Speculative: Los Angeles

Product Description

As an incubator of the future, Los Angeles has long mesmerised 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, best-selling 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 these pages, 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 urbanisation. As with our city-based Akashic Noir Series, each story in Speculative Los Angeles is set in a distinct neighborhood filled with local colour, landmarks, and flavour. 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.