The Hugo Award-winning Electric Velocipede ran for twelve years, publishing twenty-seven issues over the course of its run. The magazine was nominated four years in a row for a World Fantasy Award. Its stories appeared in Gardner Dozois’ and Jonathan Strahan’s year’s best anthologies and were also shortlisted for the Sturgeon and Tiptree Awards.

The Best of Electric Velocipede showcases a breathtaking thirty-four pieces of high quality work published during its run. If you’ve never read the magazine, you’re in for a treat. If you’re already a fan, you’ll find all your favorites and a lot of great writing that deserves a second look. With a foreword by editor John Klima and introduction by Shane Jones.

Stories and poetry by:

Mark Rich • William Shunn • Alan DeNiro • Liz Williams • Chris Roberson • Heather Martin • Jay Caselberg • Hal Duncan • Jeffrey Ford • Catherynne M. Valente • Brendan Connell • Richard Howard • Rachel Swirsky • Sandra McDonald • Shira Lipkin • Patrick O’Leary • Jonathan Wood • Toiya Kirsten Finley • Richard Bowes • Mark Teppo • KJ Bishop • Cyril Simsa • Darin C. Bradley • E. Lily Yu • Dennis Danvers • Aliette de Bodard • Ken Liu • Megan Kurashige • Michael Constantine McConnell • Damien Angelica Walters • Val Nolan • Cislyn Smith • Sam J. Miller • Caroline M. Yoachim

Count Geiger’s Blues follows the adventures of Xavier Thaxton, arts editor at a major Southern daily called the Salonika Urbanite. Thaxton thinks himself a superior man. His aesthetic standards are so lofty that he regards superheroes as pop-culture cock-and-bull, rock music as audible rubbish, and soap operas as the contemptible spew of script-writing committees.

While skinny-dipping in a pool polluted with radioactive waste, Thaxton is afflicted with superpowers all his own and becomes that which he most scorns. A radiation-induced ailment, the Philistine Syndrome, forces him to assume the persona of comic-book hero Count Geiger to allay its career- and indeed life-threatening symptoms.

Michael Bishop’s Count Geiger Blues, a novel of intellectual heft and self-spoofing kitsch, is a take on superheroes like no other: a rollicking foray into high and low culture that mines the vicissitudes and tragedies of everyday life for serious belly laughs and bona fide heartbreak.