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Beyond Mallworld
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!
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!
484 pages, Hardcover
First published September 13, 2020
About the author
S.P. Somtow
345 books163 followersCalled by the Bangkok Post "the Thai person known by name to most people in the world," S.P. Somtow is an author, composer, filmmaker, and international media personality whose dazzling talents and acerbic wit have entertained and enlightened fans the world over.
He was Somtow Papinian Sucharitkul in Bangkok. His grandfather's sister was a Queen of Siam, his father is a well known international lawyer and vice-president of the International Academy of Human Rights. Somtow was educated at Eton and Cambridge, and his first career was in music. In the 1970s (while he was still in college) his works were being performed on four continents and he was named representative of Thailand to the Asian Composer's League and to the International Music Commission of UNESCO. His avant-garde compositions caused controversy and scandal in his native country, and a severe case of musical burnout in the late 1970s precipitated his entry into a second career - that of author.
He began writing science fiction, but soon started to invade other fields of writing, with some 40 books out now, including the clasic horror novel Vampire Junction, which defined the "rock and roll vampire" concept for the 80s, the Riverrun Trilogy ("the finest new series of the 90's" - Locus) and the semi-autobiographical memoir Jasmine Nights. He has won or been nominated for dozens of major awards including the Bram Stoker Award, the John W. Campbell Award, the Hugo Award, and the World Fantasy Award.
Somtow has also made some incursions into filmmaking, directing the cult classic The Laughing Dead and the award winning art film Ill Met by Moonlight.
He was Somtow Papinian Sucharitkul in Bangkok. His grandfather's sister was a Queen of Siam, his father is a well known international lawyer and vice-president of the International Academy of Human Rights. Somtow was educated at Eton and Cambridge, and his first career was in music. In the 1970s (while he was still in college) his works were being performed on four continents and he was named representative of Thailand to the Asian Composer's League and to the International Music Commission of UNESCO. His avant-garde compositions caused controversy and scandal in his native country, and a severe case of musical burnout in the late 1970s precipitated his entry into a second career - that of author.
He began writing science fiction, but soon started to invade other fields of writing, with some 40 books out now, including the clasic horror novel Vampire Junction, which defined the "rock and roll vampire" concept for the 80s, the Riverrun Trilogy ("the finest new series of the 90's" - Locus) and the semi-autobiographical memoir Jasmine Nights. He has won or been nominated for dozens of major awards including the Bram Stoker Award, the John W. Campbell Award, the Hugo Award, and the World Fantasy Award.
Somtow has also made some incursions into filmmaking, directing the cult classic The Laughing Dead and the award winning art film Ill Met by Moonlight.
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Displaying 1 - 1 of 1 review
December 23, 2023
I will be honest. I didn't love the first half of this book nearly as much as the second half. I found some of the stories a little confusing to follow along to initially, because we were being thrown in a different world that had a bunch of different things, but it was in short story format which means we didn't get a lot of depth of details necessarily. So it took reading through multiple stories to get more familiar with Mallworld, but the more I read the more I enjoyed. These stories to me seem like a great marriage between the styles of Isaac Asimov and Douglas Adams. And as much as I may have not really loved the first few stories, I absolutely loved the last ones. I also appreciated the author's note letting us know that these were written over two decades, and some of the earlier ones may not have aged as well. All in all an interesting collection, I did end up enjoying it.
Displaying 1 - 1 of 1 review