Lost in the Shell: Flash and shorts around SciFi - English Edition

Sure what you see is real?

• John and Milly are lost in the midst of endless cornfields. The Sun looks like the eyeball of a psychopath. Thay are not alone.
• Gary asks Synthetica, a generative AI linked to his neural system, to help him approach a girl repairing android dolls in a shop. The girl turns up dead.
• Newman is a former Marine cook. He lives in Florida. Suffering from pathological anxiety after his divorce, he runs to the beach every day. It is here that he discovers one morning that someone has set the apocalypse in motion.
• A mysterious Agent B. identifies a young woman he meets on a street as an ideal donor of soul codes.
• In New York City, there is the intersection of two streets, and here, every morning, an old man who never dies sits.
• The irreconcilable Sidonia, a woman who rejects her own identity, goes to a retailer of the Hasp: a state-of-the-art shell with a consciousness extender.
• Marley and Emma find an eyeball in the garden. It hangs from the branches of a tree by nerve endings. The eye is staring at their house with a stalker’s gaze.
• Key World agent John Jenkins, known as Jax, must solve a strange case. A mysterious accident has decimated commuters on a busy road. Someone called him. They knew he had “special” abilities.

These are just a few of the 17 stories in this collection. A bizarre and disturbing journey through consciousness, science fiction, cyberpunk and technology.

Illustrated.
Available both in Italian and English.

On the genre

Science fiction is not about reality, it’s about sharpening our understanding of reality.
Brian W. Aldiss.

Science fiction is fiction about that which is not but might be or what might have been but never was, as far as we know.
Jim Baen

We have not really budged a step until we take up residence in someone else’s point of view.
John Erskine

Introduction

Speculative science fiction pushes us to the edge between the visible and the invisible, so that the mind can also claim what we do not see. Science fiction takes many forms, but it is always the story of the "what if" question, and it is startlingly dependent on specifics, no matter how unlikely, far-fetched, or even impossible. In recent years, it has become increasingly linked to scientific research, to science that is even discussed in academia and even mediated by platforms of ardent connoisseurs, but which is still up-to-date science and generally accepted (at least) as a viable scientific theory.

In this anthology, sci-fi is intertwined with the fantastic, borders on the procedural, flows into the technological anxieties of cyberpunk, and does so through mirrors of witty satirical distortion and penetratingly detached clarity. Jack Williamson has written, “Reading science fiction requires a certain flexibility. I don’t know if the science fiction audience is more intelligent than the average person, but those in it are more open-minded.” This book is for curious, thoughtful readers who are willing to question the status quo politically, technologically, sociologically, and in many other ways. Enjoy the read.
Gregor Code, Prompt engineer