Beyond Mallworld - Somtow, S. P.

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Résumé :
The shopping center as big as a planet is back - this time with over 80 pages of new material including the first new Mallworld story in thirty years - the jaw-dropping Mallworld Becomes Elektra which takes the premise of the entire satirical universe and turns it on its ear. A pungent satire of the rampant commercialism of the 1980s, S.P, Somtow's Mallworld stories first appeared in Isaac Asimov's during the post-Star Wars age of science fiction. Many things predicted in the Mallworld stories are happening today? from roller coasters inside shopping malls to cloning your filet mignon. Other things haven't happened yet but who knows? From suicide parlors to dining on the larvae of super-intelligent alliens, from baby showrooms to child repo agents ... everything is possible in Mallworld, the comic yet chilling dystopia of a future gone wild. Join the cult-of-the-month club, Insert your suppository vaculax, and shop for a nice second- hand body, preferably with compound eyes ... and if you are very lucky, party with the barJulians, who own simply everything ... including your soul. BEYOND MALLWORLD is the newest, most complete collection of Mallworld stories including the complete illustrations of Karl Kofoed and a brand new novella about a Mallworld in which people have ceased to shop!

Biographie:
Once referred to by the International Herald Tribune as 'the most well-known expatriate Thai in the world,' Somtow Sucharitkul is no longer an expatriate, since he has returned to Thailand after five decades of wandering the world. He is best known as an award-winning novelist and a composer of operas.Born in Bangkok, Somtow grew up in Europe and was educated at Eton and Cambridge. His first career was in music and in the 1970s, his first return to Asia, he acquired a reputation as a revolutionary composer, the first to combine Thai and Western instruments in radical new sonorities. Conditions in the arts in the region at the time proved so traumatic for the young composer that he suffered a major burnout, emigrated to the United States, and reinvented himself as a novelist.His earliest novels were in the science fiction field and he soon won the John W. Campbell for Best New Writer as well as being nominated for and winning numerous other awards in the field. But science fiction was not able to contain him and he began to cross into other genres. In his 1984 novel Vampire Junction, he injected a new literary inventiveness into the horror genre, in the words of Robert Bloch, author of Psycho, 'skillfully combining the styles of Stephen King, William Burroughs, and the author of the Revelation to John.' Vampire Junction was voted one of the forty all-time greatest horror books by the Horror Writers' Association, joining established classics like Frankenstein and Dracula. He has also published children's books, a historical novel, and about a hundred works of short fiction.In the 1990s Somtow became increasingly identified as a uniquely Asian writer with novels such as the semi-autobiographical Jasmine Nights and a series of stories noted for a peculiarly Asian brand of magic realism, such as Dragon's Fin Soup, which is currently being made into a film directed by Takashi Miike. He recently won the World Fantasy Award, the highest accolade given in the world of fantastic literature, for his novella The Bird Catcher. His seventy-plus books have sold about two million copies world-wide. He has been nominated for or won over forty awards in the fields of science fiction, fantasy, and horror.After becoming a Buddhist monk for a period in 2001, Somtow decided to refocus his attention on the country of his birth, founding Bangkok's first international opera company and returning to music, where he again reinvented himself, this time as a neo-Asian neo-Romantic composer. The Norwegian government commissioned his song cycle Songs Before Dawn for the 100th Anniversary of the Nobel Peace Prize, and he composed at the request of the government of Thailand his Requiem: In Memoriam 9/11 which was dedicated to the victims of the 9/11 tragedy.According to London's Opera magazine, 'in just five years, Somtow has made Bangkok into the operatic hub of Southeast Asia.' His operas on Thai themes, Madana and Mae Naak, have been well received by international critics.Somtow has recently been awarded the 2017 Europa Cultural Achievement Award for his work in bridging eastern and western cultures. In 2020 he returned to science fiction after a twenty-year absence with Homeworld of the Heart, a fifth novel in the Inquestor series.Most recently he has returned to film, producing the award-winning The Maestro and currently working on Club X, a Thai-language series set in a remote Catholic boarding school.

Sommaire:
The shopping center as big as a planet is back - this time with over 80 pages of new material including the first new Mallworld story in thirty years - the jaw-dropping Mallworld Becomes Elektra which takes the premise of the entire satirical universe and turns it on its ear. A pungent satire of the rampant commercialism of the 1980s, S.P, Somtow's Mallworld stories first appeared in Isaac Asimov's during the post-Star Wars age of science fiction. Many things predicted in the Mallworld stories are happening today' from roller coasters inside shopping malls to cloning your filet mignon. Other things haven't happened yet but who knows? From suicide parlors to dining on the larvae of super-intelligent alliens, from baby showrooms to child repo agents ... everything is possible in Mallworld, the comic yet chilling dystopia of a future gone wild. Join the cult-of-the-month club, Insert your suppository vaculax, and shop for a nice second- hand body, preferably with compound eyes ... and if you are very lucky, party with the barJulians, who own simply everything ... including your soul. BEYOND MALLWORLD is the newest, most complete collection of Mallworld stories including the complete illustrations of Karl Kofoed and a brand new novella about a Mallworld in which people have ceased to shop!...