Welcome to the official website of author Denise Hamilton.
Denise’s latest project is Speculative Los Angeles, a new anthology featuring original stories by 14 different authors with speculative, sci-fi, and paranormal themes—each using distinct neighborhood settings as a launching pad.
As an incubator of the future, Los Angeles has long mesmerized writers from Aldous Huxley to Octavia E. Butler. With its natural disasters, Hollywood artifice, staggering wealth and poverty, and urban sprawl, one can argue that Los Angeles is already so weird, surreal, irrational, and mythic that any fiction emerging from this place should be considered speculative. So, Denise commissioned fourteen stories (including one of her own) and did exactly that. In Speculative Los Angeles, some of the city’s most prophetic and diverse voices reimagine the metropolis in very different ways.
You’ll encounter twenty-first-century changelings, giant mecha robots battling on landfills, black holes and jacaranda men lurking in deep suburbia, beachfront property in Century City, walled-off canyons and coastlines reserved for the wealthy, psychic death cults, robot nursemaids, and an alternate LA where Spanish land grants never gave way to urbanization.
The collection includes brand new short stories by Lisa Morton, Aimee Bender, Luis J. Rodriguez, Kathleen Kaufman, Charles Yu, Alex Espinoza, Ben H. Winters, Lynell George, Duane Swierczynski, Francesca Lia Block, A. G. Lombardo, S. Qiouyi Lu, Stephen Blackmoore, and Denise, whose story is set in Encino.
Praise for Speculative Los Angeles:
"Speculative Los Angeles is a thrill ride of grand ideas and warnings. Take a place that already defines the future of culture, add 14 unbound minds and you get a collection that wows the imagination like no other. This book is fun, engaging and sometimes scary." - Michael Connelly
"Hamilton (Los Angeles Noir, ed.) brings together 14 outstanding stories of weird and uncanny happenings in the City of Angels...Each story presents a fresh take on the magic and strangeness of L.A. past, present, and future, and the characters are representative of the diverse region, caught in situations ranging from surreal to chilling. Readers should snap this up." - Publisher's Weekly Starred Review
"The contributing authors skillfully capture the presences of different Los Angeles neighborhoods that become characters all on their own, teetering on the precipice of many possibilities...An excellent collection of what-ifs that will pique readers' imaginations." - Booklist
"‘Speculative Los Angeles,’ otherworldly stories set in a sprawling, haunted place" - Los Angeles Times
Where to buy Speculative Los Angeles online:
