Satire Science

Tyrus Murphy is a bumbling EMT from Nebraska with big dreams. When he gets a call from an unknown number informing him he’s just inherited his uncle’s island of killer robots, he has one thought: world domination. International conquest ends up being more challenging than it seems, as the young ruler faces hard partying politicians, mysterious old aristocrats, and even his own unexpected aversion to violence. Powered by optimism and greed, Tyrus falls face-first through a globe-trotting adventure that rarely goes according to plan.

When you find out your best friend and business partner is secretly sleeping with your wife, it may be time to move on.... From your job and your marriage.... Which is precisely what happened to Jamie Newgent. A change of lifestyle is what’s needed, and a bachelor pad on the fourth floor of a jutting tower provides a new home, a fresh start, and a new chapter in his life.

Graham Paint is a downsizing consultant, and sick of it. One morning, he misses his bus when he stops to put a strange caterpillar in a matchbox. As the bus passes, he’s shocked to spot himself inside. Like Schrödinger’s Cat in the famous quantum thought experiment, the caterpillar's spawned parallel possibilities. This comic novel explores Graham’s search for a better life among the various overlapping alternatives.

At the end of the world, the zombies are not the scariest monsters. Something evil and vile now hides among the sheep seeking to devour its very heart. Pastor Mike Brown and his wife, Lauren, are loved by the congregation of the church that rose from the ashes of the zombie apocalypse. But a dark secret, if discovered, could destroy everything.

Mex is heading for the Edinburgh Festival in search of Legless. Hot on her heels is Beryl a leader who has already dropped Mex in it once and now plans to do so again. Beryl must make contact with Mex before Mex finds Legless; retrieve the spark plug but not Legless, find a way back to Planet Hy Man, without Legless and save her planet. And all before the Edinburgh Festival finishes! A feat made near impossible when considering her arch-rival Hilda, a woman as ruthless as a politician (and with the same dress sense) has access to every high- tech spying equipment going.

Set in a fantasy world of unmanageable magics and questionable cosmology, There and NEVER, EVER Back Again: A Dark Lord's Journal is the peculiar, blackly satirical tale of the Dark Lord, who is amassing an army of Things of the Night, and awaiting likely death at the hands of the Elves, the Dwarves, the Armies of Man, and the White Wizard: Embodiment of all that is good and right; just ask him. And: The Chosen One: Victim - sorry, meant to say "Hero" - of a glorious prophecy....

His Holiness, the Supreme Spiritual Leader of the Galactic Guild, Glup III, an aging podil, is about to be dethroned and podil-napped all in the same day. The MISFITS decide today is a good day to thwart the evil Cardinal Nog’nik’s plans to take over the Galactic Guild and become a living god. The Galactic Guild dispatches their top agents, George Shooters and Sali Terri to restore Glup III to his righteous position and discover how a pair of bumbling pilgrims have obtained the technology necessary to teleport Glup III from the clutches of a deranged despot.

The whole incident kicks off when God says humans worship him, whether they're blessed or unblessed. A super sweet angel hears this claim and reasons, no, man worships God only when the conditions are right. So, the creator of the universe agrees to enter into a bet with this innocent and highly sensitive angel. Muhammad, the greatest mixed martial artist ever born, being a perfect candidate for the experiment, will have his life ruined at the hands of our misunderstood angel only because he has to prove his point with a peanut butter and jelly supreme being.

What if you could make a change to history that would eliminate the Spanish Inquisition, American slavery, World War II, global warming, and an egomaniacal US president who thought he was smart enough to drop nuclear bombs here and there without negative consequences? What if that change also made the United States and five billion people poof from existence? Would you do it?

In this science fiction satire of westerns, after the American West was destroyed in a series of biological disasters, rebuilding it is a lot like building it in the first place, but there are crucial differences. For example, new, partly mechanical cattle with computer brains are called steerites. They speak and sing a lot more than the original steers. Most of the cowboys, outlaws, and lawmen are partly mechanical, too, except for those few humans called control-naturals. That group has to keep all their original equipment, just like the original cowboys.

Dr. Eve Zachara, a smart, sexy, tech executive and expert in martial arts, is on a mission to save the world from total annihilation. In the future, the fight between Apple and Google has grown into a deadly world war. Corporate fighter jets roar over the deserts of Central Asia, machine guns blast in the jungles of Africa, and high above the planet, vast battles are waged by opposing space fleets. Google has vowed to nuke the Earth from their space based nuclear platform, right after Steve Job's new Keynote speech.

Sali Terri and George Shooters - two rookie officers from the Galactic Guild - find themselves in way over their heads with political intrigue, working to ratify a treaty with the cantankerous locals of a small planet called Kili Wanna. Every time an agreement is about to be reached with the current emperor, someone kills him off, nullifying the planet's induction into the Galactic Guild. The madness ramps up when outside influences take the matter into their own hands and flood the podunk planet with junk food in an attempt to corrupt their simple lifestyle and force an alliance.

Gustavo Arellano has compiled the best questions about Mexican Americans from readers of his ¡Ask a Mexican!column in California's OC Weekly and uses them to explore the clichés of lowriders, busboys, and housekeepers; drunks and scoundrels; heroes and celebrities; and most important, millions upon millions of law-abiding, patriotic American citizens and their illegal-immigrant cousins who represent some $600 billion in economic power.

Through strange metaphysical circumstances, failed screenwriter Brad Cohen finds himself caught in an infinite time loop, forced to relive the first forty years of his life again and again. Each "repeat," Brad wakes up in the womb on what was supposed to be his fortieth birthday, with full knowledge of what's come before. In various timelines, he becomes a successful political pundit, a game-show champion, a playboy, and a master manipulator of the stock market, but none of them seems to lead him out of his predicament.

In Sugar Roses, Oklahoma, events tumble rapidly toward the End of the World. We're introduced to a cross-section of this fervently Baptist college town as it struggles to comprehend a series of supernatural phenomena: roadkill returned to life, a little girl who speaks classical Greek, an ominous shortwave signal, and a demonic voice that calls itself the Megatron.

P.J. O'Rourke traces his development from hippie protester to conservative grouch to jaded humorist. Along the way, we are privy to his strange, twisted days as editor in chief of National Lampoon, as well as the in-depth looks at appropriate sports for middle-aged Republicans, namely those which can be engaged in with a smuggled Havana between the teeth - fly-fishing, bird hunting, deep-sea fishing, and of course, golf. Plus, you'll hear O'Rourke's take on the Virtues of Automobiles - because what good was oil doing sitting in the ground for millions of years? - and many other hilarious rants in this off-the-wall collection by America's premier political humorist.

The year is 2297, and life in the Autonomous City of San Francisco is harsh and forbidding...for most people. For the elite so-called hereditary class, it's much easier, and they rule with ancient Roman zeal. Those unfortunate souls outside this group are locked in a desperate struggle for survival, subsisting on whatever limited resources they can lay their hands on. Monitored by the frighteningly all-knowing and capricious "handle device," each citizen's life is controlled by their ranking: a single number that determines what they're worth.

Tritcheon Hash is a satirical ride throught the sci-fi genre. In a futuristic world, women get tired of men and abandon them to stew in their juices on a rapidly declining Earth. They colonize their own planet, "Coney Island," and live in an all-female society.

To satisfy a public that longs for a savior, Vidal’s eponymous hero of Kalki, born and bred in America’s Midwest, establishes himself in Nepal, puts out the word that he is the last incarnation of the god Vishnu, and predicts an imminent apocalypse meant to cleanse the planet.

Messiah traces the collapse of Christianity and the rise of the next great religion of Western civilization: Cavism. Founded by undertaker John Cave, Cavism holds that it is a holy thing to die. Packaged by a marketing genius, the new religion conquers the world more quickly than any prior memeplex, but pockets of resistance remain. Eugene Luther, formerly an apostle of Cavism, now a hunted apostate, writes his memoirs as a last gesture of freedom while the noose of a totalitarian religious state tightens around him.