Installing Linux on a Dead Badger: and Other Oddities

Installing Linux on a Dead Badger (and other Oddities) is a collection of Lucy Snyder''s humorous essays, fiction and articles, some culled from places like "Strange Horizons" and "Spacesuits and Six-Guns" and some brand new. This collection of thirteen short stories, articles and essays from Lucy A. Snyder will appeal to any fan of zombies, aliens or installation manuals. Here''s what Wikipedia said about Lucy, last time we checked: "Lucy A. Snyder is an American science fiction, fantasy, humor, and nonfiction writer. She grew up in San Angelo, Texas but moved to Bloomington, Indiana for graduate studies at Indiana University and currently lives in Columbus, Ohio with her husband Gary A. Braunbeck. Snyder served as an editor for HMS Beagle, an online bioscience publication produced by Elsevier. She has also contributed technical articles to publications such as Electronic Products."

Lucy A. Snyder is the author of the story collections Installing Linux on a Dead Badger (And Other Oddities) and Sparks and Shadows.  She lives in Worthington, Ohio where she writes by day and does tech support by night.  Her writing has appeared in publications such as Strange Horizons, Doctor Who Short Trips: Destination Prague, Chiaroscuro, Full Unit Hookup, and Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet.

If genres were wall-building nations, Lucy's stories would be forging passports, jumping fences, swimming rivers and dodging bullets. To date, she's made over 70 short fiction sales, over 20 poetry sales, and lost count of her nonfiction sales sometime during her last midnight river swim.  You can learn more about her at www.lucysnyder.com.

Some people have been asking me what my new book is all about.  After all, it's classed in Humor: Business and Professional but a lot of the people buying it are also buying novels by people like Brian Keene and John Skipp.  What's up with that?

The book is a collection of a dozen of my humorous short stories, plus 14 black-and-white illustrations done by DE Christman and Malcolm McClinton.  And yes, the satiric humor is dark, but is by no means just for the horror readers.  You'll find tales of teen Linux gang mayhem, zombie call center workers, vampire managers, and vigilant faery cats defending company computer networks from troll attacks.  You find elder gods and not-so-giant squid in there, too.  And, of course, you'll find my parody of cryptic technical documentation in the title story, "Installing Linux on a Dead Badger: User's Notes", which first appeared at the science fiction magazine Strange Horizons and has been one of their most enduringly popular features.

Cross-genre?  You betcha.

Here's what some reviewers have had to say about the stories in this book:

"Do read (this book). When you do, don't have anything in your mouth that a surprised snort could catapult up into your sinuses. You have been warned."
- Nalo Hopkinson, author of The New Moon's Arms

"Very funny and well-written, and a nice satirical comment on the lengths corporations will go to in order to stay ahead."
- Jason Lundberg, author of The Time Traveler's Son, on "Your Corporate Network and the Forces of Darkness"

"'The Great Vüdü Linux Teen Zombie Massacree' by Lucy Snyder is a hilarious romp through the state of Texas in a world gone mad ... one laugh effortlessly follows the other." - Tangent Online

"Snyder, like her Linux gangs, has taken a dead body (in this case, cyberpunk) and fused it with the latest elements of science fiction to tell a story which is funny, dark, and cheerfully absurd." - Tangent Online on "Authorities Concerned Over Rise of Teen Linux Gangs"

"'Graveyard Shift' is Lucy A. Snyder's whip-smart and darkly funny take on the latest hot employee group, the dead ... Laced with jet-black humor, this is a great story and a great world to read about, if not live in." - Tangent Online