Fuzzy Dice

A high-octane tale of sweeping scope and and imagination packed into the pages of a breathless novella. Reminiscent of Jack Vance at his best in its sweep and imagination, but wholly Di Filippo in its execution.Klom is a big, simple man who works in the salvage yards on the planet Asperna as a shipbreaker. One day, while deep in the bowels of an antique ship, Klom discovers an active organic stasis pod. He splits it open and out tumbles a large quadruped that seems friendly, harmless, but non-sapient. Klom adopts it as a pet and names it Tugger. Little does he imagine the deadly danger Tugger represents. Klom is forced into a desperate chase across the stars, encountering many colourful worlds and cultures, as the most powerful beings in the galaxy hunt him down and vie for the secrets he has unwittingly discovered.

A disbarred lawyer and an ex-arsonist cross paths and find themselves organizing an elaborate real estate scam to bilk a shady rich speculator out of twenty million dollars. The sting is personal for ex-arsonist Stan and for a woman named Vee, who plays an essential role in the caper. Glen, the narrator and former lawyer, finds himself at first just along for the money. Eventually, as bonds deepen among the conspirators, Glen too discovers he has a lot more at stake than simply the loot.This cast of lively eccentrics discovers along the way that getting to the big payoff might just be more scary fun than the monetary prize itself.

Paul Di Filippo delivers a thrilling and thought-provoking adventure through the multiverse in Vangie's Ghosts, a compelling science fiction novel about one girl with extraordinary powers.Three-year-old Vangie is mute and unresponsive. She shows no interest in the people or world around her, much to the frustration of her callous adoptive parents. Little do they know, Vangie is otherwise occupied observing "ghosts"--an infinite number of versions of herself, in an infinite number of parallel universes.When a tornado hits their trailer and Vangie is severely injured, she makes a desperate leap into another timeline where she survives the tornado, but her adoptive parents do not. So begins a life of shuttling through various foster homes, cultivating her abilities to seek out alternate timelines, and making jumps calculated to better her circumstances in order to avoid the exploitation of adults who seek to harness her powers for their own means.Vangie never communicates with her avatars, until one day the "Council"--a group of Vangies--appear to her and warn her of an ominous, growing threat in the multiverse: a man they call the Massive. And thus begins an epic conflict, spanning millennia and worlds, in a brutal effort to control the fate of the multiverse.Vangie's Ghosts is Paul Di Filippo at the height of his imagination and versatility, filled with compelling characters who play captivating roles in a story where the stakes are nothing less than existence itself.

In the tradition of the Ace Double 2-in-1 books (flip one side over to read the other book), here's the 19th Wildside Double:COSMOCOPIA: A SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL, by Paul Di Filippo. Frank Lazorg's gone mad! The dean of the fantasy art illustrators has reached his end: his creative powers have deserted him. Then a strange new drug promises to reinvigorate him, both as man and artist. But the substance soon results in madness, plunging Frank into a world inhabited by monstrous parodies of humanity. Yet this new dimension has its own delights, as Frank soon discovers when he meets the female alien called Crutchsump! A science fiction adventure of mind and body.AFTER THE COLLAPSE: STORIES FROM GREENHOUSE EARTH, by Paul Di Filippo. From the swarming redoubts of the polar regions, where humanity huddles from the savage heat of Greenhouse Earth, to the dusty refugee camps of a shattered America, here are six riveting tales of life during the hard-luck times of a post-holocaust planet.