The Future is Blue eBook

Subterranean Press is thrilled to present a major new collection from one of the most dazzling, distinctive voices in the literary world. Catherynne M. Valente, the New York Times bestselling and multiple-award-winning author of The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making and other acclaimed novels, now brings readers thirteen stories unlike any others.

In the title story, Theodore Sturgeon Award-winning novelette “The Future Is Blue,” an outcast girl named Tetley lives on floating Garbagetown, in a world that dreams of the long lost land. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos is explored and reinvented in style in “Down and Out in R’lyeh.” In the novelette “The Limitless Perspective of Master Peek, or, the Luminescence of Debauchery,” Perpetua masquerades as a man in order to continue her father’s business as a glassblower and must fashion a special eye for a queen. And in “The Beasts Who Fought for Fairyland Until the Very End,” the wyvern A-Through-L, the warrior Green Wind and his giant cat the Leopard of Little Breezes cope with their broken-hearted disappointment over politicks as the evil Marquess ascends to rule. 

Of her previous collection, The Bread We Eat in Dreams, the New York Times said, “Valente’s writing DNA is full of fable, fairy tale and myth drawn from deep wells worldwide.” With The Future Is Blue she continues to build and invent unforgettable worlds and characters with lyrical abandon, creating stories that feel old and new at once.

The Future is Blue also includes three never-before-printed stories, for almost 30,000 words of work exclusive to this collection: “Major Tom,” “Two and Two is Seven,” and the long novelette “Flame, Pearl, Mother, Autumn, Virgin, Sword, Kiss, Blood, Heart, and Grave.”

Table of Contents:

• The Future Is Blue
• No One Dies in Nowhere
• Two and Two is Seven
• Down and Out in R'lyeh
• The Limitless Perspective of Master Peek, or, the Luminescence of Debauchery
• Snow Day
• Planet Lion
• Flame, Pearl, Mother, Autumn, Virgin, Sword, Kiss, Blood, Heart, and Grave
• Major Tom
• The Lily and the Horn
• The Flame After the Candle
• The Long Goodnight of Violet Wild
• The Beast Who Fought for Fairyland Until the Very End

From Publishers Weekly:

 “In this challenging collection of 15 reprints and originals with a variety of tones, themes, and styles, Valente’s unique knack for bending genres and confounding the senses is on full display. Her approach is dreamlike, even hallucinatory, leaping from one idea to the next with dizzying frequency and skill. Her multilayered, complicated narratives require careful, in-depth reading to grasp their full meaning.”

From Kirkus Reviews:

“Valente (Space Opera, 2018, etc.) collects her fablelike short works of fantasy, science fiction, and science fantasy… Valente loves poetic language, and overanalysis would ruin what she's crafted here.”

From Booklist:

“This collection of short stories showcases Valente’s (Space Opera, 2018) gorgeous way with words and impressive genre flexibility as she moves from science fiction to fairy tale to comedic horror with her singular linguistic flair… Fans of Valente will adore this collection for the same reasons they love her other work; for those unfamiliar, it provides an engrossing and appealing introduction to the many worlds and voices she is capable of producing.”