A terrorist targets the cybernetic community of a teeming and diverse metropolis. Mecha gladiators battle in a decaying factory. Nomadiks, dodging desertification and the law, set up thriving temporary market towns. Rising seas and obsolete skills lead unemployed laborers to the darknet. A space colonist revives after a blowout and discovers disturbing changes. A prisoner of war rows to the rescue of his captors. In six stories (one previously unpublished) about people on the edges of a violent and rapidly changing society, Glenn Grant explores how we survive, how we grow, and how we betray ourselves.
In his introduction, Bruce Sterling states "... if you add Glenn Grant to the rather more loquacious figures of William Gibson and Cory Doctorow, a tipping point arrives. It becomes pretty clear that cyberpunk actually is primarily Canadian."
"Grant's work paints a future that is odd (and oddly stylish), often (intentionally) funny, and sidewise."
- Cory Doctorow
"Gleefully wicked fiction! Grant is a bricoleur at play in the pre- and post-apocalyptic fields of our self-destructive, ineluctable global catastrophe."
- Paul Di Filippo
"Brilliant! Wonderful prose, nice world-building-in-teensy-increments."
- Peter Watts
Praise for the title story:
"I love a story that goes right through exploring what it means to be male or female and ends up getting at what it means to be human. This is a stylish, action-laden science fiction story, not a navel-gazer."
- Cecilia Tan
"A well-plotted story in Hardboiled Mode ... has an original twist in the emphasis on the desire/compulsion to reproduce one's kind."
- Ursula K. LeGuin
