Absolute Uncertainty

Absolute Uncertainty collects seven stories - three of them new - by Lucy Sussex, as well as an interview conducted by Maureen Kincaid Speller. In these stories, a fashionista becomes obsessed with the uncanny resemblance of the dazzling, eccentric "Lady Sanspareille" to the seventeenth-century Duchess of Newcastle; a young man loses his virginity in more than one sense of the word; an older writer shares her insight with Philip K. Dick, who really needs it; and in Biocultural Studies 101, a class examines moral ambiguities and the limits of biography in the case of Werner Heisenberg, "a real slippery customer," via a high-tech "interactive template."

"Strongly feminist, linguistically muscular, and historically erudite, Lucy Sussex is an Australian writer who deserves to be more widely read outside of her home country[...] This book is your chance to test [bridges between our day and the past] in all their precarious charm, to take them as far as they'll go in hopes of inhabiting a few broken moments of life in another time." - Strange Horizons, September 12, 2006

"It opens with a delicious original, 'Duchess'[...]The other selections range from earthy, political Australian fantasy[...] to ghost story [...] to the title's story time-traveling Watcher in a Nazi Germany where Heisenberg is busy speculating about Uncertainty, and they're told in a corresponding variety of styles and voices." - Locus, Jan 2007


Genre: Science Fiction