Punktown

Punktown is considered by many critics and readers to be one of the new classics of SF short story collections. In the nightmarish city they call Punktown, on a planet where countless sentient species collide, you can become a creator of clones. You can become a piece of performance art. You might even become a library of sorrows... Locus magazine says, “All the gritty immediacy and romantic cynicism of classic cyberpunk, along with morally complex, vividly disturbing evocations of supernatural eruptions and corruptions.”

Amazon.com Review

Like Ray Bradbury, Jeffrey Thomas writes dark science fiction at the border of horror, and like Bradbury's collection, The Martian Chronicles, Thomas's Punktown uses a shared setting to tell very different stories of very different characters, both human and alien. The Martian Chronicles follows the rise and fall of the human colonization of Mars, while Punktown's nine stories (seven previously unpublished) follow a more subtle arc, examining the course of human development, from destructive youth through the dangers of parenthood and career to late adulthood, when losses and the weight of memories bring their own horrors. As The Martian Chronicles uses the future to consider mid-American, midcentury concerns, Punktown uses the future to reflect a fin-de-siècle present shaped by brutally rapid change, by rampant abuse, by the dehumanizing acts of governments and corporations, and by serial-killer epidemics and schoolroom massacres. But in the end, Punktown little resembles The Martian Chronicles. And, though it is not in the same league as Bradbury's classic, Punktown demonstrates that Thomas is a rising talent of considerable power and imagination. In "The Reflections of Ghosts," an artist clones himself to make art for sadistic patrons, until he finds himself trapped in the ultimate self-absorption. The shadows of Poe and Lovecraft lie subtly over "The Palace of Nothingness," a mysterious, abandoned factory that may not be empty after all. And a chip-implanted detective who can forget nothing must examine mass-murder scenes in "The Library of Sorrows." --Cynthia Ward

From Publishers Weekly

Thomas is a very good wordsmith with a fecund and detailed imagination. In this collection of 10 short stories, seven original to the volume, he paints scenes from the dark and dystopic Punktown on the far-future colony world of Oasis. Gore abounds, severed heads and leaking entrails no less alarming because they belong to aliens or robots. Artists and industrialists in Punktown create their works in fleshAor something like it; gruesome has a different meaning there. The stories' appeal is to the senses, largely through violence and horror, but paradoxically, most of the tales are told through summary narrative. Fascinating as the events and conceptual inventions may be, they come to us dulled and mediated. Info-dumps aboundAintrusive patches of information clothed as dialogue or shoehorned ad hoc wherever an explanation seems needed. The dialogue is generally torpid, devoid of character, often badly serving the plot. Except for a remarkable talent for impelling first sentences, the composition skills Thomas displays are crude. He manages here and there some interesting symmetries, as in "Wakizashi," where hara-kiri, childbirth, vegetarianism and capital punishment are all thrown into a fresh light in relation to an alien religious ritual. However, nearly all of the stories come off as mere assemblages, events, characters, themes thrown about, introduced without regard to dramatic structure and never penetrated or resolved. The best we get is a nicely set scene, well imagined, but with a splash of gore or a hollow ellipsis in place of a conclusion, and many pretty phrases, but loose ends everywhere. There is certainly great promise in this writing, but no great writing yet. Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About the Author

Jeffrey Thomas is an American author of fantastical fiction, the creator of the acclaimed milieu Punktown. Books in the Punktown universe include the short story collections Punktown, Voices From Punktown, Punktown: Shades of Grey (with his brother, Scott Thomas), and Ghosts of Punktown. Novels in that setting include Deadstock, Blue War, Monstrocity, Health Agent, Everybody Scream!, and Red Cells. His stories have been selected for inclusion in The Year's Best Horror Stories (Editor, Karl Edward Wagner), The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror (Editors, Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling), and Year's Best Weird Fiction (Editor, Laird Barron). Thomas lives in Massachusetts.

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