Fountain of Age
Stories
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Nine new stories from a long-time star of the science fiction field including the Hugo Award winner "The Erdmann Nexus" and Nebula Award winner "The Fountain of Age." These stories have been reprinted in The Year's Best Science Fiction, Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, and Best of the Web.
Kress unpacks the future the way DNA investigators unravelled the double helix: one gene at a time. In many of these stories gene sculpting is illegal yet commonplace and the effects range between slow catastrophe (“End Game”), cosmic (“First Rites”), and tragic (“Safeguard”). Then there’s the morning when Rochester disappears and Jenny has to rely on “The Kindness of Strangers.” There’s Jill, who is kidnapped by aliens and trying to learn the “Laws of Survival.” And there’s Hope, whose Grandma is regretting the world built “By Fools Like Me.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Passions are magnified by age and the world only becomes more unpredictable in Kress's new collection, anchored by the Nebula-winning title novella. The nine stories, published over the course of just two years, wrestle with themes of love, death, and transformation. A 90-year-old scientist shares a powerful and inexplicable experience with his fellow nursing home residents in "The Erdmann Nexus." In "First Rites," a neuroscientist tries to save and understand his cousin's strange orphaned son. Relationships are complex and conflicted: in "Fountain of Age," a crooked businessman is driven by his obsession with a woman whose genes hold the key to prolonged youth, and in "Safeguard" a woman raises four children who unknowingly carry a plague that could destroy the world. Kress's depiction of science is much like her characters' experiences with love: by turns glorious and terrible, and always a little disturbing, even in triumph.
