"The book is titled Blind Shrike. It's not a rotten book, I think. In fact, it's a pretty traditional fantasy quest, just one that, to me, makes sense in George W. Bush's America. The hero of the story is on a quest for his own lost ignorance and innocence. He really doesn't want to know too much because, as many of us have learned, too much information is a soul-sucking pain in the ass. In the book you'll also find magic and monsters, angels and demons, magical swords and forbidden books. And blimps. Every fantasy novel should have at least one blimp." -- Richard Kadrey

This story is excerpted from Kadrey's second novel Kamikaze L'Amour. The novel is described by Mac Tonnies' Cyberpunk/Postmodern Book Reviews as "mesmerizing...a surreal (and distinctly Ballardian) account of synesthesia and mutant desire set in the jungle-choked ruins of L.A."

Mac Tonnies' Cyberpunk/Postmodern Book Reviews calls Metrophage "one of the quintessential 1980s cyberpunk novels," going on to describe "a gritty acid-trip through an ultraviolent L.A. where nothing is what it seems.... Alongside novels such as [William Gibson's] Neuromancer and Lewis Shiner's debut novel Frontera, Metrophage helped establish the cyberpunk aesthetic: relentless, paranoid and playfully cynical."

An early unpublished novel kindly made available on the web by the author. A dark novel set in a future where von Neumann probes build a growing interstellar computer network to house the uploaded minds of dead people, ruled by artificial intelligences.

Lewis Shiner is a two-time finalist for the Nebula (Frontera, Deserted Cities of the Heart), a finalist for the Philip K. Dick (Frontera), and won the World Fantasy award for Glimpses.

SOMEONE COMES TO TOWN, SOMEONE LEAVES TOWN is a glorious book, but there are hundreds of those. It is more. It is a glorious book unlike any book you've ever read. -- Gene Wolfe

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Developing Nations 2.0 License 

"Rudy Rucker should be declared a National Treasure of American Science Fiction. Someone simultaneously channeling Kurt Gödel and Lenny Bruce might start to approximate full-on Ruckerian warp-space, but without the sweet, human, splendidly goofy Rudy-ness at the core of the singularity."

--- William Gibson, author of Pattern Recognition

"Rudy Rucker is the most consistently brilliant imagination working in SF today"

--- Charles Stross, author of Accelerando