Each of the three Area X novels, Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance, is relatively self-contained. There is something extra to be gained reading all three, but they largely work independently. Absolution also does. It can be read on its own. But it departs from the three prior novels by being more of a tapestry of story than pure novel. It is, in essence, three short stories, or more specifically, a short story and two novellas.
And the time period is important. An extremely brief history lesson, the 80s were a time when America was doing it's best not to create another Vietnam in Central America. Its military forces were secretly, and less secretly, deployed throughout the region in an attempt to “keep the commies out” lest the Soviet Union win the Cold War. Shepard took this scene, added a drop or two of something speculative, and wrote a couple pieces of fiction, including “Salvador” and “R&R”, the latter of which was expanded into Life During Wartime.
Juice is foremost a frame story. It tells of a man and young girl driving a scavenger rig through the post-apocalyptic Australian outback. Our world order has collapsed many years prior and global warming has reached peak heat. Ambushed, the man and girl are taken prisoner by a lone survivor. While under lock and key, the man must convince the survivor to let him go, something he does by telling his backstory. It's in the telling of this backstory that the book's true story emerges. The reader learns of the man's childhood in the sun-baked prairies and his eventual taking of an operator position in a secret order dead set—literally—on preventing the capitalism of our our era from ever having the same power again. These two stories culminate in a choice for the survivor, and ultimately, the reader.
The Great When follows one Dennis Knuckleyard, used bookshop assistant, in the post-WWII years of London. But it's not the London you know. Superficially it looks like your London, but there are doors, entryways to another, darker, surreal London. Dennis gets himself into a spot of trouble one day in Soho picking up a box of vintage Arthur Machen books. One of the books in the box exists only in fiction, but there it sits in Dennis' hands. The young man's world turned sideways in the aftermath, he is forced to explore the London you don't know to get rid of the book, meeting all manner of gangsters and artists, harlots and killers along the way.
Dredge is a cosmic horror fishing game, or perhaps more precisely, a Lovecraftian trawling game. Players take on the role of a fishing boat captain who pilots around an odd archipelago of islands, catching a wide variety of fish and collecting ancient items. You collect the fish to pay your way, and you collect the items are for a strange recluse with an occult backstory that wants telling. Look no deeper (har har).
The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain (hereafter PH&C) is the story of two characters, one called “the boy” and the other “the woman”. Both were previously members of the their ship's Hold, a place where people are kept incarcerated, chained to walls. At some time in the past, the woman was released from the Hold and moved higher in the ship to do research at a university. She still wears, however, a security anklet, an anklet that her university overseers can use, if they desire, to take physical control of her body. The woman is doing research on the behaviors and social practices of child's play in the Hold when she receives a welcome gift: the boy as a research subject. Unlocking things inside herself she never knew possible, the lives of the boy and the woman take on new trajectories in the aftermath.
The Crypt of the Moon Spider follows the classic horror storyline of: woman is committed to a sanitarium as madness slowly creeps in. Her story is ostensibly set on the moon, and its secrets, particularly those of an underground cult, are slowly revealed as she undergoes therapy. A mad doctor, his Igor-esque assistant, and the cult culminate in a splashy ending.
Calypso is both the name of the book and the name of the generation starship at its heart. When the ship arrives at its destination planet, a woman named Rochelle awakes from cryostasis to take on her role as leader once again. But everything is not as it was when the ship departed. In her absence, a war was fought onboard the ship between two factions: the engineers and the botanists (Sterling's Shapers and Mechanists?). It becomes Rochelle's job to choose sides and settle the dispute.
