This Is the Way the World Ends

A darkly comic tale of one survivor’s unintended collaboration with the architects of a nuclear holocaust—and his surprising adventures in the post-apocalyptic world

George Paxton is a simple man, happy enough with his job carving inscriptions on gravestones. All he needs is a high-tech survival garment—a scopas suit—to protect his beloved daughter in the event of nuclear Armageddon. But when George finally acquires the coveted suit, the deal comes with a catch: He must sign a sales contract admitting to his complicity in the nuclear arms race between the US and the Soviets.

Inevitably, the bombs fall, and our hero finds himself imprisoned on a submarine headed for Antarctica, where he and five other survivors will stand trial for “crimes against humanity.” George Paxton’s accusers are no ordinary plaintiffs: They are “the unadmitted,” potential people whose hypothetical lives were canceled in consequence of humankind’s self-extinction. In the months that follow, George’s dark journey will take him through the hellscape that was once the Earth, through a human past that has become as unthinkable as the human future, to his day in court before the South Pole tribunal, and finally into the intolerable heart of loss.

The Journal of Nicholas the American

College student Nicholas Dal shares the family talent, or curse – he is an empath, a man who experiences the emotions of other people. Too-powerful emotion can induce seizures, so to stay sane he must live alone and dull his senses with vodka.

This, in itself, would be enough for anyone to bear, but Nicholas ias also haunted by a secret from his family’s past in Russia. Now someone is looking for him and he fears the worst. To further complicate things, a relationship is forming with a young woman, Jack, and his feelings for her threaten to break through his isolation.

Will Nicholas risk his love, his sanity – his life – to be with Jack?

Free Live Free

“Free Live Free,” said the newspaper ad, and the out-of-work detective Jim Stubb, the occultist Madame Serpentina, the salesman Ozzie Barnes, and the overweight prostitute Candy Garth are brought together to live for a time in Free’s old house, a house scheduled for demolition to make way for a highway.

Free drops mysterious hints of his exile from his homeland, and of the lost key to his return. And so when demolition occurs and Free disappears, the four make a pact to continue the search, which ultimately takes them far beyond their wildest dreams.

This is character-driven science fiction at its best by a writer whom, at the time of its first publication, the Chicago Sun-Times called “science fiction’s best genuine novelist.”

Count Zero

A corporate mercenary wakes in a reconstructed body, a beautiful woman by his side. Then Hosaka Corporation reactivates him, for a mission more dangerous than the one he’s recovering from: to get a defecting chief of R&D—and the biochip he’s perfected—out intact. But this proves to be of supreme interest to certain other parties—some of whom aren’t remotely human…