Kim Stanley Robinson, award-winning author of the bestselling trilogy Crimson Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars, was called “a literary landscaping artist, creating breathtaking vistas” from the Detroit Metro News. Now he confirms his popularity for brilliance as well as for the unexpected in this luminous short function.

A man tumbles through wild surf, half drowned, to collapse on the moonlit beach. When he regains consciousness, he does not have any storage of who he is or where he came from. He understands only that the girl who about A Short, Sharp Shock cleaned ashore with him has disappeared sometime in the night and that he provides awakened inside a surreal landscaping of savage beauty-a secret watery globe encircled by a thin backbone of land. Aided by strange tribesmen, he journeys to the cove from the backbone kings, a brutal competition that has enslaved the girl and several from the tribesmen. That’s only the start of his quest, as he struggles to find her identity within this wondrous and cruel land-and seeks out the girl whose hold on his imagination is normally both unfathomable and unshakable.

Haunting and lyrical, filled with unusual beauty and terrible peril, A Short, Sharp Shock is an ambitious and enthralling tale by one of science fiction’s esteemed talents.