When Julia Hernandez leaves her husband, shoots a real estate developer, and then vanishes without a trace, she slips out of the world she knew and into the Simulacrum--a place where human history is both guided and thwarted by the conflict between a species of anarchist wasps and a collective of hyperintelligent spiders. When Julia's ex-husband Raymond spots her in a grocery store he doesn't usually patronize, he's soon drawn into an underworld of radical political gestures where Julia is the new media sensation of both this world and the Simulacrum. Told ultimately from the collective point of view of another species, this allegorical novel plays with the elements of the Simulacrum apparent in real life--media reports, business speak, blog entries, text messages, psychological-evaluation forms, and the lies lovers tell one another--and poses a fascinating idea that displaces human beings from the center of the universe and makes them simply the pawns of two warring species.

Nick Mamatas is the author of three novels, including Move Under Ground and Under My Roof, which have been translated into German, Italian, and Greek and nominated for the Bram Stoker and International Horror Guild awards and the Kurd Lasswitz Prize. Many of his sixty short stories were recently collected in You Might Sleep... As co-editor of Clarkesworld, the online magazine of the fantastic, he was nominated for the World Fantasy award and for science fiction’s Hugo award, and with Ellen Datlow is he co-editor of the anthology Haunted Legends. Nick’s reportage and essays on radical politics, digital society, pop culture and everyday life have appeared in the Village Voice, In These Times, Clamor, The New Humanist, The Smart Set and many other venues, including various Disinformation and Smart Pop Books anthologies. A native New Yorker, Nick now lives in the California Bay Area.