Dossier — Stepan Chapman

For those who have not yet encountered the bizarre inner workings of Stepan Chapman, prepare for a surrealistic tour de force with this collection of seventeen of his short stories. To say that Chapman exists in another world is the more comforting of the two basic possibilities: could he be one of the very few accurate seers of the world we deludedly think we roam on? In The Selection of Toothpick a skinny island boy brazenly celebrates his heroism for killing a giant crab until the local wizard puts the vain lad's status into proper perspective. In Boots Practice a recruit is adminished by her drill instructor to not stop walking in her newly-issued boots. Good thing she doesn't, because as she traverses changing environments the footgear transforms to skis, then to ice skates...stilts...the ambulatory mechanism of a huge robot...rows of mollusk legs. It all ends normal enough—sort of. In The Sister City an American in a Tokyo bar meets a woman, Nema, at first invisible to him, who shows him her face, and reveals her identity as the spirit of a city self-destructed in grief over what the American's people had done to hers. With Chapman's tales, grip the arms of your chair as you allow your mind to take flight.ABOUT THE AUTHOR:Stepan Chapman lives in Cottonwood, Arizona with his wife. He is the author of the critically acclaimed short story collection Danger Music. His novel The Troika won the Phillip K. Dick award for best original science fiction paperback.