Punktown

Punktown is the fictional setting for a series of novels and short stories by American speculative fiction writer Jeffrey Thomas (1957 --)
Setting
Punktown is a far-future megalopolis, infamous for its level of crime. Originally given the name Paxton, it is described as, “a vast city established by Earth on the planet Oasis but since colonized by numerous other races as well. Even the Chooms, who had lived here before the first Earth people, had come to refer to the city by its nickname of Punktown.” Besides the indigenous Choom, human in appearance aside from wide mouths cut back to their ears, the stories often include or focus on a variety of alien races, clones, mutants, and sentient machines. The stories tend to feature common citizens as their protagonists, rather than the larger than life heroes of typical science fiction, with few characters recurring - one exception being mutant private eye Jeremy Stake, protagonist of the novels Deadstock and Blue War. Beyond their grounding in science fiction, Punktown stories also notably combine elements of horror, fantasy and occasionally detective noir.
Origin
In interviews Thomas has related how he first devised the city in 1980, with a handful of short stories appearing in small press publications before the collection Punktown (Ministry of Whimsy Press) was released in 2000. The Punktown stories are sometimes cited as early examples of the controversial New Weird subgenre, Paul Di Filippo in Asimov’s describing the initial collection as “a harbinger of the New Weird… Not that the concept of Punktown really needs any shoring-up by cliques or claques.”
Works
* Punktown (short story collection, Ministry of Whimsy Press, 2000)
* Monstrocity (novel, Prime, 2003) - finalist for the Bram Stoker Award, best first novel category
* Everybody Scream! (novel, Raw Dog Screaming Press, 2004)
* Punktown: Third Eye (shared world anthology in which various other writers set stories in Punktown, Prime, 2004)
* Punktown (much expanded rerelease of the original short story collection, Prime, 2005)
* Punktown: Shades of Grey (short story collection, half of the contents contributed by the author’s brother Scott Thomas, Bedlam Press, 2005)
* Deadstock (novel, Solaris Books, 2007) - finalist for the John W. Campbell Award
* Blue War (novel, Solaris Books, 2008)
* Health Agent (novel, Raw Dog Screaming Press, 2008)
* Voices From Punktown (short story collection, Dark Regions Press, 2008)
Besides numerous appearances of the short fiction in magazines and anthologies, there have also been foreign language editions of several of the Punktown books released in Germany, Russia, Poland and Greece, and three collections of audio adaptations created by the German company Lausch.

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