Satire Science

The antidote to those cotton-candy platitudes that are all too familiar to anyone who’s ever worn a mortarboard, Wheelan’s 10 head-turning aphorisms - backed up by a PhD in public policy and extensive social science research - set the record straight. Readers everywhere agreed, turning a Dartmouth Class Day speech that had gone viral into a best-selling book.

Imagine a world where everyone knows everything about everybody. Where what a person "feels" and "truly believes" is protected under the law, while what is rational, even provable is condemned as heresy. A world where to question ignorance and intolerance is to commit a Crime against Faith. Imagine it. Or just wait until After the Flood.

If Asher Hearst had a superpower, it would have to be his ability to take a punch, laugh it off, and keep on swinging. So yeah, immortality comes with a few perks. As a college student slash small-time fixer, he's about to take a job that's best left to the pros. A proposition by a dryad to save witches from the Inquisition is a first, but he isn't one to balk when the odds are stacked against him. Especially not while he's drinking on someone else's dime.

My creator once reveled in his mastery over life and death. He dug from graves, stitched me together, and brought me to life. However, he never anticipated how hard it would be to get good tech support.

High school nobody Kenan is doing just fine in the midst of the zombie apocalypse, thank you very much, but when his dream girl Katy comes stumbling around the corner, she turns his world upside-down. David Wood's first foray into young adult fiction is an action-packed horror tale laced with dark humor and even darker thrills.

The year is 2297, and life in the Autonomous City of San Francisco is harsh and forbidding...for most people. For the elite so-called hereditary class, it's much easier, and they rule with ancient Roman zeal. Those unfortunate souls outside this group are locked in a desperate struggle for survival, subsisting on whatever limited resources they can lay their hands on. Monitored by the frighteningly all-knowing and capricious "handle device," each citizen's life is controlled by their ranking: a single number that determines what they're worth.

Paul Krassner's style of personal journalism constantly blurs the line between observer and participant. Nowhere is this more apparent than this collection of essays and interviews culled from his columns at AVN Online. Krassner shines his keen satirical mind on the so-called taboos of today's society and breaks them down to show the hypocrisy of the world's "culture warriors". With a biting wit and tongue firmly planted in cheek, Mr. Krassner reveals the absurdity of our oppressive social mores....

"Mystically powered terrorists unleash volatile magic on the world, turning Washington, D.C., into a politically-charged fantasyland ripe for human sacrifice. Attackers with magical abilities bring down a 747 by summoning a dragon to rip it from the sky, using the hundreds of lives lost as a sacrifice to initiate the Change. The country morphs into a new landscape of swords and sorcery. Now computers and other machines are coming to life, and regular people have started to turn into mythical creatures and forgotten deities." ( Kirkus Reviews)

The TGSPGoSSP is a bit of a comedic acting troupe. Their 2-Part Trilogy mocks our beloved niches in genre fiction. All three books take the usual shots at the usual suspects, both fantasy and sci-fi. If you like dark, deadpan humor and satire such as Monty Python, this title might be your cup of tea.

Who Died...and Left You in Charge? includes letters from my generation to the next generation about how we screwed up the accomplishments of greatest generation.

On the face of it, this is the story of Dave Smart, business studies lecturer, as he leads a group of three colleagues on a tour of discovery to the Smiling Disc star system, 19 light years from home. Their main purpose is to investigate business practice on Kalista-mm, the larger of the system's two planets, and gather material for Dave's new book, 'Doing Business on Other Planets'.

It's 1973, and David Leveraux has landed his dream job as a Flavorist-in-Training, working in the secretive industry where chemists create the flavors for everything from the cherry in your can of soda to the butter on your popcorn. While testing a new artificial sweetener - Sweetness #9 - he notices unusual side-effects in the laboratory rats and monkeys: anxiety, obesity, mutism, and a generalized dissatisfaction with life. David tries to blow the whistle, but he swallows it instead.

After 40 years of making a living using words in every medium, print or electronic, Roy Blount Jr. still can't get over his ABCs. In Alphabet Juice, he celebrates the juju, the sonic and kinetic energies of letters and their combinations. Blount does not prescribe proper English. The franchise he claims is "over the counter" and concentrates more on questions such as these: Did you know that both mammal and matter derive from baby talk? Have you noticed how wince makes you wince?

Meet Gregor Samsa, a humble young man who works as a fabric salesman to support his parents and sister. His life goes strangely awry when he wakes up late for work and discovers that, inexplicably, he is now a man-sized baby kitten. His family freaks out: Yes, their son is OMG so cute, but what good is cute when there are bills to pay? As his new feline identity threatens to eat away at his personality, Gregor desperately tries to survive this bizarre, bewhiskered ordeal by accomplishing the one thing he never could as a man: He must flee his parents’ house.

Tritcheon Hash is a satirical ride throught the sci-fi genre. In a futuristic world, women get tired of men and abandon them to stew in their juices on a rapidly declining Earth. They colonize their own planet, "Coney Island," and live in an all-female society.

"The problem with political jokes is they get elected." Let's look at some of the best and the brightest (funniest) moments in our recent political and social history, quotes from the leaders that we so look up to and admire, and even a few celebrities. Why do we give them our undying attention, faith, and hope? Why not pay closer attention to who we're letting speak for and guide us?

This novel is Shakespeare's worst nightmare. It takes two of the bard's most famous plays, Hamlet and Othello, and recasts them with fantasy characters in a place called Gundarland. Hamlet is a dwarf and Othello is a dark elf. Iago and his wife, Emilia, are trolls. If that isn't bad enough, these two tragedies are now comedies with Falstaff, Shakespeare's most popular rogue, thrown in as a bonus. Not familiar with Shakespeare? No problem. You'll still enjoy this romp.

As the United States sinks into apocalypse, two people fight to preserve life and sanity. One is Nora Burkhart, a schoolteacher who will stop at nothing to save her son. The other is genius sculptor Gerard Korty, who struggles to create a masterwork that will heal the metaphysical wounds of the age. Highlights include a bloody battle on a New Jersey golf course between Jews and anti-Semites, a debate between Martin Luther and Erasmus, and a chilling villain in the personage of Dr. Adrian Lucido - founder of a new pagan church in Mexico and inventor of a cure worse than any disease.

In Nothing Is Wrong and Here Is Why, acclaimed satirist Alexandra Petri offers perfectly logical, reassuring reasons for everything that has happened in recent American politics that will in no way unsettle your worldview. In essays both new and adapted from her viral Washington Post columns, Petri reports that the Trump administration is as competent as it is uncorrupted, white supremacy has never been less rampant, and men have been silenced for too long. The "woman card" is a powerful card to play! Q-Anon makes perfect sense!

Moments after the inauguration of our 45th president, best friends Barack Obama and Joe Biden were escorted to a secret lab run by the world’s greatest scientists. They were asked to take off all their clothes and hold very still in a fetal position until they felt a painful tingling sensation. Then they vanished. They would awake to find themselves apart, and inside their younger bodies and driven to find each other, and to change history for the better.