Satire Science

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.

What if you could reach back in time to deport the world’s worst environmental villains to a depository planet before their greed condemns Earth to an ecological apocalypse? What if each time you did so, an alien instantly extracted a body part and replaced it with a refurbished one? Would you still do it?

The Doctor awakens to discover a universe that is at once all too familiar and yet completely unlike that which he was expecting. Join him as he argues with himself, his companions, and anyone else near enough to be drawn in—all the while attempting to save a shattered and disintegrating universe. If this seems to be parodying something familiar that has itself recently fallen apart and lost its shine, it probably is.

Sheriff Mac must put his love interest on hold when KORN radio station is attacked by a UFO. Believers flock to the lake to witness another UFO attack. The media frenzy grows when Bigfoot is seen near the attack site. Can Mac solve the UFO and Bigfoot mysteries in time to save his relationship with Faith?

The Armor You Built, a genre-bending collection of short stories by Jonah Kruvant, delves into the complexities of human connection, authenticity, and the struggle for selfhood in a world that often demands conformity. Seamlessly blending satire, philosophical musings, and science fiction, the book explores the metaphorical "armor" people build to navigate cultural and familial pressures.

An implant that gives moral advice whether you like it or not, an irritable galactic ambassador examining Earth’s religions, a future where love can’t happen without litigation, pushy alien anthropologists without regard for the human need for privacy, discrimination against an artificial intelligence in a multicultural world, alien sex - love in the time of deformity, neighborly nitpicking made easy by Computer Court, the excruciating reality of Martian music, invasion of the toe snatchers, something crunchy on the menu, and a transgenic pig dog at war with an android nemesis.

Celebrity-chasing paparazzo Barry Young was abducted by aliens when he was six, an experience he does not remember. He can only piece together what happened that night by what his best friend Scott (who was also abducted) tells him. One night, Barry uncovers evidence of an alien invasion that his ex-girlfriend, journalist Nikki Graves, has been assigned to cover. Together, these two estranged exes are hot on the trail of an alien invasion plot 20 Earth years in the making. Will they stop the invasion?

Follow the unbelievable rise of Mickey Rooster, Republican barn developer and upper-class travesty of the year, the hilarious chicanery of the candidate, the one and only Democratic man-turned-female candidate on a path to finally breaking the glass ceiling, and the eye-opening ordeal of Theodore Freeman, a common American like you and me, caught in the crossfire of tragicomedy and reality.

Universes are colliding. Characters from a tangle of universes - Star Trek, Marvel, Star Wars, DC Comics, Middle Earth, and more - are colliding in a reality that has gone mad. There is a great disturbance in the Farce! The evil, orange-skinned usurper, Uranus Blowhard, has hypnotized Amerricans with this mind-numbing MAGA chant. Blowhard is determined to collect the five Time Cheaters that will make him the most powerful roach motel tycoon in the Infiniverse. The only thing standing in Blowhard’s way is Captain Quark and his crack team of superheroes, The Funtastic Five.