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Alta Live: Denise Hamilton
March 17, 2021 @ 12:30 pm - 1:30 pm PDT
In Speculative Los Angeles, bestselling author and Alta contributor Denise Hamilton reimagines her hometown in dramatically disparate ways by commissioning 13 stories from some of the city’s most prophetic and diverse voices (and adding her own). She joins Alta Live and Alta editor at large Mary Melton for a deep dive into speculative fiction in the City of Angels.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Edgar Award finalist Denise Hamilton is the author of seven crime novels and the editor of the anthology Los Angeles Noir (which includes the Edgar Award–winning short story “The Golden Gopher” by Susan Straight) and Los Angeles Noir 2: The Classics. She is a former Los Angeles Times journalist, a Fulbright Scholar, a noir and sci-fi/fantasy geek, and a proud L.A. native.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
As an incubator of the future, Los Angeles has mesmerized writers from Aldous Huxley to Octavia E. Butler. With its natural disasters, Hollywood artifice, staggering wealth and poverty, and urban sprawl, the city is, arguably, already so weird, surreal, irrational, and mythic that any fiction emerging from it should be considered speculative. That’s the approach bestselling author Denise Hamilton took as she assembled 14 stories (including one of her own) and did exactly that in Speculative Los Angeles.
In these pages, you’ll encounter 21st-century changelings, dirigibles plying the suburban skies, black holes and jacaranda men lurking in deep suburbia, beachfront property in currently landlocked Century City, walled-off canyons and coastlines reserved for the wealthy, psychic death cults, robot nursemaids, and an alternate L.A. where Spanish land grants never gave way to urbanization. Speculative Los Angeles features new stories from Charles Yu, Aimee Bender, Lisa Morton, Alex Espinoza, Ben H. Winters, Denise Hamilton, Lynell George, Stephen Blackmoore, Francesca Lia Block, Duane Swierczynski, Luis J. Rodriguez, A.G. Lombardo, Kathleen Kaufman, and S. Qiouyi Lu. •