Spaceman Blues: A Love Song

Brian Francis Slattery

Aug 2007 · Sold by Macmillan

About this ebook

Painted in browns and grays and sparked by sudden fires, Spaceman Blues is a literary retro-pulp science-fiction-mystery-superhero novel, the debut of a true voice of the future, and a cult classic in the making.

When Manuel Rodrigo de Guzmán González disappears, Wendell Apogee decides to find out where he has gone and why. But in order to figure out what happened to Manuel, Wendell must contend with parties, cockfights, and chases; an underground city whose people live in houses suspended from cavern ceilings; urban weirdos and alien assassins; immigrants, the black market, flight, riots, and religious cults.


At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Ratings and reviews

An impossibly pulsing, sprawling, hyperkinetic novel, propelled by a remarkably original voice: the jacket blurbs compare him to Pynchon, and yes, he'll appeal to anyone who loved Gravity's Rainbow (or a big fat novel by William Gaddis or David Foster Wallace, but also, I think, Tom Robbins, William Gibson and Neal Stephenson). But Slattery's tumbling, cumulative, evocative, celebratory prose is distinctively his own, and so is his resolute focus: this relatively slim book never wafts off into abstractions, just maniacally unfolds its manifold (but converging) plotlines against an exuberant setting of wild partying and lucrative black marketeering among the immigrants from dozens of nations in a magical-realist New York. Yes, when you're done reading it, you tend to write long sentences. I am inexpressibly grateful to the random guy in the library who recommended this to me while I was browsing the new sf. He said it was "quirky." I saw it was blurbed by Harlan Ellison on the front, and was sold. Thanks, random library guy.

About the author

Brian Francis Slattery is an editor, writer, and occasional musician living in New Haven, Connecticut. Spaceman Blues is his first novel.