The City We Became (paperback)

When the dead begin speaking to sixteen-year-old Kim Nguyen, her peaceful childhood is over.

A delicate meditation on the nature of ghosts, belief, and how the future is shaped by the past. When the dead begin speaking to sixteen-year-old Kim Nguyen, her peaceful childhood is over. Suddenly everyone wants to exploit her new talent—her family, the Vietnamese government, and even the spirits themselves.

Hoa Pham is the author of several books and two plays. Her most recent publication is Empathy, also published by Goldsmiths Press under the Gold SF imprint. She is also the founder of Peril Magazine, an Asian-Australian online arts and culture magazine. Hoa lives in Melbourne, Australia.

Alien worlds, alter-egos, and Pleasure Domes–Sci-fi, Magick, Queer L.A.: Sexual Science and the Imagi-Nation explores the overlooked importance of science-fiction fandom and the occult to U.S. queer history.

Science fiction and occult communities helped pave the way for the LGBTQ+ movement by providing a place for individuals to meet, imagine, and create a life less restricted by societal norms. Focusing on Los Angeles from the late 1930s through the 1950s, this reader follows the lives of artists, writers, publishers, early sci-fi enthusiasts, and progressive communities, from Kenneth Anger, Lisa Ben, and Jack Parsons to the L.A. Science Fantasy Society (LASFS) and Ordo Templi Orientis at the Agape Lodge (O.T.O.).

Spanning sci-fi fandom, aerospace, queer history, and the occult, Sci-fi, Magick, Queer L.A. reveals how visionary artists, filmmakers, scientists, science-fiction writers and fans worked together to build a world of their own making. Featuring copious illustrations of salacious pulps, ritual paintings, and archival materials, authors Joseph Hawkins, Joan Lubin, Alexis Bard Johnson, Ben Miller, Judith Noble, Kelly Filreis, and Susan Aberth tell the interconnected stories behind the underground communities of early Los Angeles. This publication is made possible with support from Getty through its PST ART: Art & Science Collide initiative.

Palestine + 100 poses a question to twelve Palestinian writers: what might your country look like in the year 2048 – a century after the tragedies and trauma of what has come to be called the Nakba? How might this event – which, in 1948, saw the expulsion of over 700,000 Palestinian Arabs from their homes – reach across a century of occupation, oppression, and political isolation, to shape the country and its people? Will a lasting peace finally have been reached, or will future technology only amplify the suffering and mistreatment of Palestinians?

Covering a range of approaches – from SF noir, to nightmarish dystopia, to high-tech farce – these stories use the blank canvas of the future to reimagine the Palestinian experience today. Along the way, we encounter drone swarms, digital uprisings, time-bending VR, and peace treaties that span parallel universes. Published originally in the United Kingdom by Comma Press in 2019, Palestine +100 reframes science fiction as a place for political justice and the safekeeping of identity.

Edited by Basma Ghalayini. Featuring  Talal Abu Shawish, Tasnim Abutabikh, Selma Dabbagh, Emad El-Din Aysha, Samir El-Youssef, Saleem Haddad, Anwar Hamed, Majd Kayyal, Mazen Maarouf, Abdalmuti Maqboul, Ahmed Masoud & Rawan Yaghi.

In the 2090s, Earth is somehow still here. Drones and clones are big business and Henries Ickles, debonair New Los Angeles infoarchitect, wants in on the action. Metaphysical theories are put into practice, invisible art is critiqued, quasicrystals are crafted, yogurt is spilled. From diplomatic misadventures with metallic herds in RealSweden to an underwater rendezvous in the free domes of MiamiVII, Ickles, ad Infinitum is a compendium of the exuberant and the abject, a refracted hologram of the absurdities of cultural production that swerves between incisive ode and knowing lampoon.

Mark von Schlegell has been pushing the envelope with independently-published experimental fiction and theory since the 1990s. He was born in New York, moved to L.A. in 2000, and currently lives in Cologne. His first novel, Venusia (Semiotext(e), 2005) was honor's listed for the Otherwise Award in Science Fiction.

A literary odyssey along the highways at a time when a new form of superintelligence has emerged.

Autodrive is a work of literary fiction that melds techno-scientific inquiry and storytelling, critical theory and comedy, speculative fiction and satire. It is a road novel of sorts, an odyssey along the highways at a time when a new form of superintelligence has emerged. This new form of artificial intelligence is not entirely distinct from the characters in the narrative—it is ingrained in the machines they already use, the vehicles they already take, the systems they are already part of, but cannot fully see. The human character who is typically at the center of the fictional world gives way to an eccentric cast of performers—an ensemble of people and machines.