The 3rd episode of the Chiasmus Press Interviews from the Edge series
is up, in which I read from the scene in NIS where Ymo gets her new
body and discuss some of the greater themes of the book:

http://chiasmuspress.wordpress.com/2008/07/09/interviews-from-the-edge-episode-3-colette-phair/

Ymo is a girl.
Ymo gets sick.
Ymo will die.
Ymo gets turned into a robot (not a girl).
Robots don't die.
Robots don't sleep.
Robots don't dream...

Getting medical tests performed on her to pay the rent, staying up all night with her scarred and strange friends, sharing beds with her boyfriend and whoever else comes along, Ymo's is a world so infused with sex that it's become an identity. Ymo is a woman. That is, until diagnosis with a life-threatening illness leaves her no chance of survival, except in the gender-neutral body of a robot. What follows is her struggle to stay human while existing as a sexless object. Ymo's final role as guinea pig will be to answer the question "What if people didn't dream?"

"A toxic-shock torrent of bad energy and beautiful language, Colette Phair's 'Nightmare in Silicon' is recklessly brave and driven writing, brimming with fluorescent style and startling ideas. Hers is a strong, new voice that demands and deserves to be listened to."
—ALAN MOORE, author of V For Vendetta and Watchmen

"Cyberpunk is alive and well. Nightmare in Silicon is convulsively funny, hideously diseased, erotically oozing, tightly plotted, and told with a wonderfully sharp tongue."
—RUDY RUCKER, author of Software and Mathematicians in Love

"If Kathy Acker had lived long enough to have access to an iPod, Red Bull and Second Life, she might have come to sound like Colette Phair… Phair takes no prisoners in her vivid, sonorous truth-telling."
—PAUL DI FILIPPO, author of Ciphers and Ribofunk

Available from Amazon, Amazon.co.uk, or Powells.com.

I have an article on gender-neutral pronouns in the Fall "Singular/Plural" issue of Bitch Magazine. I use GNPs in Nightmare in Silicon to refer to Ymo after she is no longer a she.

You can subscribe here.

These are the ways the world ends.

Thirty-four new and selected Doomsday scenarios: an enthralling collection of work by canonical literary figures, contemporary masters, and a few rising stars, all of whom have looked into the future and found it missing. Across boundaries of place and time, these writers celebrate the variety and vitality of the short story as a form by writing their own conclusions to the story of the world. Obliteration has never hurt so good.

Contributors include: Grace Aguilar, Steve Aylett, Robert Bradley, Dennis Cooper, Lucy Corin, Elliott David, Matthew Derby, Carol Emshwiller, Brian Evenson, Neil Gaiman, Jeff Goldberg, Theodora Goss, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Jared Hohl, Shelley Jackson, Ursula K. Le Guin, Stacey Levine, Tao Lin, Kelly Link, H.P. Lovecraft, Gary Lutz, Rick Moody, Michael Moorcock, Adam Nemett, Josip Novakovich, Joyce Carol Oates, Colette Phair, Edgar Allan Poe, Terese Svoboda, Justin Taylor, Lynne Tillman, Deb Olin, Unferth, H.G. Wells, Allison Whittenberg, and Diane Williams.

Ordering/More info:

Powells

Amazon U.S.

Amazon UK

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