Synopses & Reviews
Last Plane to Heaven is the final and definitive short story collection of award-winning SF author Jay Lake, author of Green, Endurance, and Kalimpura.
Long before he was a novelist, SF writer Jay Lake, was an acclaimed writer of short stories. In Last Plane to Heaven, Lake has assembled thirty-two of the best of them. Aliens and angels fill these pages, from the title story, a hard-edged and breathtaking look at how a real alien visitor might be received, to the savage truth of “The Cancer Catechisms.” Here are more than thirty short stories written by a master of the form, science fiction and fantasy both.
This collection features an original introduction by Gene Wolfe.
Review
Praise for Jay Lake
“Lakes world-building is stellar, even with as idiosyncratic a narrator as Green, and the story she tells thrills.”—Booklist on Green
“The richness of [Lake's] rendering of urban life as tapestry is genuinely irresistible.”—John Clute
“Lakes strong storytelling skills and his ability to depict exotic cultures and create believable characters make this a tale that should appeal to most lovers of fantasy and the martial arts.”—Library Journal on Kalimpura
“Lake deftly weaves complicated, stubborn characters into a plot that reaches the grandest and most personal scales without ever straining credulity.... This complex, lonesome, haunting novel will appeal to fans of Valente, Monette, and Miéville.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review, on Endurance
“Lake wields big themes—magic and religion versus science, free will, colonialism, and a bit of romance.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review, on Pinion
About the Author
JAY LAKE was a prolific writer of science fiction and fantasy, as well as an award-winning editor, a popular raconteur and toastmaster, and an excellent teacher at the many writers' workshops he attended. His novels included Tor's publications Mainspring, Escapement, and Pinion, and the trilogy of novels in his Green cycle - Green, Endurance and Kalimpura. Lake was nominated multiple times for the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, and the World Fantasy Award. He won the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer in 2004, the year after his first professional stories were published. In 2008 Jay Lake was diagnosed with colon cancer, and in the years after he became known outside the sf genre as a powerful and brutally honest blogger about the progression of his disease. Jay Lake died on June 1, 2014.
Table of Contents
Foreword by Gene Wolfe
Last Plane to Heaven
Angels i
Houses of the Favored
Science and Other Fictions
The Starship Mechanic
Permanent Fatal Errors
“Hello,” Said the Gun
The Speed of Time
West to East
The Women Who Ate Stone Squid
Looking for Truth in a Wild Blue Yonder
Angels ii
Scent of the Green Cathedral
Steam, Punks, and Fairies
Spendthrift
Jefferson's West
They Are Forgotten Until They Come Again
The Woman Who Shattered the Moon
The Blade of His Plow
Grindstone
The Temptation of Eustace Prudence McAllen
That Which Rises Ever Upward
Angels iii
A Feast of Angels
Phantasies of Style and Place
Promises
Testaments
The Fall of the Moon
A Critical Examination of Stigmata's Print Taking the Rats to Riga
From the Countries of Her Dreams
Unchambered Heart
Angels iv
Novus Ordo Angelorum
Descent into Darkness
The Tentacled Sky
Such Bright and Risen Madness in Our Names
Her Fingers Like Whips, Her Eyes Like Razors
Mother Urban's Booke of Dayes
Angels v
Going Bad
The End
The Cancer Catechism
Afterword