• Books|
• authors|
• genres|
• Contact|
• Cart

synopsis

In 1980, Jeffrey Thomas began writing his first stories set in the noirish, far future city called Punktown — prefiguring the coining of the terms “cyberpunk” and “New Weird” — but it wasn’t until 2000 that his debut collection of these tales was published, by Jeff VanderMeer’s Ministry of Whimsy Press. Since that time, there have been further collections of short stories, plus a number of novels, two shared world anthologies, and a roleplaying game set in the Punktown universe.
      Except in rare cases, the Punktown stories seldom share the same protagonist or continue a single plotline. They are glimpses into the lives of the city’s remarkable denizens, so that the reader is like a drone, stealthily trailing after one character to spy on a critical event in their life before moving on to the next. These characters represent the colorful variety of Punktown’s citizenry: the descendants of the human colonists who founded this city on a far-flung planet, the indigenous race called the Choom, fantastically imagined beings from a countless array of other worlds and even other dimensions, not to mention sentient machines.
      Beyond the setting, there is no simple template, no predictable theme or approach for a Punktown story. Rife with grotesque imagery and nightmarish situations, most often they combine elements of horror with science fiction, but just as readily other genres such as crime fiction will enter into the mix, with the occasional nod to Lovecraft. Many of the stories function as a vehicle for social commentary, even satire of a darkly humorous nature.
      First and foremost, these are stories of people — not always human in their physical makeup, but three-dimensional and relatable — living their desperate lives in a monstrous city that seems the personification of a universe intent on snuffing them out. As George Mann says in his introduction to Volume 2:
      “…in these tales of a distant world, in a distant future, Thomas makes use of the alien to show us what it is to be human.”
      This omnibus of three volumes collects several decades’ worth of Punktown short fiction. A generous cross-section of the city’s inhabitants is represented here. Gangsters and detectives, baristas and booksellers, cloned laborers and obsessed artists, mutants and lovers, monsters and ghosts. Whatever their guise, readers might well recognize themselves in one of them…or all of them.
      Each book is bound in full black European cloth with ribbon marker, head and tail bands, stamping on spine and front, and a signature page in each. Each book has full wraparound dustjacket art and several black & white interior illustrations.