AustLit

'It's 1986 and a fungal extract developed by unconventional, mask-wearing Alfie Soda promises immortality. Ralph Makki is looking for a meaningful way to invest the inheritance from his father, a formidable if unwholesome business magnate. Among Makki senior's paperwork is an unsent letter expressing interest in the extract. Makki invests in the drug, despite its obscure origins, believing it could be a boon to humankind.

'Plus, he's already addicted to the stuff.

'So when Soda absconds from the research station in Papua New Guinea, taking Makki's money plus everything needed to synthesize the extract, Makki is forced into a global search for Soda and a source of the extract. Soda's trail leads Makki into a series of humanitarian disasters. But what is Soda's obsession with hotspots of misery and genocide? And is Makki the hunter or the hunted?'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'A collection of thirteen pulp-inspired, speculative short stories by Greg Guerin, including ten originally published in Aurealis, Borderlands, Aphelion-webzine, Planetmag and Gateway as well as three previously unpublished stories.

'Over 80,000 words of mind-bending science fiction, fantasy and horror packed with imagination and shocking twists, spanning the present to the end of time through characters ranging from humans to alien organisms the size of planets....

'The desperate protagonists of these stories find themselves in the most unusual of circumstances:

'A deformed baby who must heal a tear in time itself...

'A man who witnesses millions of years of evolution compressed into hours from within an observation complex on reconstructed Earth...

'A boy who returns from a place between life and death to haunt the township of Lenswood...

'A failed academic who has leeches inside his brain, feeding on non-social neurotransmitters...

'A brain-dead ex-particle physicist living in a nursing home on a hellish world who is obsessed with tending a patch of sweet peas...

'This collection from Greg Guerin contains an assortment of post-apocalyptic, psychological and Universe-altering science fiction, with some horror and high fantasy thrown in, and explores the extremes of imagined existences.'

Source : publisher's blurb