Dance the Eagle to Sleep (34 page)

Ursula K. Le Guin is the one modern science fiction author who truly needs no introduction. In the forty years since
The Left Hand of Darkness,
her works have changed not only the face but the tone and the agenda of SF, introducing themes of gender, race, socialism and anarchism, all the while thrilling readers with trips to strange (and strangely familiar) new worlds. She is our exemplar of what fantastic literature can and should be about.

Her Nebula winner
The Wild Girls,
newly revised and presented here in book form for the first time, tells of two captive “dirt children” in a society of sword and silk, whose determination to enter “that possible even when unattainable space in which there is room for justice” leads to a violent and loving end.

Plus: Le Guin’s scandalous and scorching Harper’s essay, ‘Staying Awake While We Read’, (also collected here for the first time) which demolishes the pretensions of corporate publishing and the basic assumptions of capitalism as well. And of course our Outspoken Interview which promises to reveal the hidden dimensions of America’s best-known SF author. And delivers.

“Idiosyncratic and convincing, Le Guin’s characters have a long afterlife.”

—
Publishers Weekly

“Her worlds are haunting psychological visions molded with firm artistry.”

—
The Library Journal

“If you want excess and risk and intelligence, try Le Guin.”

—
The San Francisco Chronicle

“Her characters are complex and haunting, and her writing is remarkable for its sinewy grace.”

—
Time

“She wields her pen with a moral and psychological sophistication rarely seen. What she really does is write fables: splendidly intricate and hugely imaginative tales about such mundane concerns as life, death, love, and sex.”

—
Newsweek

Mammoths of the Great Plains

Eleanor Arnason

ISBN: 978-1-60486-075-7
$12.00 152 pages

When President Thomas Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark to explore the West, he told them to look especially for mammoths. Jefferson had seen bones and tusks of the great beasts in Virginia, and he suspected—he hoped!—that they might still roam the Great Plains. In Eleanor Arnason’s imaginative alternate history, they do: shaggy herds thunder over the grasslands, living symbols of the oncoming struggle between the Native peoples and the European invaders. And in an unforgettable saga that soars from the badlands of the Dakotas to the icy wastes of Siberia, from the Russian Revolution to the AIM protests of the 1960s, Arnason tells of a modern woman’s struggle to use the weapons of DNA science to fulfill the ancient promises of her Lakota heritage.

PLUS: “Writing SF During World War III,” and an Outspoken Interview that takes you straight into the heart and mind of one of today’s edgiest and most uncompromising speculative authors.

“Eleanor Arnason nudges both human and natural history around so gently in this tale that you hardly know you’re not in the world-as-we-know-it until you’re quite at home in a North Dakota where you’ve never been before, listening to your grandmother tell you the world.”

— Ursula K. LeGuin

“Eleanor Arnason’s wise and engaging stories make you question the things you take for granted. How we love, how we fight, how we live.”

— Maureen McHugh, Winner of the James Tiptree Jr. and Hugo Awards

“Arnason doesn’t write about peace, the unreachable stasis. She writes about reconciliation: and art, a process, an intricate and never-ending dance. A literature of reconciliation, a celebration of this other ancient preoccupation of humanity, is a truly exciting development in our genre. It takes feminist SF out of the ghetto, out of the realm of reaction and reproach, into the real world.”

— Gwyenth Jones, Winner of the James Tiptree Jr. and Philip K. Dick Awards

“Arnason… refuses to write within the neat, confining boundaries of genre expectation, and in part because her fearless exploration of difficult political and social issues makes some editors and readers uneasy… Her work exploring gender, and particularly its intersection with politics, stands comparison with that of such better-known writers as Le Guin, Suzy McKee Charnas and Sheri Tepper.”

— Michael D. Levy, Professor of English Literature, University of Wisconsin-Stout

Calling All Heroes:
A Manual for Taking Power

Paco Ignacio Taibo II

ISBN: 978-1-60486-205-8
128 pages $12.00

The euphoric idealism of grassroots reform and the tragic reality of revolutionary failure are at the center of this speculative novel that opens with a real historical event. On October 2, 1968, 10 days before the Summer Olympics in Mexico, the Mexican government responds to a student demonstration in Tlatelolco by firing into the crowd, killing more than 200 students and civilians and wounding hundreds more. The massacre of Tlatelolco was erased from the official record as easily as authorities washing the blood from the streets, and no one was ever held accountable.

It is two years later and Nestor, a journalist and participant in the fateful events, lies recovering in the hospital from a knife wound. His fevered imagination leads him in the collection of facts and memories of the movement and its assassination in the company of figures from his childhood. Nestor calls on the heroes of his youth—Sherlock Holmes, Doc Holliday, Wyatt Earp and D’Artagnan among them— to join him in launching a new reform movement conceived by his intensely active imagination.

“Taibo’s writing is witty, provocative, finely nuanced and well worth the challenge.”

—
Publishers Weekly

“I am his number one fan… I can always lose myself in one of his novels because of their intelligence and humor. My secret wish is to become one of the characters in his fiction, all of them drawn from the wit and wisdom of popular imagination. Yet make no mistake, Paco Taibo—sociologist and historian—is recovering the political history of Mexico to offer a vital, compelling vision of our reality.”

— Laura Esquivel, author of
Like Water for Chocolate

“The real enchantment of Mr. Taibo’s storytelling lies in the wild and melancholy tangle of life he sees everywhere.”

—
New York Times Book Review

“It doesn’t matter what happens. Taibo’s novels constitute an absurdist manifesto. No matter how oppressive a government, no matter how strict the limitations of life, we all have our imaginations, our inventiveness, our ability to liven up lonely apartments with a couple of quacking ducks. If you don’t have anything left, oppressors can’t take anything away.”

—
Washington Post Book World

Fire on the Mountain

Terry Bisson
with an introduction
by Mumia Abu-Jamal

ISBN: 978-1-60486-087-0
$15.95 208 pages

It’s 1959 in socialist Virginia. The Deep South is an independent Black nation called Nova Africa. The second Mars expedition is about to touch down on the red planet. And a pregnant scientist is climbing the Blue Ridge in search of her great-great grandfather, a teenage slave who fought with John Brown and Harriet Tubman’s guerrilla army.

Long unavailable in the US, published in France as Nova Africa,
Fire on the Mountain
is the story of what might have happened if John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry had succeeded—and the Civil War had been started not by the slave owners but the abolitionists.

“History revisioned, turned inside out… Bisson’s wild and wonderful imagination has taken some strange turns to arrive at such a destination.”

— Madison Smartt Bell, Anisfield-Wolf Award winner and author of
Devil’s Dream

“You don’t forget Bisson’s characters, even well after you’ve finished his books. His
Fire on the Mountain
does for the Civil War what Philip K. Dick’s
The Man in the High Castle
did for World War Two.”

— George Alec Effinger, winner of the Hugo and Nebula awards for
Shrodinger’s Kitten,
and author of the MarTd Audran trilogy.

“A talent for evoking the joyful, vertiginous experiences of a world at fundamental turning points.”

—
Publishers Weekly

“Few works have moved me as deeply, as thoroughly, as Terry Bisson’s
Fire On The Mountain
… With this single poignant story, Bisson molds a world as sweet as banana cream pies, and as briny as hot tears.”

— Mumia Abu-Jamal, death row prisoner and author of
Live From Death Row,
from the Introduction.

Love and Struggle: My Life in
SDS, the Weather Underground,
and Beyond

David Gilbert
with an introduction by Boots Riley

ISBN: 978-1-60486-319-2
$22.00 384 pages