A Splendid Chaos
Zero is a young film maker who believes his whole life and career are mapped out before him. That is, until the night he and his friends walk into a rock club... and are caught in a dazzling trap that spans worlds.
They are dropped onto a dreamlike planet whose surrealistic beauty cannot hide its grotesque reality. Fool’s Hope – a world, so stunningly bizarre, nightmares are irrelevant. Here, abductees – both human and alien – are pitted against a neverending succession of hellish parasites, carnivores, shape-changers, and symbiotes.
Yet the greatest enemy of all could be human. When former professor Harmon Fiskle is transformed by the Current – a roving mutagenic force – he is freed to pursue his megalomaniacal nature. He advocates a depraved policy of social Darwinism, and forges a grotesque alliance of Twists: men and women who have sacrificed their own humanity to become monstrous mutations of their former selves.
With an entire world at stake, only Zero can solve the mystery of Fool’s Hope... if it isn’t already too late.
John Shirley
John Patrick Shirley (born 1953) is an American science fiction and horror writer of novels, short stories, and television and film scripts.
John Shirley's most significant cyberpunk novels are City Come A-Walkin and the Eclipse (A Song Called Youth) trilogy. Avant-slipstream critic Larry McCaffrey called him "the post-modern Poe". Bruce Sterling has cited Shirley's early story collection Heatseeker as being a seminal cyberpunk work in itself. Indeed, several stories in Heatseeker were particularly seminal, including Sleepwalkers, which, in just one example, probably provided the inspiration for William Gibson's "meat puppets" in Neuromancer. Gibson acknowledged Shirley's influence and borrowing ideas from Shirley in his introduction to Shirley's City Come A-Walkin.