A living form of money results in the unraveling of the world.
The bank is there to save and lend.
-Workers work and customers spend.
ANTISOCIETIES is a collection of ten stories about isolation - what it does to people, and what isolated people do to each other and themselves. An ominously quiet town. A haunting young adult novel from the turn of the century. Two starving captives frozen in agony. A young boy from a doting family. A man in a cheap Halloween mask. A succession of portraits of people trapped in their own identities, some of whom insist on their own ideas because they would have nothing at all without them. People for whom being seen by another is terrifying. And, like any collection of portraits, ANTISOCIETIES is also a collection of speculative mirrors ...
Michael Cisco is of a different kind and league from almost anyone writing today, and The Narrator is Cisco at his startling best. -CHINA MIEVILLE, author of Perdido Street Station
An extraordinary story of war and the supernatural that combines the creepiness of Alien with the clear-eyed gaze of Full Metal Jacket. Like The Other Side if it included soldiers who could glide over the water, a mysterious tower right out of early David Lynch, and infused with Kafka's sense of the bizarre. Destined to be a classic. -JEFF VANDERMEER, author of the Southern Reach trilogy
The Narrator is not a subversive fantasy novel. It eliminates all other fantasy novels and starts the genre anew. You must begin your journey here. -NICK MAMATAS, author of Move Under Ground and Love is the LawFrom Michael Cisco, one of the most innovative and subversive writers working today, comes the long-awaited, ground-breaking novel of a suicide survivor trying in vain to write himself back into existence.
Unlanguage is the story of a man transformed by death and by language change. The language, once understood, transforms him, and transforms learning itself. One day, he looks down at the hand resting on his thigh and sees that it's just an ordinary hand. What had been composed of colored light made solid goes back to being meat and blood. His body reverts to the ordinary sloshing heaviness of a regular body. The exalted vision of his eyes becomes the filmy, blurred vision of the usual kind. He slumps back into his former self. Whirlwinds of shame close on him. With a violent, monkey-like energy he wracks his brains for a way back. Then it occurs to him, he can still write that language. He must write his way back.
Told as a structural guide to impossible grammar, Michael Cisco's Unlanguage is a brilliant, thought-provoking novel that not only pushes the boundaries of literature but of language itself.
Chalo the man is recruited by a latter day prophet named Grant to design and build a campus on Catalina Island, where initiates will be trained to receive a celestial visitor, the Ancient Newborn. Chalo the yak reflects on his human past while the annual rut looms ominously nearer and nearer. The struggle to fund and construct the campus is complemented by the psychoactive changes of the yak breeding cycle, and the mating battles that Chalo will have to participate in. Both involve creating something that will outlast Chalo's individual life, and give it meaning. Both will also involve telluric forces, demons recruited by Grant to overcome sinister fiduciary magic, which cross-link the two halves of the story.
Weird fiction icon and award-winning author Michael Cisco's Black Brane, begins with the physical pain of a bad foot and later voyages into absurdity, mad science, occultism, and existential dread.
A man lying in a bed of pain flees from physical torment into his own memories, and into speculations about life and reality. He was, once, employed by the Temporary Institute for the Study of Holes, a think tank pursuing research that ranges from occult studies to advanced physics, including black holes--or, as they are known in string theory, black branes.
He meets and interacts with the various other members of the institute. Its founder, Dr. Marilyn Shitansky, a formerly homeless woman who claims to have a thinking hole in her brain; its resident occultist, the chain-smoking Daladara with his magic abacus; Ernie Allegre the engineer, who designed and built a decoherence reactor to power the institute; Dr. Liu, the string theorist; the linguist Dr. Corngholm, who can't sit still; and Dr. Shitansky's secretary, Renbrui, who seems to carry a mystery with her wherever she goes.
In memory, the speaker finds them again, in a story of physical and emotional pain, of social and quantum entanglement, that turns comic, speculative, and nightmarish. Echoing the work of Blake Crouch and Thomas Ligotti, Michael Cisco shows in Black Brane why he's beloved by weird fiction and horror readers.
ANTISOCIETIES is a collection of ten stories about isolation - what it does to people, and what isolated people do to each other and themselves. An ominously quiet town. A haunting young adult novel from the turn of the century. Two starving captives frozen in agony. A young boy from a doting family. A man in a cheap Halloween mask. A succession of portraits of people trapped in their own identities, some of whom insist on their own ideas because they would have nothing at all without them. People for whom being seen by another is terrifying. And, like any collection of portraits, ANTISOCIETIES is also a collection of speculative mirrors ...