Dan Abnett

Robert Shearman

Paul Lewis

David Roden

Steve Lockley

For a year, while the Master ruled over Earth, Martha Jones travelled the world telling people stories about the Doctor. She told people of how the Doctor has saved them before, and how he will save them again. This is that story. It tells of Martha's travels from her arrival on Earth as the Toclafane attacked and decimated the population through to her return to Britain to face the Master. It tells how she spread the word and told people about the Doctor. The story of how she survived that terrible year. But it's more than that. This is also a collection of the stories she tells - the stories of adventures she had with the Doctor that we haven't heard about before. The stories that inspired and saved the world... Featuring the Tenth Doctor and Martha as played by David Tennant and Freema Agyeman in the hit Doctor Who series from BBC Television.

The Story of Martha

From Schism [2] Press It is enough to glance at the footnotes - from masters of body horror like Cronenberg, Ballard and Barker to post-structuralist philosophers of the self like Derrida, Nancy and Deleuze - to grasp the intention of Snuff Memories. Unveiling like a tableau of ancient gods and deathly orgies, where "the universe is composed out of windowless monads each locked away and screaming," this evocative novel is better called a theoretical installation. Each fragment documenting an erotic way to lose one's humanity, this is a collection of nightmarish yet utopian miniature visions of sex, death, transformation, and pain, where human bodies are stretched beyond their capacity into mythical realms. Brutal and evocative, at once a prose poem and a theory of the limit, Snuff Memories creates a mythology of enticing and deadly encounters with mutants, matriarchs, and goddesses, documenting a multitude of ways in which one can be erotically and philosophically disemboweled. - Bogna M. Konior, Research Fellow, NYU Shanghai, Interactive Media Arts department & AI and Culture Research Centre Snuff Memories is Sadean. Not because of its commitment to detailing the minutiae of posthuman pornographic excess (although that is certainly an important part of the work) but because of its obsession with permutation. Everything is erected, demolished, decentred, and respooled, before being forced out to the limits once again. Bodies effervesce in fatal conjugations, topologies deform, fuzz out and remerge everted, like bad DOOM skins, covered in blood. The posthuman cannot be known before it is produced-so to know it, we must produce it. And until we really are swept up in these disorienting forces-merciless, murderous, erotic perhaps-we have literature. Snuff Memories is a book for anyone who ever secretly wanted to get dommed by fiction. - Amy Ireland

Snuff Memories

The Marquis de Sade enters the decimal labyrinth and is immediately intoxicated by the smell of a rotten rose. The Medieval meets the posthuman on the operating table and a hooded woman listlessly drains you for some last scrap of pleasure. “It will be just you and me and a blunt instrument.” We are all bored with our biology, but unable to escape the eros-thanatos skinsuit. Roden’s scrawls from some distant outpost are like the tortured pornography of monks and philosophers, minds addled by abstraction, but labouring ever onwards in shrouds of grey meat. As do we all!
—Nina Power

Sensation carries information, and through extreme sensation one can acquire an abject, alien knowledge – a wholly unique disease of faith. Tracing the symbols with your finger, accept from trepanned skull hallucination alighting synapse, to stir your loins and embolden your endocrine. “In truth, I only ever wanted to be vermin.” The story is a hole (O); a place to be buried in. Containment for the sheer sacs of us. Language blooms and coats us, making our skins visible, for what else would we be without? Here, in Roden’s cities, eroticism is a map, nouns as sex as chrysalis – a space from which to emerge permanently altered and forever unrecognizable.
—B. R. Yeager

A dialectic between the abstract and the absurd. Roden aggressively refuses to provide any relief through emotionality. A fully detached perspective on humanity’s demise with the ascension of the posthuman (i.e., extinction).
—Charlene Elsby

One way to read this story collection is to find its methodology in the work itself, as Roden says, “bukkake holocaust deep, interiorized, so when the load is shot, he’ll chain toxic shocks, vesicles bursting like pomegranates.” It is a work of deep readability, perversion, delirium, gothic romance and posthuman mutation, this is the weird fiction your mother warned you about.
—Tom Bland

Xenoerotics

Christopher Norris

Jacques Derrida

We imagine posthumans as humans made superhumanly intelligent or resilient by future advances in nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and cognitive science. Many argue that these enhanced people might live better lives; others fear that tinkering with our nature will undermine our sense of our own humanity. Whoever is right, it is assumed that our technological successor will be an upgraded or degraded version of us: Human 2.0. Posthuman Life argues that the enhancement debate projects a human face onto an empty screen. We do not know what will happen and, not being posthuman, cannot anticipate how posthumans will assess the world. If a posthuman future will not necessarily be informed by our kind of subjectivity or morality the limits of our current knowledge must inform any ethical or political assessment of that future. Posthuman Life develops a critical metaphysics of posthuman succession and argues that only a truly speculative posthumanism can support an ethics that meets the challenge of the transformative potential of technology.

David Roden

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