Dark Harvest (NewCon Press)

Cover Artist: Cat Sparks

Multiple award-winning author Cat Sparks writes science fiction with a distinctly Australian flavour – stories steeped in the desperate anarchy of Mad Max futures, redolent with scorching sun and the harshness of desert sands, but her narratives reach deeper than that. In her tales of ordinary people adapting to post-apocalyptic futures, she casts a light on what it means to be human; the good and the bad, the noble and the shameful.

Dark Harvest gathers together Cat’s best short fiction of recent years, as selected by the author herself: fourteen stories, two of them novelettes, including one brand new tale and two Ditmar Award winners. 

In “You Will Remember Who You Were” humanity’s elite survive in vast Arcs towering high above the surface of an Earth ravaged by climate change, the bored inhabitants of Solstice Arc forever jealous of their neighbours and oblivious to the struggles of those they left below...

Set in a harsh denuded future, “Fata Morgana” sees a deadly war machine attempt to bring its aged maker home, pursued by the weapons of its former employers.

In “The Ship Sales On” passengers on a luxury liner cling desperately to the decadence of the past as the world crumbles around them and the inevitability of their doom closes in. 

The title story, “Dark Harvest”, introduces us to a unit of soldiers abandoned on an alien planet, fighting an enemy they don’t understand without the support they so desperately need.

In “Before Dominica” we are introduced to Ruby, who used to have an office and a promising CV; now she’s a cleaner in a corporate building, surviving on scrounged left-over sandwiches and routinely working around the corpses from the latest gun battle. Ruby is down-trodden, defeated by circumstances and resigned to her lot, until a ghost from her past ignites resentments she never suspected still smouldered within her...

CONTENTS:

• Hot Rods 
• Cassini Falling 
• Hacking Santorini 
• Dragon Girl 
• You Will Remember Who You Were 
• Fata Morgana 
• Before Dominica 
• The Seventh Relic 
• And the Ship Sails On 
• Jericho Blush 
• No Fat Chicks 
• Veterans Day 
• Dark Harvest 
• Prayers to Broken Stone 

Limited to 50 signed and numbered hardcover copies