Lovers & Fighters, Starships & Dragons

Century-spanning life spans. Biohacking. Personality modification technology. Tom Purdom likes to quote Frederik Pohl's prescription for a good science fiction story: "interesting people doing interesting things in an interesting future." He began his writing career over 50 years ago, selling stories and novels to legendary editors like Pohl, John W. Campbell, H. L. Gold, and Donald Wollheim. For the last twenty years, he's been roving space and time with an acclaimed string of stories in Asimov's Science Fiction magazine.
Settle back with twelve of his best portraits of all-too-human characters coping with the challenges of the future. Reviews:"It is a stunning array of stories that surprised me at their breadth of concepts and topics. They could explore interpersonal and philosophical ideas of a community living on an interstellar asteroid or debate the reasons of war. All of these ideas come wrapped up in a cocoon of thoughtful sci-fi concepts and stellar writing.
At their core, they're idea driven stories that not only entertain but expand your thinking into new territories, which is what the best science fiction always does." -Chris Urie, naming author Tom Purdom "Geek of the Week" in Geekadelphia (25 June 2014)Chosen as a "Best Bet for Speculative Fiction Books-February 2014" by Kirkus ReviewsA few comments on Tom Purdom:"Very simply, Tom Purdom IS science fiction.
His ever-inventive stories are cut from the cloth of it and sewn with the skill of a master." -Gregory Frost"Tom Purdom made his first professional sale all the way back in 1957. It's hard to think of any other member of his generation whose current work is frequently mentioned in the same breath with that of writers such as Charles Stross, Greg Egan, and Alastair Reynolds, many of whom were not even born when Tom started his professional career, but Tom's is.
In fact, for sweep and audacity of imagination and a wealth of new ideas and dazzling conceptualization, Tom Purdom not only holds his own with the New Young Turks of the '90s and the Oughts, he sometimes surpasses them. And unlike some of today's Hot New Writers, Tom's work never fails to ALSO feature fascinating and psychologically complex characters, and intrepid investigation into the human heart." -Gardner Dozois"Tom Purdom is the most underrated science fiction writer I know of.
His short fiction delivers again and again with great plots, characters, and an imagination both cosmic and delicately complex." -Jeffrey Ford"Purdom has created a major body of work. Thoughtful, humane, intelligent, extrapolative, involving, his stories are exactly the sort of thing our genre exists to make possible. If you don't like Tom Purdom, you don't like science fiction. Period." -Michael Swanwick