Norman Spinrad

Illustrator: Leo Summers

A collection of short stories from the acclaimed author of Bug Jack Barron. Includes "No Direction Home" which depicts a drug dystopia, and "Sierra Maestra." A violent rock group with maniacal music boils up a craze for a nuclear blast. A man finds himself blown into a ghastly world by a bolt of lightning.

Can human consciousness exist within the framework of an electronic "brain" and still maintain its humanity? In DEUS X, a dying priests consciousness is uploaded into the most advanced computer of the day - and what ensues is a thought-provoking, entertaining and overly intriguing clash between the various characters surrounding the experiment, a female Pope and a computer guru whod rather be sailing and smoking pot, for example.

Its just another sleazy, smoggy day at KLAX: But today is anything but normal. Green Army Commandos is what they call themselves. Theyre violent ecoterrorists, theyre armed to the teeth, and they havent just taken over the station - theyre hijacking the news itself. The Bad News Is theyve wired themselves and the station with enough high explosives to blow a significant hole in the planet theyre trying to save - and theyre ready to do it unless their entirely impossible demands are met. The Good News Is the KLAX Action News Team has an exclusive on the most explosive story of the decade - their own kidnapping - and the ratings are going through the roof.

In the near future, the debt-laden U.S. owns a technology that renders it "the worlds best-defended Third World country." The only real outer-space planning is in Common Europe, so young American "space cadet" Jerry Reed goes to work in Paris. He falls in love with and marries Soviet career bureaucrat Sonya Gagarin and the story jumps ahead 20 years, blending world events with a focus on their family. Sonyas star has risen with the Euro-Russians while Jerry has been stymied by pervasive anti-Americanism. Daughter Franja has her fathers space fever and enrolls in a Russian space school; son Bob, fiercely curious about an earlier, admired America before it was run by xenophobic "Gringos," enters Berkeley. Ten years later the U.S. is a pariah, Euro-Russia the pet of the civilized world and the Reeds scattered - politics forced Jerry and Sonyas divorce, Franja speaks only to her mother and Bob is trapped in "Festung Amerika." A series of odd, occasionally tragic events brings the family (and the world) together. Despite some tech-talk this is not science fiction: the first two-thirds of this hefty book is chillingly logical, if sometimes very funny, and while the "happy" ending may seem forced, Spinrad ( Bug Jack Barron ) gives us a wild, exhilarating ride into the next century.

Norman Spinrads 1972 alternate history, gives us both a metafictional what-if novel and a cutting satire of one of the 20th centurys most evil regimes . . .In 1919, a young Austrian artist by the name of Adolf Hitler immigrated to the United States to become an illustrator for the pulp magazines and, eventually, a Hugo Award-winning SF author.This volume contains his greatest work, Lord of the Swastika: an epic post-apocalyptic tale of genetic trueman Feric Jagger and his quest to purify the bloodline of humanity by ruthlessly slaughtering races of the genetically impure - a quest Norman Spinrad expertly skewers through ironic imagery and over-the-top rhetoric.Spinrad hoped to expose some unpalatable truths about much of SF and Fantasy literature and its uncomfortable relationship with fascist ideologies - an aim that was not always apparent to neo-fascist readers. In order to make his aims clear to the hard-of-understanding, Spinrad added an imaginary critical analysis by a fictional literary scholar, Homer Whipple, of New York University.

American Dream or American Nightmare? Norman Spinrad describes The Star-Spangled Future:"America is something new under the sun. not so much a nation at all as a precog flash of the future of the species . . .I wrote believing that I was simply writing disconnected science fiction stories from whatever came into my head . . . And they all turned out to be about America, the leading edge of all possible futures unfolding around us . . . After all, that was what was coming into my head, thats the mother lode of science fiction realities - the American fusion plasma of which we are creatures - and all we have to do is keep ourselves open to it . . . thats my definition of science fiction.We have seen the future and it is us."

Spinrad examines one of his most compelling obsessions - the possible "futures" of America.Street Meat: In New York City, streeties, zonies and subway cannibals are locked in a nighmarish scrabble for rat meat, sex - and survival.The Lost Continent: group of African tourists visit the ruins of Space Age America - a surreal landscape of abandoned skyscrapers, empty streets and dead, rusted machinery.World War Last: The hashish-smoking Sheik of Koram has a plan to trick America and Russia into war.La Vie Continue: In Paris exiled science-fiction author Norman Spinrad ignores a lucrative - but dangerous - bidding war between the KGB and the CIA for the film rights to his story "Riding the Torch".

The world of the future is in a lot of trouble. Pollution, overpopulation, and ecological disasters have left the rich nations still rich, and the poor nations dying. Still, for international businesses it is business as usual. It is better to be rich. But is it all coming to a terrible end? A scientist has predicted Condition Venus, the sudden greenhouse end of the planet - but she cant say when. So the attention of the world is on a UN conference in Paris, where all hell is about to break loose.

The Plagues origins were mysterious, but its consequences were all too obvious: quarantined cities, safe-sex machines, Sex Police, the outlawing of old-fashioned love. Four people hold the fate of humanity in their hands...A sexual mercenary condemned to death as a foot soldier in the Army of the Living Dead; a scientist whos devoted his whole life to destroying the virus and now discovers he has only ten weeks to succeed; a God-fearing fundamentalist on his way to the presidency before he accepts a higher calling; and a young infected coed from Berkeley on a bizarre crusade to save the world with a new religion of carnal abandon. Each will discover that the only thing more dangerous than the Plague is the cure.

Una de las novelas más famosas de Spinrad reeditada de nuevo. El libro es una ucronía dentro de una ucronía. Spinrad propone un mundo producto de la divergencia creada por un Adolf Hitler que emigra a Nueva York en 1919. Hitler se convierte en escritor de ciencia ficcion, llegando a ganar varios premios en su carrera. Hitler escribe El Señor de la Esvastica. Esta otra ucronia, que compone el grueso del libro, es la historia de Feric Jaggar, un joven geneticamente puro quien habita una Tierra alterna cuya poblacion ha sufrido los efectos de una guerra termonuclear que ha causado horrendas mutaciones de las cuales la mas peligrosa es la representada por telepatas, por lo que Jaggar propone la eliminacion masiva de todos los mutantes. El Sueño de Hierro es a la vez muchos libros, evidentes y ocultos; un puzzle literario que se ordena como aviso y advertencia y que penetra en el lector sin concesiones.