BUNDLE - Michael Swanick Flash Fiction [2 Collections]

A chance to get two Michael Swanwick trade paperback novellas of flash fiction for just £11.99 plus P&P.

• THE PERIODIC TABLE OF SCIENCE FICTION

When Mendeleev set forth the Periodic Table of the Elements, he revolutionised chemistry—but just as importantly, he planted the seeds for Michael Swanwick’s Periodic Table of Science Fiction. Now, after their epochal appearances online at www.scifi.com, this collection gathers together the one hundred and eighteen stories of the PTSF in print for the first time, in their definitive form. Life, Chemistry, and Science Fiction will never be the same again.

Swanwick, grand master of the SF short story and absolute master of the short-short, is at his exuberant and ingenious best in these tales, each inspired by a single chemical element. Here are cosmos-spanning future histories, slyly conceived alternative timelines, shockingly subversive secret chronicles of intellectual passion, divine jests, and fragments of incomparable wisdom. In The Periodic Table of Science Fiction, revelations flow like heady wine: the real reason the Hindenburg exploded; how to measure the apocalyptic mood swings of God; why you never want pond scum to preside over your office; which is the most boring element in existence; how the Plains Indians adopted not the horse but the motorcycle; the best way to avert a spaceship hijacking; how to make a fortune in interplanetary metals prospecting; robot ideology; and much, much more. If Mendeleev encompassed all matter in his Periodic Table, Michael Swanwick’s encompasses all that really matters . . . With an Afterword by the author, and an Introduction by Theodore Gray, winner of the Ig Nobel Prize for his Wooden Periodic Table.

• THE SLEEP OF REASON

At last, Goya’s immortal etchings get the fictive treatment they deserve! Grotesque, mordant, and darkly hilarious by turn, the satiric images of Los Caprichos are as relevant now as they were when they were first published in 1799. In an era of war and extreme cruelty very much like our own, they laid bare the folly and absurdity of the human condition. As do the stories Michael Swanwick has crafted to accompany them. It is a monstrous and possibly even blas-phemous work of hubris for a contemporary writer to collaborate with an artist recog-nized as “the last of the Old Masters and the first of the moderns” two centuries after his death rendered him unable to give his consent to the project. But Swanwick is up to the task. Read this book and discover for yourself the satirical worlds of Goya and Swanwick.