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Speculative Los Angeles

Audiobook
0 of 1 copy available
Wait time: About 2 weeks
0 of 1 copy available
Wait time: About 2 weeks

The debut title of a new city-based anthology series featuring stories with speculative, sci-fi, and paranormal themes

As an incubator of the future, Los Angeles has long mesmerized writers from Philip K. Dick to Aldous Huxley. With its natural disasters, Hollywood artifice, staggering wealth and poverty, urban sprawl, and diversity, one can argue that Los Angeles is already so weird, surreal, irrational, and mythic that any fiction emerging from this place should be considered speculative.

So, bestselling author Denise Hamilton commissioned some stories and did exactly that. In Speculative Los Angeles, fourteen of the city's most prophetic voices reimagine the city in very different ways. In this audiobook, you'll encounter twenty-first-century changelings, dirigibles plying the suburban skies, black holes and jacaranda men lurking in deep suburbia, beachfront property in Century City, walled-off canyons and coastlines reserved for the wealthy, psychic death cults, robot nursemaids, and an alternate LA where Spanish land grants never gave way to urbanization.

As with our city-based Akashic Noir Series, each story in Speculative Los Angeles is set in a distinct neighborhood filled with local color, landmarks, and flavor. Since the best speculative fiction provides a wormhole into other worlds while also commenting on our own, that is exactly what you'll find here.

Featuring brand-new stories by: Aimee Bender, Lisa Morton, Alex Espinoza, Ben H. Winters, Denise Hamilton, Lynell George, Stephen Blackmoore, Francesca Lia Block, Charles Yu, Duane Swierczynski, Luis J. Rodriguez, A. G. Lombardo, Kathleen Kaufman, and S. Qiouyi Lu



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    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from November 16, 2020
      Hamilton (Los Angeles Noir, ed.) brings together 14 outstanding stories of weird and uncanny happenings in the City of Angels. Francesca Lia Block showcases her expertise at infusing speculative fiction with strong L.A. flavor in the retro “Purple Panic,” about what it means to return home to the people and places one has left behind. S. Qiouyi Lu explores love and abandonment in “Where There Are Cities, These Dissolve, Too,” set in a cyberpunk future where the Chinese Exclusion Act has been reinstated. Present-day atrocities are given a terrifying, supernatural spin in Alex Espinoza’s “Detainment,” an updated changeling tale about children being swapped with inhuman copies when rescued from immigration custody, and “Peak TV” by Ben H. Winters, in which a television producer is forced to reckon with the tragic results of his series. Each story presents a fresh take on the magic and strangeness of L.A. past, present, and future, and the characters are representative of the diverse region, caught in situations ranging from surreal to chilling. Readers should snap this up. Agent: Anne Borchardt, Georges Borchardt, Inc.

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Perhaps the technical highlight in this dark and challenging collection of 14 post apocalyptic short stories by some of the West Coast's brightest literary talents is award-winning narrator Gabrielle de Cuir's use of a robot voice in "Walk of Fame" by Duane Swierczynski. She sounds like a machine--but so very human at the same time. Hard to do. There's a tough noir style to all the narration in these tales of changelings and ghosts, steampunks, and cops and robots--all set in a gray, decaying future Los Angeles. The final story goes against the grain, with Justine Eyre's voice breaking the listener's heart in "Sailing That Beautiful Sea" by Kathleen Kaufman, about the last woman left in Century City. Fresh and gritty. B.P. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

Languages

  • English

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