It's election time in New Babylon, and President Maggie Delgado is running for re-election but is threatened by the charismatic populist Ted Rust. Newly appointed City Commissioner Georg Ratner is given the priority task to fight the recent invasion of Synth in the streets of the capital, a powerful hallucinogen drug with a mysterious origin. When his old colleague asks him for help on another case and gets murdered, things become more and more complicated, and his official neutrality beco...

Foreword Indies Award Bronze Winner!From Seb Doubinsky, author of The Song of Synth, The Babylonian Trilogy, White City, Absinth, Omega Gray, and Suan Ming, comes his highly anticipated next installment in the City-States Cycle. Missing Signal—a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside a government conspiracy? Agent Terrence Kovacs has worked for the New Petersburg Counter-Intel Department propagating fake ...

Seasons have always been connected with the passing of time and the changes of life, inspiring myths, folklore, poems, and songs. In this short collection award-winning J.S. Breukelaar and Seb Doubinsky have decided to pay tribute to the old tradition of yearly almanacs, which contained short pieces of lore and traditions. Keeping with the short format, they have renewed the genre by infusing it with a modern-day setting, pushing the boundaries of the folk-horror uncanny into the borders o...

1969: Revolution in Mexico!Decades later, charismatic guerrilla leader Lorenzo is living in Europe with a young son. Approached by a German revolutionary organization for his account of the conflict, he struggles to recall repressed memories of violence, absurdity, and tragedy. Lorenzo's past returns in Seb Doubinsky's kaleidoscopic Fragments of a Revolution. Raging between moments of ecstatic liberation and quixotic disappointments, what emerges is a manifesto for freedom...

Williams Burroughs meets Philip K. Dick in this dystopian drug-fueled novel set in the not-so-distant future.Synth is a drug able to induce hallucinations indistinguishable from reality. But it’s brand new, highly addictive, and more than likely dangerous. Even the dealers peddling the pills don’t know what long term effects the drug will have on its users. For Markus Olsen, Synth offers an easy escape to his crumbling life. Markus, an ex-hacker, has been caught re...

There's a hot new drug on the market, and it's creating a stir. Synth can induce bold hallucinations that are indistinguishable from reality. Sure, it's highly addictive, and no-one knows yet what the long-term effects are, but does that really matter when the buzz is this good?For Markus Olsen, Synth is the escape he needs as his life crumbles around him. His hacking career is in tatters, his friends imprisoned, and his skills traded in a plea bargain to the oppressive state he spe...

When a famous horror writer arrives in a lovely coast town to work on his new novel, he is immediately seduced by its picturesque beauty and friendly locals. It looks like he finally found the ideal place to concentrate after a difficult and stressful period of his life. But when strange and frightening events begin to happen all around him, he begins to wonder if behind the beautiful facade of reality lurk some well-hidden and much darker secrets— or, maybe worse, if he' s purely and simp...

Languages of Water is a rare but intimate fusion of East, West and Africa, a stunning artefact of writerly immersion and cultural exchange. This child of digital collaboration brings together writers, illustrators and translators of poetry, fiction and essays, and refuses to be contained.In a playful interrogation of French literary theorist, critic and philosopher Roland Barthes' le plaisir du texte and death of the author, Languages of Water opens with the homing story 'When the ...

THE THREAT: There are villainous monsters, mutants, freaks, and warped masterminds in the world, beyond the ability of conventional police forces to deal with.THE SOLUTION: Recruit your own monsters, mutants, freaks, and warped masterminds, and give them warrant cards.Every large urban centre has its own Special Talents Response Team, a small cadre of… unusual personalities with unusual abilities.Manchester's is the infamous GOON SQUAD, a team that has been operating c...

The alliance between humans and androids is fractured…will it break forever?It has only been hours since the android attack on the world government capitol. Despite being driven away, the evil android engineer behind the attack, Jeanette Crenshaw, begins amassing her metal army, with dreams of an android-only world.Crenshaw declares terrorist attacks every hour on the hour unless X hands over his legendary black box that contains untold secrets left by his ...

Puppet Girl has been inducted into the Goon Squad -- Manchester's Special Talents Response Team -- but is very much on probation. When her first time in the field goes badly wrong, it looks like her new career might be over before it has even started. But she has one champion who will stand up for her and who suggests a new course of inquiry that might just save the investigation. Plus, as a bonus, it involves hitting the nightclubs.Find out what happens in GOON SQUAD #2 "Nightclub...

This edition of The Year's Best Science Fiction collects twenty-five of the finest works of speculative fiction to see print in 1990, stories from the genre's every edge, and from its heart.Among the many marvels are tales from the field's most accomplished artists: Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Shobies' Story" returns to the Hainish worlds with a reality-defining story, while Joe Haldeman's "The Hemmingway Hoax" embarks from our world on a time-defying trip th...