Cover art by J. K. Potter.

For many of us, the Ace Double Novels of the '50s and '60s have long been a source both of pleasure and nostalgia. This new double volume from Subterranean Press stands squarely in that distinguished tradition, offering a pair of colorful, fast-paced novellas from one of the finest writers currently working in any genre: Lucius Shepard.

InVacancy, a washed-up actor, a mysterious motel, and a Malaysian "woman of power" form the central elements in a riveting account of a rootless man forced to confront the impossible – but very real – demons of his past. This is Shepard at his harrowing, hallucinatory best.

Ariel brilliantly transmutes some traditional SF concepts – alien incursions, the mysteries of quantum physics – into an astonishing, often moving reflection on love and obsession, memory and identity, and the archetypal conflict that stands at the heart of an infinite multitude of worlds.

Contents:

  • Vacancy
  • Ariel
Published
2009
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Additional book details

Author

Lucius Shepard

Lucius Shepard (1947–2014) was an American writer. Classified as a science fiction and fantasy writer, he often leaned into other genres, such as magical realism. His work is infused with a political and historical sensibility and an awareness of literary antecedents. Brief biographies are, like history texts, too organized to be other than orderly misrepresentations of the truth. So when it's written that Lucius Shepard was born in August of 1947 to Lucy and William Shepard in Lynchburg, Virginia, and raised thereafter in Daytona Beach, Florida, it provides a statistical hit and gives you nothing of the difficult childhood from which he…