"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

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?"

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Reviews:

"Do you remember when Spielberg's AI came out and every review seemed to mention that it had long been a pet project of Stanley Kubrick, and then went on to lament what an amazing creation it could have been in his hands? While in no way the same beast, Colette Phair's debut novella Nightmare in Silicon is the closest analog to an imaginary Kubrick AI that you're likely to find..."

- Jeremy R. Johnson, Verbicide


"Nightmare In Silicon defiantly turns its back on the established SF tropes and styles as its heroine turns her back on her mortality. Colette Phair tells a harrowing tale of the hatred of one's body, of the alienation of post-modern life, and of the consequences of trying to leave it all behind."

- Paul Raven, Velcro City

Excerpts:

Hello (Intro)
The thing that excites me about sex, more than anything, is presence. Knowing someone else is there...sensing the same things I am...that if I say something they're going to hear it. Wondering what they're going to do next... That it's not just my hand down there. That, I think, is the number one reason I can't have sex with a robot.
Read more >>


Old Skin (Audio)
Ymo snuck into the graveyard at night but this time zie was alone. No flashlight needed - now zie saw through lifetimes, feeling zir way around till zie came to zir stone.
Listen >>


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