Carter Scholz

Short novels are movie length narratives that may well be the perfect length for science fiction stories. This collection presents the best-of-the-best science fiction novellas published in 2015 by current and emerging masters of this vibrant form of story-telling. In "The Citadel of Weeping Pearls," by Aliette de Bodard, set in the author's Dai Viet interstellar empire, an Empress orders her scientific Grand Master to search deepest space and track down the missing Citadel, along with its technologies, to help defend against enemies amassing on her borders. In "The New Mother," by Eugene Fischer, a freelance journalist pursues the career-making opportunity to write a feature article for a major publication following a contagion that turns human ova diploid, capable of parthenogenesis-reproduction without the need for sperm. In "Inhuman Garbage," by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, set in the author's popular Retrieval Artist series, a detective investigates the murder of a body found in a recycling/composting waste disposal crate in a dome on the moon. In "Gypsy," by Carter Scholz, a meticulously rendered, slower-than-light, starship flees a totalitarian Earth on a mission whose outcome is not a clear-cut success or failure. Finally, in "What Has Passed Shall in Kinder Light Appear," by Bao Shu, Xie Baosheng and his lifelong love, Qiqi, are small children as the countdown to the 2008 Beijing Olympics has begun. Their lives in China are prosperous but then history starts to run backwards.

The intriguing story of how a bold but tiny group of beleaguered humanity financed by a rogue billionaire undertake the top-secret colonization of a nearby star system In this collection of sci-fi stories, heralded writer Carter Scholz explores a variety of sociopolitical themes. In the novella Gypsy, a few visionary scientists, chosen and nurtured by an eccentric billionaire undertake humankind s most expansive adventure a generations-long voyage to a distant planet. The story The Nine Billion Names of God uses a classic sci-fi text to deconstruct literary deconstruction itself, with hilarious results. Imprecations is an unforgiving examination of the primary lies in popular culture. An interview with the author, in which Scholz reveals his sources, frustrations, forbidden delights, and demonic designs, is also included."

In this collection of twelve stories, Carter Scholz reveals his truly remarkable range and prodigious narrative gifts. Traveling from the surface of the moon to the New Jersey suburbs, they explore the places in the human mind where science and fiction merge. Here are stories that disturb the universe, probe the worlds we call home, and measure the degrees of our alienation. Mind-expanding, entertaining, and often richly disquieting, the stories in "The Amount to Carry" are bravura performances of the imagination.

Previously published only in a signed, limited edition, Kafka Americana has achieved cult status. Norton now brings this reimagination of our labyrinthine world to a wider audience. In an act of literary appropriation, Lethem and Scholz seize a helpless Kafka by the lapels and thrust him into the cultural wreckage of twentieth-century America. In the collaboratively written "Receding Horizon," Hollywood welcomes Kafka as scriptwriter for Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life, with appropriately morbid results. Scholz's "The Amount to Carry" transports "the legal secretary of the Workman's Accident Insurance Institute" to a conference with fellow insurance executives Wallace Stevens and Charles Ives, to muse on what can and can't be insured. And Lethem's "K for Fake" brings together Orson Welles, Jerry Lewis, and Rod Serling in a kangaroo trial in which Kafka faces fraudulent charges. Taking modernism's presiding genius for a joyride, the authors portray an absurd, ominous world that Kafka might have invented but could never have survived.