Once and Future Cities

Cities are the defining aggregation of modern humankind. Hate to live with them, hate to live without them.

Allen Ashley’s tales of Urban Fantasy are intensely surreal, savagely satirical, subtly subversive and despairingly funny. Possessed of a unique vision and a distinctive prose style, Allen Ashley exposes the absurdities of modern British society like no other writer. Every waking moment is a struggle for continued sanity and survival as we muddle thoughtlessly through this surrealist joke called civilisation. The challenges – factual, fictitious, mythical, eminently plausible – just keep on coming. Ashley demonstrates that, if you have the nose for it, apocalypse can be smelled everywhere – in the latest media circus; in the latest dubious laws or government measures; in celebrity culture or the surveillance state; in the mindsets and prejudices of the population and in the tiniest actions we all perform.

Contents:

• Beholders
• Black Forest Manoeuvres
• Canoe Boy
• Play the Pipes of Pan
• The Pamela Faction
• D-Leb
• Waving Not Drowning
• Flat Top
• Stoners
• Turbulent Times
• Petrified
• The Accidentalists
• The Spaces in Our Lives
• The Slot
• Murdoch Celeste
• Nine Views of the Light of the World
• The Short and the Long of It
• Slow Planes
• War Haven
• Shirts
• Future Cities
• Today We Were Astronauts