Gravity's Angels

Short stories from the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Award-winning author. "One of the best science fiction collections I've ever read." —The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction

Though written in the last decades of the twentieth-century, these tales are timeless and prophetic visions created by Michael Swanwick's wide-ranging imagination. Through stories of talking alien beasts, eco-fiction, and post-apocalyptic survival, this collection shows that humanity is something worth clinging to, even as technology and circumstances drastically change around us. 

Swanwick's first-published short story, "The Feast of Saint Janus," takes us to an America after the Worldwide Collapse, where a woman is surgically enhanced to look and sound like Janis Joplin—with horrific consequences. In the award-winning "The Edge of the World" a group of teenagers explore the graffiti-ridden stairway at the precipice of a flat earth. While in "The Dragon Line," Merlin and Mordred reunite in a dim and disenchanted future to join forces and save the world. 

With thirteen stories in all, Gravity's Angels "chronicles the career of one of the most impressive science fiction writers of the '80s . . . Swanwick's work illustrates the power and potential of contemporary science fiction" (Publishers Weekly).

"The stories collected here are luminous with the promise of his ambition, smart and allusive, dense with ideas and images, sacred and profane." —Interzone

"An extremely impressive collection . . . If there is any justice in the world, Gravity's Angels will bring Swanwick whatever recognition he has not had thus far." —Locus 

"This is a book that merits a place on any serious science fiction reader's shelf." —The New York Review of Science Fiction