Labor Day 1989: Duncan Twists sleazy client, Nick Varnish, has loaned him a cottage overlooking the salt marshes of Dusktide Beach, a barrier island in southeast North Carolina. Just to the south lies Lorn Island, which is deserted, except for one ethereal resident: the Kindred Spirit. Duncan accidentally encounters a former lover, Tendency Specter, who introduces him to the Kindred Spirit. In turn, the Kindred Spirit introduces him to an unnamed person who has mysteriously disappeared. Intrigued as much by their rekindling relationship as they are by the missing person, Duncan and Tendency...

David Manning wrote A Brief History of the Recent Future in the mid 1970s with the idea of satirizing the present by forecasting the most bizarre imaginable future. The result was a "verbally animated cartoon" tracing the evolution of an apocalyptic conflict between proponents of ganic garbage vs those advocating ficial garbage as civilization's final energy resource. Along the way, the tale introduces such absurdities as a credit-system economy; the Bronx Sanitation Air Force; a 3,000-acre rubber-raft island named Carabia; a news toaster that burns headlines onto breakfast bread; and people...