Whether We Are Mended

Perry Slaughter's work has been called "dismayingly sexist" and "what you might get if Philip K. Dick and Chuck Palahniuk raised a special-needs baby." His characters, grappling as they do with issues of manhood and violence, are not what one would generally regard as romantics, and yet here, in a run of remarkable stories penned in the late '80s, he gives us romance as only he could-or would.

In settings ranging from Earth to distant planets to parallel worlds, with characters running the gamut from human to cyborg to alien, Perry Slaughter shows us love (or its analogues) in all its dirty, wretched, heartfelt squalor. With his characteristic energy and peculiar style, he shakes us by the lapels and shouts that romance is a thing of bloody science fiction.