Thoreau's Microscope
The innovative novels and stories of Michael Blumlein, MD, have introduced new levels of both terror and wonder into the fiction of scientific speculation. His work as a medical researcher and internist at San Francisco's UCSF Medical Center informs his tales of biotech, epigenetics, brain science, and what it means to be truly if only temporarily human.
Our title piece, "Thoreau's Microscope," inspired by a historic High Sierra expedition with Kim Stanley Robinson and Gary Snyder and first published here, is a stunning mix of hypothesis and history, in which the author inhabits Thoreau's final days to examine the interaction of impersonal science and personal liberation. A journey as illuminating as it is intimate.Plus... A selection of short stories with Blumlein's signature mix of horror, "hard" science, and wicked humor. "Fidelity" coolly deconstructs adultery with the help of an exuberant tumor, an erotic cartoon, and a male malady. "Y(ou)r Q(ua)ntifi(e)d S(el)f" will reset your Fitbit and your workout as well. "Paul and Me" is a love story writ extra-large, in which an Immortal from Fantasy comes down with a distinctly human disorder. In the chilling "Know How, Can Do" a female Frankenstein brings romance to life in the cold light of the lab.
And Featuring: Our overly intrusive Outspoken Interview, in which the ethics of experimental medicine, animal surgery, the poetry of prose, cult film acclaim, Charles Ludlam, Darwin, and gender dysphoria all submit to examination.
"Blindingly brilliant . . . Blumlein is beyond any genre . . . a genuinely great writer." --Katherine Dunn, author, Geek Love
"A wonderful and disturbing writer." --William Gibson
"Offbeat and unpredictable . . . a talent that bears watching." --Publishers Weekly
"Disturbing. More!" --Joe Lansdale, creator, Hap and Leonard
"The title piece, original to the collection, creates a delightfully strange atmosphere of simultaneous intimacy and intellectual detachment in an autobiographical first-person narrative of how a doctor deals with the 'morbid curiosity' of experiencing his own cancer as both patient and professional." --Publishers Weekly
"Blumlein's voice takes on a degree of urgency here, but it only reminds us of the deeply humane urgency that his fiction has always exhibited." --Paula Guran, Locus Magazine
