Speculative Los Angeles

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What to expect

The debut title of a new city-based anthology series featuring stories with speculative, sci-fi, and paranormal themes

As an incubator of the future, Los Angeles has long mesmerized writers from Philip K. Dick to Aldous Huxley. With its natural disasters, Hollywood artifice, staggering wealth and poverty, urban sprawl, and diversity, one can argue that Los Angeles is already so weird, surreal, irrational, and mythic that any fiction emerging from this place should be considered speculative.

So, bestselling author Denise Hamilton commissioned some stories and did exactly that. In Speculative Los Angeles, fourteen of the city’s most prophetic voices reimagine the city in very different ways. In this audiobook, you’ll encounter twenty-first-century changelings, dirigibles plying the suburban skies, black holes and jacaranda men lurking in deep suburbia, beachfront property in Century City, walled-off canyons and coastlines reserved for the wealthy, psychic death cults, robot nursemaids, and an alternate LA where Spanish land grants never gave way to urbanization.

As with our city-based Akashic Noir Series, each story in Speculative Los Angeles is set in a distinct neighborhood filled with local color, landmarks, and flavor. Since the best speculative fiction provides a wormhole into other worlds while also commenting on our own, that is exactly what you’ll find here.

Featuring brand-new stories by: Aimee Bender, Lisa Morton, Alex Espinoza, Ben H. Winters, Denise Hamilton, Lynell George, Stephen Blackmoore, Francesca Lia Block, Charles Yu, Duane Swierczynski, Luis J. Rodriguez, A. G. Lombardo, Kathleen Kaufman, and S. Qiouyi Lu



Critics Review

“A thrill ride of grand ideas and warnings…A collection that wows the imagination like no other.”

Michael Connelly, #1 New York Times bestselling author

“Tales that are both wildly imaginative and emotionally grounded.”

Los Angeles Times

“Shows the breadth of worlds that can be created inside Los Angeles.”

Los Angeles Daily News

“Outstanding…Each story presents a fresh take on the magic and strangeness of LA past, present, and future…Readers should snap this up.”

Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Award-winning narrator Gabrielle de Cuir’s use of a robot voice in ‘Walk of Fame’ by Duane Swierczynski. She sounds like a machine—but so very human at the same time. Hard to do…Fresh and gritty.”

AudioFile

“An excellent collection of what-ifs that will pique readers’ imaginations.”

Booklist

“The stories here move among all of Los Angeles’ gritty and bright corners.”

Kirkus Reviews

“Speculative stories set in neighborhoods around Los Angeles…a particularly appropriate and broadly appealing place to begin the series, given its outsized role in the American imagination.”

Shelf Awareness

“Many [stories] have a distinctly gritty and postapocalyptic flavor that takes advantage of a uniquely LA vibe.”

Library Journal

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