Paul Di Filippo Books in Order

These connected stories imagine a future shaped by biotechnology rather than electronics. Genetically altered humans, engineered laborers, and strange hybrid creatures navigate a society where biological experimentation creates new inequalities, environmental hazards, and possibilities for rebellion.

Cyril Prothero and Polly Peptide join forces after their lovers disappear. Their search leads through a dense tangle of mysterious figures, rock music, cryptography, biotechnology, and competing signals in a world saturated with information.

Ten speculative stories explore alternate worlds through unlikely situations and comic disruptions. Paul Di Filippo follows strange possibilities beyond ordinary reality, using playful science fiction to reconsider the familiar assumptions that shape how people understand their lives.

Nine stories imagine famous writers living radically different lives. Kafka becomes a scourge of Gotham, Henry Miller delivers telegrams, and Philip K. Dick sells hardware, as altered circumstances reshape the identities and destinies of familiar literary figures.

After ventriloquist Skipper Keats dies onstage, his son Will discovers that the dummy buried alongside him has vanished. Searching for his father’s wooden partner, Will encounters suspicious associates and family secrets in this comic mystery.

An orphaned Caribbean boy known as Ardy idolizes Reader’s Digest and sets out to thank its staff in Pleasantville, New York. Immigration obstacles and eccentric encounters turn his hopeful pilgrimage into a complicated journey through America.

Will Keats’s new domestic life collapses when his partner’s young daughter disappears during a storm. As official investigations stall, he must cooperate with her hostile father and follow underworld connections into the swamps of the Okefenokee.

Eleven speculative stories explore the strange limits of everyday work. A struggling sandwich shop’s coupons become a currency, a unique fabric depends on one maker, and other unusual jobs reveal how people survive systems built around their labor.

In a future dominated by corporate control, exploited secretary Kerry Hackett merges with an engineered organism. Her transformation brings extraordinary powers and leads her into a strange Brazil, where her new abilities attract dangerous attention.

Writer Diego Patchen lives in a city stretching an unknowable distance between a river and railway tracks. A year of friendships, family troubles, and artistic life reveals the intimate experiences of residents within this extraordinary world.

Fourteen stories explore humanity’s possible transformations, from cities divided into warring enclaves to societies remade by nanotechnology. Biological change, cultural upheaval, and encounters beyond the human raise questions about what survival and liberation might demand in a posthuman future.

Seventeen stories explore bizarre disruptions of ordinary life, from a professor discovering mysterious doorways to an unusual nocturnal journey through Manhattan. Fantastic encounters, unsettling transformations, and grotesque humor connect these excursions into strange alternative realities.

Disillusioned bookstore clerk Paul Girard accepts a visitor’s offer of access to countless universes in exchange for copying his human essence. Armed with a dimension-traveling yo-yo, he encounters bizarre societies while searching for meaning beyond his life.

Twenty speculative stories bring together figures as different as Jayne Mansfield, Pythagoras, Disney designers, and the Virgin Mary. Their unlikely encounters combine humor with unsettling possibilities, shifting familiar characters into worlds where ordinary expectations no longer apply.

Struggling Hoboken sandwich-shop owner Rory Honeyman creates meal vouchers to pay an employee. Intended as a temporary solution, the new currency spreads beyond his control, entangling him with eccentric entrepreneurs and an increasingly disruptive alternative economy.

Eighteen stories send unusual characters into alternate histories, speculative futures, and absurd adventures involving talking beavers. Introductions by Paul Di Filippo accompany tales that cross genres and examine familiar concerns through situations far removed from ordinary life.

Six decades after scientists encountered and mistreated an amphibious creature, another researcher travels into the past to investigate its origins. His discoveries challenge the accepted account of the monster and threaten to alter humanity’s history.

Thomas Rhymer sets out in search of happiness and harmony, encountering rogues, monsters, and an upside-down castle. His journey into Faerie becomes more complicated when Queen Mab and her assistant draw him into their machinations.

These satirical stories turn science fiction’s tools on publishing itself. Authors, agents, reviewers, and booksellers face absurd extrapolations of their own habits, from literary hit men to personal servant agents, exposing the industry’s pretensions and recurring mistakes.

This collection moves between science fiction, comic fantasy, horror, and political intrigue. Publishing satire, a fantastic assassin, unsettling encounters, and surreal vignettes inspired by paintings bring different kinds of danger and absurdity into Paul Di Filippo’s imagined worlds.

Seventeen speculative stories explore uneasy futures and altered humanity. Survivors seek love among a devastated East Coast, human and posthuman rivals compete for a woman, and a return to the Ribofunk universe examines the unsettling consequences of biological change.

Ambitious graduate student Merritt Abraham longs to escape museum work in the endlessly extending Linear City. Joining an expedition into the Jungle Blocks, she confronts academic rivalries, dangerous inhabitants, and rumors of an elusive queen.

Sixteen-year-old runaway Kid A seeks freedom and wisdom inspired by Kerouac and Gibran. Traveling with experienced wanderer Sid, he takes work at a Massachusetts motor lodge and begins questioning his companion’s approach to living.

Six stories follow survivors trying to rebuild after planetary catastrophe. From overheated Earth’s polar towers to ruined American refugee camps and virtual landscapes, human and transgenic characters search for new ways to live among the remains of their worlds.

Paul Di Filippo explores his creative approach to science fiction through an essay advocating abundant ideas and imaginative risk. Drawing on literary influences, popular music, and genre history, he examines the methods behind his own writing.

Damien Broderick and Paul Di Filippo select 101 English-language science fiction novels published between 1985 and 2010. Plot summaries and critical discussions introduce the works and their authors, extending the earlier selection associated with David Pringle.

A stroke has ended illustrator Frank Lazorg’s career until a strange drug restores his creativity at a terrible cost. Addiction and violence propel him into an unfamiliar world, where a compassionate creature offers an uncertain possibility of redemption.

Sixteen stories gather early work that remained outside Paul Di Filippo’s previous collections. Twelve previously published tales and four stories appearing for the first time offer speculative journeys drawn from his writing of the 1980s and 1990s.

Seventeen science fiction stories gather a period of Paul Di Filippo’s more recent work. The collection brings together speculative tales written across roughly two and a half years, offering a broad selection from his continuing exploration of imagined worlds.

These stories visit cities where beauty is currency, altered wartime histories, and futures shaped by technology and repression. Characters search for identity, confront ancient enemies, and resist oppressive worlds, finding imagination and love amid uncertain possibilities.

This collection ranges from cosmic horror and biopunk futures to lunar pulp adventures and cyberpunk. Characters pursue impossible ambitions, attempt to kill a creator, or travel toward happier times, confronting worlds that turn imagination into both opportunity and danger.

Disbarred lawyer Glen McClinton and former arsonist Stan Hasso organize a real-estate scam against the wealthy man who betrayed Stan. As their elaborate con develops, revenge and growing loyalties complicate their pursuit of a huge payout.

A private detective searching for a missing con man discovers a conspiracy spanning cosmic history. His investigation draws him into surreal encounters and forces him to question his own place in events stretching toward the universe’s end.

Con men Glen and Stan discover a scientist whose unusual invention could yield a major payday. Their attempt to exploit it becomes complicated by gangsters, international interests, personal betrayals, and their own appetite for easy money.

Notorious scammers Glen and Stan try to invest their winnings and go legitimate. While Stan chooses a rehabilitation business, Glen pursues a mezcal venture whose ambitions bring him into dangerous conflict with a hostile liquor distributor.

Johrun Corvivios expects to marry Minka Soldavere on their families’ planet, Verano. When disaster separates them and costs him his inheritance, he ventures across the galaxy with a devoted helper, determined to reclaim his home.

Within a galaxy regulated by the Quinary, Johrun Corvivios loses his promised marriage and place on Verano. Accompanied by his resourceful helper Lutramella, he faces dangerous strangers while seeking a path back to his birthright.

Nineteen speculative stories explore alternative histories, posthuman journeys, and unfamiliar forms of society. From a furry survivor navigating intelligent magma to the title story’s reimagined politics, characters confront futures that reshape identity, technology, and everyday assumptions.

Aspiring journalist Sophronia Tempest attends a mysterious sect’s meeting with her boyfriend and becomes entangled in a scheme reaching another world. With Providence’s anniversary parade approaching, she and a rival reporter must uncover what the conspirators intend.

Ten stories range through cyberpunk, cosmic horror, and speculative mysteries. Adventures involving Cthulhu, an imaginative detective, and a world connected to The Thing place characters in strange circumstances where the route to safety may be unexpectedly difficult.

Young Vangie can perceive alternate versions of herself across parallel universes. After a tornado forces her to change timelines, she develops her abilities while navigating foster homes and adults who want to exploit her extraordinary power.

Three novellas reimagine the nineteenth century through strange science and historical figures. A missing Queen Victoria, monstrous threats in Massachusetts, and an extraordinary encounter between Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson open doors into bizarre alternate histories.