Dystopian Short Stories

Perché un paladino in copertina? Certamente perché il racconto, intrigante e pieno di atmosfera, è ambientato in Sicilia - ma tranquilli, di dialetto ce n'è poco. Quanto basta, "come il sale", secondo una lettrice di Parma. Ma c'è un secondo motivo. In tutti i racconti tratti da "Pilipintò - Racconti da bagno per Siciliani e non", come questo "I moti del 2048" che state per ascoltare dalla mia voce, troverete trame e capovolgimenti di prospettiva.

Generations after a bloody nuclear civil war, the United States is not as we know it. The inhabitants of the Northern states live as normal, but the South, after being decimated during the Second Civil War, are a changed people. Nuclear fallout has stolen any vestige of humanity. When the aircraft carrying the President of the Northern United States takes an erroneous detour, it is shot down somewhere over the south.

It is known as The Descent. The event that brought on the fall of humanity and unleashed the violent, hungry Freaks upon the world. The mysterious pirate radio voice Doctor Midnite has called for the Regulars - the humans - who are left to "Take it back." Jonathan "Pops" Poplovitch and his team of "Exterminators" answered the call and attempted to take down the nefarious Admiral Shen, who'd set up shop in Columbus, Ohio. They failed.

If someone observed us from afar, they could claim that our civilization was a civilization of walls. That was its main purpose. Such observers would likely not be able to explain why. I cannot either. Walls do not protect. They just trap and kill. Three short stories about a dystopic future, about people turning into machines, about walls and fences, about the way history works. Three short stories about now.

Have you ever wondered what lies behind every click you make on the internet? What if the data from your online life is used to change your own future? As the internet shapes a new era, three corporations become the rulers of a virtual world called Etherea. Mr. Davis, the CEO of Apollo Corporations, will have to fight against two unprecedented enemies that seek supremacy in the universe.

Jennifer Benton has made it through the zombie apocalypse and has fallen in love with Mark, the charismatic leader of a group of fellow survivors. He's brought them from Illinois to hoped-for shelter at his family's Texas ranch, only to discover it destroyed. The survivors have one more chance when Mark befriends Todd in a nearby refugee camp; he invites the group to fly with him to his wealthy family's home in Oklahoma. But what's inside Todd's house may be worse than the zombies outside. And now Jennifer has more than Mark and herself to worry about....

---Escaping an evil Empire is all Fortune wants, but someone has other plans.--- ~A Quest for freedom~ ~A Desired Suitor~ ~One Deadly Battle~ Fortune, deemed a rogue because she refuses to swear an allegiance to the elite or royals is cast out of the Castle area and must live in a desolate wasteland destroyed by a drought for the past two years. On a mission to liberate her and her outcast friends, her plan involves fending off this horrid monarchy if/when they attack while trying to find a way to a safer territory. Meanwhile, her childhood crush, Leo, notices her as more than a life-long ...

Visiting the galaxy's only Cageless Zoo should be a special treat for Melandre and her children. Except she's still trying to reckon with her husband's recent death and how she's going to raise two highly independent children on her own. As their visit quickly falls to chaos, Melandre learns that family is the only thing left she has to rely on.

This original short story asks the question, "If eternal life came at the expense of love, would you choose death?"

Kate Enrite lives in the near future where a person's influence score determines what society offers. These influence scores have pervaded social structures to the point that privacy has been outlawed as a hindrance to influence measurement. With nothing to gain from her true identity or lose as a fake, Kate fights to secure what she perceives as a better life. In the process, she will discover how long a person can pretend to be someone they are not before becoming the pretense.

The story of The Scarlet Plague takes place in 2073 in the San Francisco area, 60 years after an apocalyptic pandemic called the Red Death or Scarlet Plague has depopulated the Earth. James Smith, one of the survivors, lives with his grandsons who are hunter-gatherers in a tribal world. He relates the horror of the plague to them, and tells them of the time when he was a professor of English, and of the start of the pandemic. His grandsons, who are of limited cognitive ability, refuse to believe him; they cannot believe that the disease was spread by germs.

New from the author of The Story of My Face, Paradise & Elsewhere is a collection of dark fables at once familiar and entirely strange: Join the Orange Prize-nominated Kathy Page as she notches a new path through the wild, lush, half-fantastic and half-real terrain of fairy tale and myth.