Satire Science

Stephen Leacock (1869-1944) may be considered the Canadian counterpart to Mark Twain. For many years he was professor of economics at Magill University and published a number of well-regarded texts on economics and political science. However, he is best known today for his many volumes of humorous fiction. During the 1920s he was one of the most widely read authors in the English-speaking world and was considered by Jack Benny and Groucho Marx to be one of the greatest comic writers of all time.

Messiah traces the collapse of Christianity and the rise of the next great religion of Western civilization: Cavism. Founded by undertaker John Cave, Cavism holds that it is a holy thing to die. Packaged by a marketing genius, the new religion conquers the world more quickly than any prior memeplex, but pockets of resistance remain. Eugene Luther, formerly an apostle of Cavism, now a hunted apostate, writes his memoirs as a last gesture of freedom while the noose of a totalitarian religious state tightens around him.

In this biting satire, the Cold War may have ended, but the eastern and western governments never told their citizens. Instead they created an elaborate ruse wherein each side comes up with increasingly outlandish doomsday weapons - weapons that don’t work. But when aliens invade, the top designers of both sides have to come together to make a real doomsday device - if they don’t kill each other first. With its combination of romance, espionage, and alien invasion, The Zap Gun skewers the military-industrial complex in a way that’s as relevant today as it was at the height of the Cold War.

The location: London. The date: Very, very soon. Beset by multiple crises and buried under a growing mountain of debt, the leaders of the G7 have taken the only logical decision. They've sold the planet. When Toby, a penniless student, and his two new flatmates find out one morning on TV, they're surprised to find the Earth's new alien owners are staggeringly cute and bring the promise of a debt-free future. They're just getting ready to celebrate along with the rest of the world, when a chance encounter with a mysterious professor reveals the truth.

What if the history of the transatlantic slave trade had been reversed and Africans had enslaved Europeans? How would that have changed the ways that people justified their inhuman behavior? How would it inform our cultural attitudes and the insidious racism that still lingers today? We see this tragicomic world turned upside down through the eyes of Doris, an Englishwoman enslaved and taken to the New World, movingly recounting experiences of tremendous hardship and the dreams of the people she has left behind, all while journeying toward an escape into freedom.

It was just supposed to be a quick trip to the pet store for some cat food, but the universe had other plans for Florence Valentine. Good for nothing kids and some annoying store employees were giving her a hard time, and then things got worse when she was killed by a delivery truck. Instead of angels, pearly gates, and eternal rewards, a voice in her head keeps telling her that she’s become a dungeon core, whatever that is.

The United States has survived clueless presidential administrations before. But no matter how enormous the crisis, the Great Depression, Vietnam, Watergate, or Monica Lewinsky's thong, America always comes out looking like, well, America.

Steve is hell's super, its handyman. Being Mr. Fixit to the underworld keeps him and his assistant, Orson Welles (yes, that Orson Welles), pretty busy, since things go on the blink all the time down there. No malfunction has ever created so much inconvenience, though, as the malfunction of hell's escalator, which leads from the pearly gates to the depths of Hades. What's worse: The breakdown appears to be sabotage.

National Book Award winner M. T. Anderson returns to future Earth in a sharply wrought satire of art and truth in the midst of colonization.

Earth is rising in the House of Voltar.... And there’ll be hell to pay! That’s right. The invasion is on...and it’s coming soon to a galaxy near you. The action couldn’t be hotter, and the plot couldn’t be more diabolical. Earth is coming to Voltar - and the Voltarians won’t know what hit them. Murder, blackmail, drugs, psychoanalysis, PR firms, sex-crazed teenyboppers, riots in the streets, women in chains. These are the powerful secret weapons of war.

The Believer magazine presents a compendium of advice from producers, writers, and actors of The Daily Show, Saturday Night Live, Parks and Recreation, Late Show with David Letterman, The Hangover, and The Colbert Report, along with other musicians, cartoonists, New Yorker writers, and those similarly unqualified to offer guidance.

Introducing the Wixy Witches, this tale of many tales is an allegory like Alice or Oz, lampooning fairytales, the fantasy genre, and status brands. Set in the early fifteenth century, the orphaned Wixy quintuplets evade Florence’s witch hunters, as alchemist Bolinbard Hargmond flees plague with his wife and son Rebicus, heading for Draxenland, an island kingdom in the North Sea.

As time runs down for the players trapped by the evil Lich-Lord in the hyper-realistic MMORPG Fantasy Realms Online, Kromgorn the Barbarian is still stuck playing as the gorgeous, pleasure-fueled Lacey the Courtesan, a character designed to level fastest when she’s getting busy with every NPC in sight. The action is hot, the stakes are high, and Lacey will need to pull out every skill she can muster if she wants to win the day.

Beijing, sometime in the near future: a month has gone missing from official records. No one has any memory of it, and no one could care less - except for a small circle of friends, who will stop at nothing to get to the bottom of the sinister cheerfulness and amnesia that have possessed the Chinese nation. When they kidnap a high-ranking official and force him to reveal all, what they learn - not only about their leaders, but also about their own people - stuns them to the core.

This panoramic fictional oral history begins with one small mystery: the body of a young woman found in an Arizona border town, presumed to be an illegal immigrant, disappears from the town morgue. Soon, the US government - and eventually biomedical researchers, disgruntled lawmakers, and even an insurgent faction of the Catholic Church - must come to terms with what they're too late to stop: an epidemic of vampirism that will sweep first the United States, and then the world. With heightened strength and beauty and a steady diet of fresh blood, these changed people, or "Gloamings", rapidly rise to prominence in all aspects of modern society.

Fox 8 has always been known as the daydreamer in his pack, the one his fellow foxes regarded with a knowing snort and a roll of the eyes. That is, until Fox 8 develops a unique skill: He teaches himself to speak Yuman by hiding in the bushes outside a house and listening to children’s bedtime stories. The power of language fuels his abundant curiosity about people - even after danjer arrives in the form of a new shopping mall that cuts off his food supply, sending Fox 8 on a harrowing quest to help save his pack.

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?

These are the adventures of a naughty wooden puppet who, through many misadventures, learns what it takes to become a real boy.

Mr. Goldson is filthy rich. He’s also callous and cruel and hasn’t got a festive bone in his ancient body. Naturally, he’s due for a holiday haunting. When his business partner, Bolbi Baggs, announces that they’re to be visited by three spirits, Mr. Goldson braces himself for a whirlwind tour of his past, present, and future. Mr. Goldson, however, isn’t human. He’s a Dwarf, and Mr. Baggs is a Halfling, and the adventure that’s about to take them across the enchanted world of Arth is anything but typical.

A mysterious pyramid appears in Chicago, oozing fantastic creatures and sucking humans into our own mythological past. It's an alien invasion from within! When a special forces team sent to capture an AWOL official gets into deep trouble with a certain one-eyed Norse god, redoubtable comparative mythologist Jerry Lukacs must rescue them, strike a deal with the droll and dangerous Loki, and risk bringing on Ragnarok itself to once again save human myth from alien domination.