Night Shift

Wry, dark humor burnishes visionary SF in these often prophetic, sometimes troubling, but always fascinating tales that combine and masterfully conflate the disparate worlds of corporate tech and literary art.

“After the Thaw” is a hi-tech take on an ancient idea: immortality. “Terrible Trudy on the Lam” based on actual events, is a modern fable about a zoo escape, a private eye, a vaudeville act and keeping your mouth shut. “Night Shift at NanoGobblers,” written for a NASA website, is about asteroid-altering AIs and their world-weary earthbound handlers. “Transitions” deals with jet lag when your flight is decades late. Gunn’s long-awaited third collection is rounded out by incisive and affectionate portraits of her SF colleagues, mentors, and friends, beginning with Ursula Le Guin. All illuminated of course by our artfully intimate interview.

What People Are Saying

“Without Eileen Gunn, life as we know it would be so dull, we wouldn’t recognize it. Among the five or six North Americans currently able to write short stories, she has not written anywhere near enough.” Ursula K. Le Guin

“If ‘umami’ described how stories feel in your mind instead of how food tastes, I would say everything Eileen does is infused with umami.” Nisi Shawl

“Plenty of science fiction and fantasy authors do ‘thought experiments’ but few of them disregard experimental safety protocols with quite as much gleeful abandon as Eileen Gunn.” Charlie Jane Anders

About the Author

Eileen Gunn is a science fiction author and editor based in Seattle, Washington, who began publishing in 1978. Her story “Coming to Terms,” inspired, in part, by a friendship with Avram Davidson, won the Nebula Award for Best Short Story in 2004. Several others have been nominated for the Hugo, World Fantasy, and Locus awards. Gunn has a background in high-tech advertising and marketing; she wrote advertising for Digital Equipment Corporation in the 1970s, and was Director of Advertising at Microsoft in the 1980s. A seasoned SF pro, she is on the board of directors of the Clarion West Writers Workshop.