Under the biological microscope, fractal geometry reveals itself as the secret structure of Life itself. Like Russian dolls, the closer we zoom in, the more we pass into repeating realms of infinite divisibility. In Ultrameta, Douglas Thompson searches for just such patterns in the confusion and social devastation of modern urban life. Ultrameta is the metropolis of all metropolises. The city we all live in, wherever we happen to be in the world. London, Glasgow, Athens, New York, Tokyo . . . the 'City of the Soul' that has grown within all of us. The time-span of the text ranges from Ancient Greece to the unnervingly familiar present, leading us to uncomfortable questions about ourselves and the life we live. It encompasses a vast emotional and social spectrum, which we plunge through as we follow the main character, Alexander Stark, through a vivid range of different identities, moving from one time and place to another in a seemingly endless cycle of death and re-emergence. What is Ultrameta? Visionary horror? Experimental surrealism? Trippy outsider art? Like Danielewski's House of Leaves, this is one of those few books that possess a core of something genuinely unusual, both in its ideas and its approach to storytelling. A tale of 'Serial Suicide' - or perhaps of immortality. A circular novel - or is it a story collection? A four-dimensional shadow of, or an enigma modelled on, Life itself? Ultrameta represents a striking development in Slipstream writing and a unique way of looking at the world.

The murder of a free-lance investigator aboard a crack Chicago to California train might have been written off and forgotten except for the involvement of a quasi-secret group funded by a general with the United States government when the train reaches the yard at Salt Lake City. A tangled trail of murder and mayhem is precipitated when a persistent Mexican/Irish homicide detective, Ramos Torres, is ordered to back-off and accept the version arranged by two Federal officers from D.C. His neatly organized life is changed forever when he is initiated into a world of deceit and biotechnological research by a reporter from Boston, Kathleen Flaherty. The young woman is drop-dead gorgeous, Irish, and the victim's partner in their investigation of the mail handling inquiries. Torres becomes enhanced with this Irish Queen's story and because of his involvement with her the department becomes embroiled in a dangerous game of espionage and murder. The murder on the train escalates to include the Medical Examiner and the Police department before involving trips through several western states and ending up in Boston, Massachusetts. Throughout the story Faulkner and his stone cold killer Corrigan, known as the 'Iceman', do everything within their power to keep Torres isolated from any assistance from his friends by destroying them incrementally. The violent end comes in a hotel room with the help of a Boston cop, two U.S. senators, an editor and a Mafioso's top man.

An astonishing, first-hand account of an unknown chapter in Mafia history

A revelatory and dramatic true-life thriller spanning much of the 20th century, this page-turning chronicle tells of an elaborate Mafia plan to invade Europe, taking over its gambling, by using 1960s London as a bridgehead. The capital city of the Swinging Sixties was a world of gambling, guns, and gangsters. Several veterans of the era are astonished that they survived it and some feel protected enough--now that most of the killers are themselves dead--to reveal to author Douglas Thompson the details of one of history's greatest criminal conspiracies, and of how world-champion boxer Freddie Mills really died. The tension is ferocious as the tale moves from London to New York and Las Vegas, down to Miami, into Havana, on to the Bahamas, and back to an unexpected denouement in London. This brutal, terrifying, intrigue-packed account of the Mob's Machiavellian global manipulation of governments and officials even unearths a London connection to the assassination of JFK. Recounting events from the viewpoint of the pawns as well as the kingmakers, this chronicle includes big players of Mafia history, controlled by the gangster genius Meyer Lansky, but it also considers the hit men, the fixers, the hoodlums, and the wiseguys.

A racy, entertaining story of gambling, greed and the perfect con.

Apoidea... When the bees were wiped out, famine and war threatened and mankind faced the abyss. But then came salvation, in the form of the cyber bee. Fully functional, fully capable of replacing its extinct predecessor. Humanity would survive. But suddenly, the bees are not behaving the way they should. Something is wrong... Apoidea... A fast paced, intelligent and frighteningly contemporary science fiction thriller from Douglas Thompson, author of Ultrameta and Sylvow. Praise for Douglas Thompson... Thompson writes with the assurance of someone completely in control of his material... Pete Tennant, Black Static magazine Thompson uses the tropes of the fantastic in unique and compelling ways while at the same time creating vivid and fully realized protagonists... Mike O'Driscoll, The Fix Online Thompson has certainly shown he is a name to watch. Ian Sales, Interzone Magazine

The subject of Andrew Lloyd-Webber's Stephen Ward the Musical, Ward was the social cavalier who knew everyone who mattered, and who played an enigmatic role in one of the great political scandals of the 20th Century

The tragic story of the persecution, trial, and death of Stephen Ward is both torturous and infamous. Now, author Douglas Thompson has traced confidants of Ward, speaking for the first time in more than half a century; along with newly-discovered government documents, he has gathered their eyewitness accounts of Downing Street intrigue, sex orgies, and dangerous liaisons. Few truly knew the rakish charmer who was the catalytic character of The Profumo Affair. A talented osteopath and artist, Stephen Ward treated, sketched, and seduced the great and often not-so-good of the post-war years. He healed Churchill and Gandhi, Frank Sinatra and Elizabeth Taylor; he drew Princess Margaret, the Duke of Edinburgh, Harold Macmillan, dukes, duchesses, maharajahs, and Christine Keeler, whose striking likeness by him hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London. Everyone loved the superbly well-connected Stephen Ward. But when Christine Keeler slept with two of his friends--British War Minister John Profumo and Soviet superspy Eugene Ivanov--and President Kennedy's White House went haywire, suspicion and scandal cast a shroud over Ward and his world. In the middle of a nuclear poker game, he soon had MI5 and MI6 snapping at his heels, along with the KGB, the CIA, and the FBI at his shoulder. The spooks all feared what he might know, or do. The British Establishment, keen to see Ward gone, brushed him off. Posterity is ferociously capricious, but there are still those alive who know the secrets and the true story of Stephen Ward--brilliantly told here.

Few writers can continuously span the chasms of prejudice that divide literary writing from science fiction and horror. The Fallen West unites Douglas Thompson's mainstream poetry with his often outlandishly surreal short stories. The distorting mirrors of the tales focus on how the human condition oscillates between boredom and terror. The poems explore how the forces of decay and destruction in our lives are part of a continual cycle of the natural world. Troubled characters grapple with hidden openings into fantastical worlds. Their revelations are metaphors for the problems of our society at large, and for the state of heightened awareness essential for each of us to stay creatively alive.

Did I only dream of Emilianna? Or was she real? If she was real, what she taught me was that nothing was real. Or if she was a dream, then she taught me that everyone was dreaming and dreaming was everything. Waking late this morning, I knew that I'd been thinking of her again, her flat down by the river Kelvin, from which the fog and ice would spread in winter at dusk and dawn like nerve gas. Her flat looked out west across the winding river, on the other side of which sat my office, or the building that held my office on its fourth floor in its swelling mansard attic like an upside-down boat.

Fresh out the pin, self made man Kedar has plans on getting back to the top. Only this time he plans on doing it the right way. But when life from the inside starts to catch up with him on the streets and a past secret is revealed, Kedar is forced to figure out whether his inner circle is friend or foe. With time winding down, he summons up the old savagery in him, with ruthless actions. Can he figure out how to balance the good with the bad in time to remain UNSHAKABLE?......Or has his luck finally run out?

April Ashley was a trailblazing figure in the fight for trans visibility and acceptance, one of the first British people to undergo gender-reassignment surgery, in 1960 - this is her remarkable story.

Born in 1935 in Liverpool, Ashley was assigned male at birth, but knew from a young age that she identified as a woman. At the age of sixteen, April left home and began her journey of self-discovery, eventually transitioning and undergoing gender-reassignment surgery in 1960. She became one of the first British people to undergo the procedure, which was illegal at the time in the UK.

April's transition was met with both admiration and hostility from the media and the public. Despite facing discrimination and transphobia, she remained dedicated to promoting trans visibility and acceptance.

In the 1960s, she moved to Paris and became a successful model and cabaret performer, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Salvador Dalí and Jean Cocteau. She also appeared in films and on television, becoming a prominent figure in the entertainment industry.

Throughout her life, April Ashley was a tireless advocate for the rights of trans people, speaking out on issues such as discrimination, health care, and legal recognition. She received numerous awards for her activism, including an MBE in 2012 for services to transgender equality.

Today, April's legacy continues to inspire and empower trans people around the world. Her courageous journey and unwavering dedication to fighting for trans rights will undoubtedly be remembered as a vital part of the LGBTQ+ movement.

Did I only dream of Emilianna? Or was she real? If she was real, what she taught me was that nothing was real. Or if she was a dream, then she taught me that everyone was dreaming and dreaming was everything. Waking late this morning, I knew that I'd been thinking of her again, her flat down by the river Kelvin, from which the fog and ice would spread in winter at dusk and dawn like nerve gas. Her flat looked out west across the winding river, on the other side of which sat my office, or the building that held my office on its fourth floor in its swelling mansard attic like an upside-down boat.

Thomas Tellman, an RAF pilot who disappeared pursuing a UFO in 1948, unexpectedly returns entirely un-aged to a small town on Scotland's north-east coast. He finds that his 7-year-old daughter is now a bed-bound 87-year-old woman suffering from dementia. She greets him as her father but others assume she is deluded and that Thomas is an unhinged impostor or con man. While Thomas endeavours to blend in to an ordinary life, his presence gradually sets off unpredictable consequences, locally, nationally and globally. Members of the British Intelligence Services attempt to discredit Thomas in advance of what they anticipate will be his public disclosure of evidence of extra-terrestrial activity, but the local community protect him. Thomas, appalled by the increase in environmental damage that has occurred in his 80 year absence, appears to have returned with a mission: whose true nature he guards from everyone around him.

Douglas Thompson's thought-provoking novel is unashamedly science-fiction yet firmly in the tradition of literary explorations of the experience of the outsider. He weaves together themes of memory loss and dementia, alienation, and spiritual respect for the natural world; while at the same time counterposing the humanity inherent in close communities against the xenophobia and nihilistic materialism of contemporary urban society. Of all the book's vivid characters, the fictional village of Kinburgh itself is the stand-out star: an archetypal symbol of human community. In an age of growing despair in the face of climate crises, Stray Pilot offers a passionate environmental allegory with a positive message of constructive hope: a love song to all that is best in ordinary people.

In the city of Sylvow, brother and sister Claudia and Leo Vestra made a childhood promise to each other: he would look after the plants and she would look after the animals. Unlike most promises, both of these were kept - each in their own way. Claudia is now a vet - looking after pampered pets or putting down strays and leading a mundane life in the city. Leo, on the other hand, disenchanted with modern urban life, has abruptly abandoned his wife and disappeared into the surrounding forest, his only contact with the outside world being a sequence of dramatic and prophetic letters - increasingly convinced that a semi-sentient natural world is preparing to rebel against its human irritants. Nature is a strange thing - although we have done an amazing job of cataloguing and observing it, we still know very little about it. Nature always surprises - and always changes, especially under an external influence such as humanity's devastating effect on the environment. This book follows its cast of characters through a spectacular clash between everyday life and life on the evolutionary scale - as society dissolves and is stripped away under the onslaught of surreal environmental disaster. Douglas Thompson has dug deep into the inevitable guilt that we all feel, as a culture/species, for the disastrous state of civilization and its effect on both ourselves and the world around us - in the process touching on elements as diverse as literary surrealism, philosophical tract, horror, disaster novel and visionary science fiction.

Under the biological microscope, fractal geometry reveals itself as the secret structure of Life itself. Like Russian dolls, the closer we zoom in, the more we pass into repeating realms of infinite divisibility. In Ultrameta, Douglas Thompson searches for just such patterns in the confusion and social devastation of modern urban life. Ultrameta is the metropolis of all metropolises. The city we all live in, wherever we happen to be in the world. London, Glasgow, Athens, New York, Tokyo . . . the 'City of the Soul' that has grown within all of us. The time-span of the text ranges from Ancient Greece to the unnervingly familiar present, leading us to uncomfortable questions about ourselves and the life we live. It encompasses a vast emotional and social spectrum, which we plunge through as we follow the main character, Alexander Stark, through a vivid range of different identities, moving from one time and place to another in a seemingly endless cycle of death and re-emergence. What is Ultrameta? Visionary horror? Experimental surrealism? Trippy outsider art? Like Danielewski's House of Leaves, this is one of those few books that possess a core of something genuinely unusual, both in its ideas and its approach to storytelling. A tale of 'Serial Suicide' - or perhaps of immortality. A circular novel - or is it a story collection? A four-dimensional shadow of, or an enigma modelled on, Life itself? Ultrameta represents a striking development in Slipstream writing and a unique way of looking at the world.

An astonishing first-hand account of an unknown chapter in Mafia history, previously published as Shadowland

A revelatory and dramatic true-life thriller spanning much of the 20th century, this page-turning chronicle tells of an elaborate Mafia plan to invade Europe, taking over its gambling, by using 1960s London as a bridgehead. The capital city of the Swinging Sixties was a world of gambling, guns, and gangsters. Several veterans of the era are astonished that they survived it and some feel protected enough--now that most of the killers are themselves dead--to reveal to author Douglas Thompson the details of one of history's greatest criminal conspiracies, and of how world-champion boxer Freddie Mills really died. The tension is ferocious as the tale moves from London to New York and Las Vegas, down to Miami, into Havana, on to the Bahamas, and back to an unexpected denouement in London. This brutal, terrifying, intrigue-packed account of the Mob's Machiavellian global manipulation of governments and officials even unearths a London connection to the assassination of JFK. Recounting events from the viewpoint of the pawns as well as the kingmakers, this chronicle includes big players of Mafia history, controlled by the gangster genius Meyer Lansky, but it also considers the hit men, the fixers, the hoodlums, and the wiseguys.

Scott Malthrop is a murderer with a difference: his entire house is filled with an enormous device gradually assembled by him and his father over four decades. Known only as The Machine the device seems to transport Malthrop to different locations in space and time by feeding off his memories and a vast array of sentimental objects and trophies taken by Malthrop from his own past and that of his victims. As Malthrop's experiments become ever more violent and life-threatening, they cause distortions in the surrounding quantum fabric, and spark off pursuit from two very different directions: a local Police Inspector and two Angels sent back from the end of time.

Cilla Black is one of Britain's best-loved entertainers, and an icon of the sixties. Known to one generation for a string of number-one hits like Anyone Who Had a Heart and You're My World, and loved by another for hosting the classic ITV show Blind Date, Cilla has come a long way from hanging coats in Liverpool's Cavern Club for five bob an hour. In Cilla: Queen of the Swinging Sixties, Douglas Thompson traces her rise to the top, her heart-warming marriage to Bobby Willis, and the profound effect his death had on her. This affectionate biography is a fitting tribute to 50 years in show business for our Cilla.

By turns wistful, haunting and macabre, 'The Sleep Corporation' is a major collection of thirty-one stories by Douglas Thompson, a self-proclaimed 'Glasgow Surrealist' and one of the most original and individual voices to have emerged in the field of British speculative and dark fiction over the last fifteen years. Thompson is a short story writer and novelist of almost unparalleled skill. This is an extraordinarily gifted writer whose lines are infused with poetry Charles Packer - Sci Fi Online

Two centuries from now, humans' unchecked environmental pollution will have provoked a new ice age. Amid the ruins of the city of Volwys, a bio-dome is under construction to protect a privileged elite, while the peasants outside live in mediaeval squalor, facing gradual extinction as the planet cools. Only one man alive remembers our world, having been kept alive by genetic manipulation by the mysterious 'cherubs'. The cherubs are frequent visitors at the court of the ruler: The Wolf King, who is guarded by bird-headed soldiers. Rrio is plagued by nightmares and visions as he attempts to uphold his odious regime by interrogation and torture. As his consciousness disintegrates, he comes to realise that the rebel leader each of his victims speaks of holds a fascination that may unlock the enigma of his own soul. This edition also includes nine acclaimed science fiction short stories published over the last ten years in magazines and anthologies.

In the city of Sylvow, brother and sister Claudia and Leo Vestra made a childhood promise to each other: he would look after the plants and she would look after the animals. Unlike most promises, both of these were kept - each in their own way. Claudia is now a vet - looking after pampered pets or putting down strays and leading a mundane life in the city. Leo, on the other hand, disenchanted with modern urban life, has abruptly abandoned his wife and disappeared into the surrounding forest, his only contact with the outside world being a sequence of dramatic and prophetic letters - increasingly convinced that a semi-sentient natural world is preparing to rebel against its human irritants. Nature is a strange thing - although we have done an amazing job of cataloguing and observing it, we still know very little about it. Nature always surprises - and always changes, especially under an external influence such as humanity's devastating effect on the environment. This book follows its cast of characters through a spectacular clash between everyday life and life on the evolutionary scale - as society dissolves and is stripped away under the onslaught of surreal environmental disaster. Douglas Thompson has dug deep into the inevitable guilt that we all feel, as a culture/species, for the disastrous state of civilization and its effect on both ourselves and the world around us - in the process touching on elements as diverse as literary surrealism, philosophical tract, horror, disaster novel and visionary science fiction.