Paul Di Filippo Book order

Far in the glorious interstellar future, a time of riches and complex technologies, the stern but utilitarian Quinary guards and regulates the flourishing human-colonized galaxy. Under their business-like rule, a family may own a whole planet. And so two bloodlines--the Corvivios clan and the Soldavere clan--are in full possession of the lush and benign world of Verano. All looks rosy for the families, but then the happy future is dramatically and tragically overturned!

Glen and Stan team up again in this exciting follow-up to The Big Get-Even. Two high-flying con men stumble upon a lone scientist and his half-genius, half-addlepated invention, which seems to promise a big payoff if they can dupe the right buyers. But infidelity, gangsters, foreign governments, and their own greed offer stumbling blocks galore.

A disbarred lawyer and an ex-arsonist cross paths and find themselves organizing an elaborate real estate scam to bilk a shady rich speculator out of twenty million dollars. The sting is personal for ex-arsonist Stan and for a woman named Vee, who plays an essential role in the caper. Glen, the narrator and former lawyer, finds himself at first just along for the money. Eventually, as bonds deepen among the conspirators, Glen too discovers he has a lot more at stake than simply the loot. This cast of lively eccentrics discovers along the way that getting to the big payoff might just be more scary fun than the monetary prize itself.

Three tales set in the 19th century. In Victoria, a scientist breeds a replica of Queen Victoria and when the real queen disappears, the government uses her as a replacement. In Hottentots, Massachusetts is threatened by H.P. Lovecraft-style monsters and, of course, Hottentots. In Walt and Emily, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson travel to the world of spirits to meet future writers.

Visited one morning by a dimension-hopping artificial intelligence named Hans, Paul Girard is given the ability to jump instantly to any world he can envision. But without truly knowing himself, Paul soon discovers that framing a wish that gets the expected results is not as easy as it first appears. Paul races across bizarre dimensions in search for happiness, love, wealth, status and the answer to the ontological pickle until the only exit is death. And then his adventures really begin--Cover p. [4].

In a strange, seriously funny and stunningly inventive collection of stories all set in the same disturbingly dystopian tomorrow, acclaimed sf innovator Paul DiFilippo demonstrates that the future isn't electronic, nuclear, or cyber...it's organic. Here is an Earth where bodies and brains are routinely genetically/chemically modified; where laboratory-created Splices do the dirty work -- as long as their genetic makeup is less than haft human -- and, sometimes, go renegade, forcing the Protein Police to hunt them down like dogs. In this world, potentially apocalyptic threats -- viral, mental, virtual, physical, and brain-fryingly toxic -- are everywhere, inside and out, the outrageous end-products of unchecked biological tinkering with our surroundings and ourselves. You will never forget this brave new world: it's a future that will swallow you whole.