The Department of Cautionary Tales

My ideas never seem evil until everybody is screaming and the SWAT team shows up. It's rough being a mad scientist. You make one tiny little mistake, like covering all of Houston in fungus, and they cart you off to a top-secret military prison laboratory. I'm Juniper Strauss and I'm stuck on the juvenile level at DCT. It's not so bad. They gave me a shiny lab filled with all the latest equipment and let me do whatever I want so long as I complete the projects they give me. Sometimes it's splicing vaccines into peanuts; sometimes it's creating hallucinogenic vodka. The other rogue experimentalists are pretty cool. There is my new best friend, Boom. She's a grouchy chemist from New York. You know that ecodisaster that killed all the fish in the Great Lakes last year? That was her having PMS. Rex has a time traveling watch that he uses to prank historical figures and Kamal hacks into nuclear silos just for fun. Don't get me started on Shelley. I try to stay on her good side because her bad side has lizard claws. She turned her boyfriend into a giant mutant bearman. He's in DCT too. They have the most messed up relationship. I'm starting to think I don't want to be an evil genius. Maybe I want to invent socially acceptable things like giant carrots or a cure for herpes or whatever. I'm not sure how to be a good guy, though. I don't exactly have tons of positive role models. Praise for Katy Stauber's Revolution World "Seriously, buy this book right now. It's goddamn amazing and it has fire-breathing cows." Chris Roberson, writer of iZombie "Quirky, offbeat and wildly originial." Paul Goat Allen, BN Scifi and Fantasy Blog "Awesome fun... fantastic, fast-paced debut, filled with with, snappy dialogue, and some genuinely hilarious developments." Hypercritical.net Praise for Katy Stauber's Spin The Sky "Stunningly smart and deceptively unique, Spin The Sky is a new classic for modern times." The Founding Fields ..".it made me think, it made me smile, it made me stop reading and admire how deceptively simple its prose is. If you aren't afraid of trying something different, give Spin the Sky a try." Sense of Wonder