Plant-based skyscrapers, reluctant sex robots, pencil-wielding black-belts fighting a zombie apocalypse... Welcome to the weird and wonderful world of Adam Marek’ s third collection: an almanac of the absurd, a handbook to the hardware problems of being human. From driverless bodies, to life-coaching AIs, to sleep research on primates, to the effects of time dilation on married life... these stories explore the unlikeliest of possibilities the future may hold for us, as a race, but at their heart is a paradox: what happens when the seemingly limitless potential of human ability runs up against the insurmountable inadequacies of basic human psychology? Sons never forgive their fathers. Superheroes are brought low by simple performance anxiety. Billionaire space industrialists are exposed by their bad parenting skills. Hardwired into our humanity, it seems, are bugs that no amount of future upgrades can ever fix.

Adam Marek writes short stories about the futuristic and the fantastical colliding with everyday life. His two collections, The Stone Thrower and Instruction Manual for Swallowing, are published by Comma Press. His stories have appeared on BBC Radio 4, and in many magazines and anthologies, including The Penguin Book of the British Short Story. He is an Arts Foundation Short Story Fellow. He regularly teaches creative writing for Arvon, and occasionally works with SciFutures, using storytelling to help prototype the future.