Speculative Los Angeles

The debut title of a new city-based anthology series featuring stories with speculative, sci-fi, and paranormal themes.

"Echoing Akashic's popular city-specific 'Noir' series, this first in what promises to be an intriguing new run of books looks at weirdly wonderful Los Angeles and sees changelings, dirigibles, jacaranda men, psychic death cults, robot nursemaids, a walled-in canyon for the rich, and an alternate city where Spanish land grants endured. With brand-new stories from Aimee Bender, Alex Espinoza, Francesca Lia Block, Charles Yu, Duane Swierczynski, and more."
--Library Journal, Barbara Hoffert's Prepub Alert

"Speculative Los Angeles is a thrill ride of grand ideas and warnings. Take a place that already defines the future of culture, add fourteen unbound minds, and you get a collection that wows the imagination like no other."
--Michael Connelly, author of the best-selling Harry Bosch series

A Booklist Shout 'n' Share Title to Watch (July 2020)

"The stories here move among all of Los Angeles' gritty and bright corners."
--Kirkus Reviews

As an incubator of the future, Los Angeles has long mesmerized writers from Philip K. Dick to Aldous Huxley. With its natural disasters, Hollywood artifice, staggering wealth and poverty, urban sprawl, and diversity, one can argue that Los Angeles is already so weird, surreal, irrational, and mythic that any fiction emerging from this place should be considered speculative.

So, best-selling author Denise Hamilton commissioned some stories and did exactly that. In Speculative Los Angeles, fourteen of the city's most prophetic voices reimagine the city in very different ways. In these pages, you'll encounter twenty-first-century changelings, dirigibles plying the suburban skies, black holes and jacaranda men lurking in deep suburbia, beachfront property in Century City, walled-off canyons and coastlines reserved for the wealthy, psychic death cults, robot nursemaids, and an alternate LA where Spanish land grants never gave way to urbanization.

As with our city-based Akashic Noir Series, each story in Speculative Los Angeles is set in a distinct neighborhood filled with local color, landmarks, and flavor. Since the best speculative fiction provides a wormhole into other worlds while also commenting on our own, that is exactly what you'll find here.

Featuring brand-new stories by: Aimee Bender, Lisa Morton, Alex Espinoza, Ben H. Winters, Denise Hamilton, Lynell George, Stephen Blackmoore, Francesca Lia Block, Charles Yu, Duane Swierczynski, Luis J. Rodriguez, A.G. Lombardo, Kathleen Kaufman, and S. Qiouyi Lu.