The universe delivers the enemy you need

Adam Marek's stories have always led us into strange and startling new worlds: futures replete with the unlikeliest of technologies, worldviews shaped and coloured by the intrinsic oddity of modern life. But in his third collection we see a new set of pressures bearing down on his characters, both personal and seemingly insurmountable. Parents use holograms to protect their children from the judgements of others; teenagers take refuge in run-down factories, training harder each day to face the monstrous foes outside. The cause of these pressures may often be science fictional, in nature, but Marek's responses to them are always entirely human.