Several of his novels have
rock music as a theme or main focus, especially the musicians of the late 1960s; for example, Shiner's 1993 novel Glimpses considers the great never-recorded albums of
The Doors,
Brian Wilson,
The Beatles and
Jimi Hendrix. Say Goodbye: The Laurie Moss Story (1999) focuses on a fictional up-and-coming female musician and her subsequent fall back down. Slam (1990) is immersed in
skate punk and
anarchist culture. Perhaps because novels with music as a major theme are not generally considered mainstream genre material, his work has frequently been overlooked.[citation needed]
He is a contributing author to the
George R. R. Martin-edited anthology Wild Cards, notably creating that universe's most powerful character, the tantric sex magic wielding pimp,
Fortunato.
In July 2007 Shiner created the web site Fiction Liberation Front (FLF) as a venue for his short stories. The stories are released under the
Creative Commons license and are available in
HTML and
PDF formats.[2]
Love in Vain. Burton, MI, US: Subterranean Press, 2001.
ISBN1-931081-14-X
Shades of Gray (chapbook available with the signed, numbered limited edition of Black and White). Burton, MI, US: Subterranean Press, 2008.
Love in Vain (Australian edition, includes previously uncollected novellas "Perfidia" and "Primes"). Greenwood, WA, Australia:
Ticonderoga Publications, 2009.
ISBN978-0-9803531-0-5