Doris Piserchia
A cult favorite whose fiction blended surreal imagination with a darkly comic voice.
A Billion Days of Earth (1976): The year is 3,000,000 A.D. Humanity has ascended into godhood and is abandoning the planet, rats have evolved into cyborg ratmen with mechanical claws, and a protean silver entity called Sheen is quietly absorbing souls. A mix of cosmic SF and philosophical speculation.
Star Rider (1974): Jade and her telepathic jak, Hinx, embark on a dimension-spanning quest for the legendary dream-world of Doubleluck. A richly imaginative mix of planetary adventure and metaphysical fantasy.
Spaceling (1978): Daryl can see the interdimensional rings drifting in Earth’s atmosphere, and is able to pass through them into increasingly bizarre alternate realities. Surreal, darkly funny, and full of wonder.
Mister Justice (1973): A vigilante travels back in time to witness crimes as they happen and then returns bearing photographic proof, waging a one-man war on a legal system that would rather stop him than use him. Bleak, dense, and unnervingly prescient about anonymous power and vigilante justice.
Bob Buckley
A longtime Analog contributor whose fiction emphasized engineering, science, and problem-solving.
World in the Clouds (1980): Originally serialized in Analog, this hard SF novel unfolds in enormous floating cities in the atmosphere of Venus. The story follows two groups – the scientifically trained colonists and a contingent of paroled murderers deemed too useful to execute – whose uneasy co-existence is tested in one of the Solar System’s most lethal environments.
World of Crystal, Sky of Fire (1985): A late-career novelette that earned Buckley a third-place finish in that year’s Analog Readers Poll, and one of his most warmly received short works. It tells the story of a family of off-world miners whose crystal crop is wreaked by a cat – a cat whose life is then saved by timely alien intercession.
“The Runners” (1978): A short story about a scientific expedition to the Late Cretaceous, it is reportedly among the earliest SF tales to give raptor-like theropods a prominent role. Reprinted in multiple dinosaur anthologies, it remains the most widely available Buckley story and the best entry point to his work.
“The Star Hole” (1972): A team of lunar explorers investigate a mysterious lunar crater whose winding depths conceal wisp-like alien life forms in this story that spotlights the tensions between scientific curiosity and bureaucratic caution.
George Alec Effinger
His fiction combined satire, wit, and deeply human characters.
When Gravity Fails (1987): A landmark early cyberpunk novel, it follows Marîd Audran, a Budayeen hustler drawn into a string of murders in the walled Arab underworld of a Balkanized near future.
Schrödinger’s Kitten (1988): This Hugo and Nebula Award-winning novelette runs quantum mechanics and the many-worlds interpretation through the branching lives of Jehan Ashûfi, a girl in the same Budayeen – a killer in one reality, Heisenberg’s lab assistant in another.
A Fire in the Sun (1989): The second Marîd Audran novel sees our hero planted in the police force as Friedlander Bey’s liaison – a cop answerable to the crime lord who now owns him – expanding the characters and world while exploring identity, systemic corruption, and cybernetic addiction.
The Exile Kiss (1991): The conclusion to the Budayeen trilogy sees Marîd and his patron Friedlander Bey framed for murder and exiled to the harsh Arabian desert, capping the series with a story of survival, identity, and honor.
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