his humble and tragic origins to found a great and peaceful city of the future. By way of his ‘Ransom Process’, [...]
Welton University is a leading University in the wilds of Minnesota. Much like the isolated and bucolic University of Minnesota at Morris, Welton University has a rustic setting that takes full advantage of the beautiful Minnesota countryside. There, students like Kim, Robert, Liesel and Julian take courses like Historical Tarot, CM, Combat Shielding, and PK [...]
To create the ultimate forgery, what you need is, unsurprisingly, is the ultimate forger. And when the forgery is of the arcane variety, to forge and affix a stricken emperor’s very soul, who better than someone capable of magically forging items to the most exacting detail? Fortunately for those who wish to keep the Emperor [...]
Space Magic by David Levine, a collection of fifteen short stories, combines a variety of award winning genre fiction. Tales of magic and science, ghost stories and fairies, exist side by side in delightful harmony. “Wind from a Dying Star” describes a unique vision of humanity evolving to live among the stars. In “Nucleon,” a [...]
It’s been rough for Oscar Britton, Army officer turned Sorcerous Operations Corps portamancer turned outlaw selfer. After the chaos of his escape from the U.S. Army base in The Source, living life on the run while being true to his developing philosophy and ideals for what should be the future of magic users like himself [...]
In The Mad Scientist’s Daughter, Cassandra Rose Clarke weaves a heartbreaking tale of love and loss centered around the life of Cat and her strange relationship with her father’s assistant, an android named Finn. Though Cat’s mother and father are both cyberneticists, Cat’s mother has largely given up her career to raise their daughter. Doctor [...]
The Lands of Faerie, after a struggle and a near-death experience, have a true High Prince again. The rule of the false Basilisk Prince is over, and the long process of healing the damage caused by his reign can finally happen.There are holdouts, those who do not want to submit to the new Prince, and [...]
The beautifully written novel, Broken by A.E. Rought takes the reader through a modern retelling of Frankesntein with a twist of Romeo and Juliet. The story begins in a cemetery, where the lonely teen, Emma, mourns her boyfriend and the fact that he will never have a grave. Her heartache is palatable; yet soon she [...]
A familiar skeleton of a tale. A lost ruler or aspirant to rule of a magical land has been banished, and lost his allies, friends and even his memory. He lives his life on Earth, unaware of his true role and nature, until a meeting with an ally from his old realm shows up at [...]
In the middle of this elemental storm a fire gleamed among the dripping furze bushes like the madness in a weasel’s eye. It illuminated three hunched figures. As the cauldron bubbled an eldritch voice shrieked: ‘When shall we three meet again?’ There was a pause. Finally another voice said, in far more ordinary tones: ‘Well, [...]
Thematic Shared-world anthologies used to be, once upon a time, all the rage, and one of my favorite forms of genre reading. Wild Cards, Thieves World, Heroes in Hell, Forever After, Time Gate, the Man-Kzin Wars…at one point, I couldn’t scan a shelf in a bookstore without running into one I had not seen or read before.Thematic [...]
This book is a love letter. Within its pages, books are magic. They come alive. Libriomancy allows certain gifted individuals to pull forth objects from the pages of books and use them in our world. From the time Gutenberg himself became the first Libriomancer when he invented the printing press, libriomancy has been used [...]
As a barista at a cafe/comic book store in a fictional California college town, Ree Reyes has a pretty typical life for a genre geek. Talk with the regulars about the latest Watchmen prequel, gather with her group of equally geeky girlfriends after work. Try and pay the rent and the bills in a recession. [...]
Babylon is the madam of a brothel in Scalentine. Scalentine has two moons, and is a hub of the multiverse, with portals to many other worlds. As such, a madam of a brothel who is also a good swordsman is fairly straightforward and ordinary compared to lizard races, a werewolf chess playing police captain, and [...]
Drothe is a Nose. In a city of thieves, his role is as an information gatherer and curator for his employer, a roughhewn boxer of an Upright Man (think mob boss) called Nicco. It’s a decent life, one that Drothe has developed over years as one of the Kin. On the side, Drothe likes [...]
In Purgatory, by Tim Dodge, Charles Cunningham joins forces with Edgar Allan Poe and a mysterious character named Billy to win his salvation and gain admittance to heaven. To accomplish this, they journey to Earth to watch over Charles’s daughter, who is now an old woman. Through this act of kindness toward the daughter [...]
Amy is five years old, somewhat stunted for her age, but otherwise a happy go lucky innocent girl who is about to graduate from kindergarten, an only child with a loving father and devoted mother. Amy is also not human, just like her mother is not human. Both are Von Neumann machines, android form artificial [...]
Subscribe to The Functional Nerds Podcast on iTunes and never miss an episode!