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During the Second Civil War, a new U.S. political party called the Family Protection Movement established The Divide, which separates… Normal people from those who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender.Seventeen-year old Serenity Blackwater lives in the normal Midwestern town of Mapleville, but she is not normal. She hacks into an illegal gay chat room and meets Dawn, a lesbian who lives in a gay community less than a mile away. Serenity discovers normal people can bribe their way inside the walls and decides to go, both to meet Dawn and check out what may be her future home.Dawn is even more beautiful than Serenity hoped, and the two soon become a couple. But Serenity only has a few months before she must take the Normal Verification Test, and then she’ll be separated from her family forever. So she joins the Human Equality Organization, an underground group working to end The Divide. Dawn thinks the rebellion is too dangerous, and since Dawn’s ex-girlfriend Malaki is also a member, Serenity doesn’t tell Dawn about her involvement.Serenity reveals to the HEO that her parents are leading a campaign to organize attacks on all Gay Communities. With her help, the HEO creates Project Jericho, in which all Gay Communities walls will implode at once. But after too many delays, and when Dawn discovers Serenity has been spending more time with Malaki than her, Serenity knows she has to start the revolution herself. She heads to D.C. to contact a group of senators secretly against The Divide ... or straight into a trap set by the Family Protection Movement.
A space salvager and her partner make the discovery of a lifetime that just might change the universe in this… wild, big-ideas space opera from multi award-winning author Elizabeth Bear. <P><P>Halmey Dz and her partner Connla Kurucz are salvage operators, living just on the inside of the law...usually. Theirs is the perilous and marginal existence—with barely enough chance of striking it fantastically big—just once—to keep them coming back for more. <P><P>They pilot their tiny ship into the scars left by unsuccessful White Transitions, searching for the relics of lost human and alien vessels. <P><P>But when they make a shocking discovery about an alien species that has been long thought dead, it may be the thing that could tip the perilous peace mankind has found into full-out war. <P><P>Energetic and electrifying, Ancestral Night is a dazzling new space opera, sure to delight fans of Alastair Reynolds, Iain M. Banks, and Peter F. Hamilton.
Perfect for fans of Warcross and Black Mirror, Girl Gone Viral is the inventive and timely story of a seventeen-year-old… coder's catapult to stardom.For seventeen-year-old Opal Hopper, code is magic. She builds entire worlds from scratch: Mars craters, shimmering lakes, any virtual experience her heart desires. But she can't code her dad back into her life. When he disappeared after her tenth birthday, leaving only a cryptic note, Opal tried desperately to find him. And when he never turned up, she enrolled at a boarding school for technical prodigies and tried to forget.Until now. Because WAVE, the world's biggest virtual reality platform, has announced a contest where the winner gets to meet its billionaire founder. The same billionaire who worked closely with Opal's dad. The one she always believed might know where he went. The one who maybe even murdered him.What begins as a small data hack to win the contest spirals out of control when Opal goes viral, digging her deeper into a hole of lies, hacks, and manipulation. How far will Opal go for the answers--or is it the attention--she's wanted for years?
A space cruiser, in search of its sister ship, encounters beings descended from self-replicating machines. In the grand tradition of… H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, Stanisław Lem's The Invincible tells the story of a space cruiser sent to an obscure planet to determine the fate of a sister spaceship whose communication with Earth has abruptly ceased. Landing on the planet Regis III, navigator Rohan and his crew discover a form of life that has apparently evolved from autonomous, self-replicating machines—perhaps the survivors of a “robot war.” Rohan and his men are forced to confront the classic quandary: what course of action can humanity take once it has reached the limits of its knowledge? In The Invincible, Lem has his characters confront the inexplicable and the bizarre: the problem that lies just beyond analytical reach.
Scientists attempt to decode what may be a message from intelligent beings in outer space. By pure chance, scientists detect… a signal from space that may be communication from rational beings. How can people of Earth understand this message, knowing nothing about the senders—even whether or not they exist? Written as the memoir of a mathematician who participates in the government project (code name: His Master's Voice) attempting to decode what seems to be a message from outer space, this classic novel shows scientists grappling with fundamental questions about the nature of reality, the confines of knowledge, the limitations of the human mind, and the ethics of military-sponsored scientific research.
A playful, witty, reflective memoir of childhood by the science fiction master Stanisław Lem. With Highcastle, Stanisław Lem offers a… memoir of his childhood and youth in prewar Lvov. Reflective, artful, witty, playful—“I was a monster,” he observes ruefully—this lively and charming book describes a youth spent reading voraciously (he was especially interested in medical texts and French novels), smashing toys, eating pastries, and being terrorized by insects. Often lonely, the young Lem believed that he could communicate with household objects—perhaps anticipating the sentient machines in the adult Lem's novels. Lem reveals his younger self to be a dreamer, driven by an unbridled imagination and boundless curiosity. In the course of his reminiscing, Lem also ponders the nature of memory, innocence, and the imagination. Highcastle (the title refers to a nearby ruin) offers the portrait of a writer in his formative years.
A multi-national research team, led by a medical genomics expert suffering from MS, study an ancient pandoravirus at a remote… Siberian research facility. Called "Molli" by the research team, the organic substance reveals some unique but troublesome characteristics, qualities that, in the wrong hands, could lead to human extinction.The researchers soon learn that even in the right hands, Molli is a force too dangerous to escape their compound. But the virus has a mind of its own, and it wants out.FLAME TREE PRESS is the new fiction imprint of Flame Tree Publishing. Launched in 2018 the list brings together brilliant new authors and the more established; the award winners, and exciting, original voices.
A thirteen-year-old girl wakes up in a future where human emotions are extinct and people rely on personal-assistant robots to… navigate daily life. Imagine a future in which many human emotions are extinct, and “emotional masseuses” try to help people recover those lost sensations. Individuals rely on personal-assistant robots to navigate daily life. Students are taught not to think but to employ search programs. Companies protect their intellectual property by erasing the memory of their employees. And then imagine what it would feel like to be a sweet, smart thirteen-year-old girl from the twenty-first century who wakes from a cryogenically induced sleep into this strange world. This is the compelling story told by Carme Torras in this prize-winning science fiction novel. We meet Celia, brought back to life when a cure is found for her formerly terminal disease, and Lu, Celia's adoptive mother, protective but mystified by her new daughter. There is Leo, a bioengineer, who is developing a “creativity prosthesis” to augment humans' atrophied capacities, and the eccentric robotics mogul Dr. Craft. And there is Silvana, an emotional masseuse who reads old books to research the power of emotion. Silvana sees Celia as a living, breathing example of the emotions and feelings that are now out of reach for most people. Torras, a prominent roboticist, weaves provocative ethical issues into her story. What kind of robots do we want when robot companions become as common as personal computers are now? Is it the responsibility of researchers to design robots that make the human mind evolve in a certain way? An appendix provides readers with a list of ethics questions raised by the book.
Within this volume lie the complete Steampunk short stories of Professor Langdon St. Ives, Victorian adventurer, written by avowed Steampunk… Legend, James P. Blaylock.St. Ives, traveler through time and space and an often misunderstood member of the Explorers Club and the Royal Society, has trodden the foggy London streets and Thames-side alleyways for decades, caught up in near-death adventures in pursuit of nefarious villains and obscure knowledge.In the pages of this chronicle, the intrepid Professor and his stalwart friends face down strange enemies and avert catastrophes that the world scarcely knows exist, finding themselves stalked through the idol-infested jungles of Borneo, set adrift in the starlit reaches of outer space, plunged into the infamous “barrel madness” that descended upon London in the late 18th century, and wandering in a past-and-future age when they stumble upon a time portal in the midst of ancient standing stones in the idyllic Kent countryside.World Fantasy Award winning author James Blaylock, one of the pioneers of the Steampunk genre along with Tim Powers and K.W. Jeter, has written more than 25 novels as well as scores of short stories, essays, and articles. His Steampunk novel Homunculus won the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award, and his short story “The Ape-box Affair,” published in Unearth magazine in 1978, was the first contemporary Steampunk story published in the U.S. His recent Steampunk works include The Aylesford Skull, Beneath London, River’s Edge, and The Gobblin’ Society.Praise for James P. Blaylock:“A singular American fabulist.” —William Gibson“Blaylock is a magician!” —Michael Swanwick“Blaylock’s prose is so rich it literally sings!” —Charles de Lint“Blaylock is better than anyone else at showing us the magic that secretly animates our world...” —Tim Powers“While many recent novels have picked up the steampunk banner, this one fully delivers, offering action, farce, tender relationships, and prose full of genuine Victorian cadence and flavor.” —Publishers Weekly on The Affair of the Chalk Cliffs“St. Ives has to be one of the most fleshed out Victorian characters ever written, and I m sincerely hoping that Blaylock isn t finished with this scientist adventurer. The Aylesford Skull can easily stand alone without any knowledge of Blaylock s previous steampunk stories, but you’ll want to hunt down additional St. Ives tales, I’m for certain.” —Wired.com“Blaylock throws in all the furniture of the genre: derring-do and cliffhangers, a vivid portrayal of Victorian London, a gallery of grotesque characters and the obligatory airship, but the strength of the novel is his rendering of St Ives caught between his love of the chase and his commitment to family.” —The Guardian
Science/Fiction Collections offers different views and attitudes toward Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature and descriptions of a variety of collections.… Written during a time when Science Fiction and Fantasy writings had just gained widespread popularity, it offers suggestions and considerations for approaching any special collection dealing with a relatively new field.
A thrilling showdown brings the Dark Matter trilogy to a satsifying close. Shay is trapped at the Multiverse compound while… looking for the real Callie, and an unforgiving Kai is her best chance at outsmarting Alex and saving countless lives.Shay has left Kai once again by following Alex to his Multiverse compound. Her goal is to find the real Callie, but Shay discovers that the younger girl has no memory of her past. Their hope is to leave the community. While Shay pretends to be a devoted follower, Alex makes his own plans to use Shay to spread the epidemic he caused with his dark matter experiments. The survivors will be only the most worthy humans--those who evolve special abilities.The opportunistic Freja further poisons Kai's memories of his girlfriend. Angry and hurt, Kai doubles down on his mission to reveal that his former stepfather is behind the epidemic, but he has little luck convincing the authorities--until it's almost too late to save Shay from a fate worse than death.
An omnibus edition consisting of all three volumes of Madeline Ashby's epic sci-fi masterwork, The Machine Dynasty. Collects vN, iD and ReV.vNAmy Peterson is… a von Neumann machine, a self-replicating humanoid robot. For the past five years, she has been grown slowly as part of a mixed organic/synthetic family. She knows very little about her android mother&’s past, so when her grandmother arrives and attacks her mother, little Amy wastes no time: she eats her alive.Now she carries her malfunctioning granny as a partition on her memory drive, and she&’s learning impossible things about her clade&’s history – like the fact that the failsafe that stops all robots from harming humans has failed… Which means that everyone wants a piece of her, some to use her as a weapon, others to destroy her.iDJavier is a self-replicating humanoid on a journey of redemption. Javier's quest takes him from Amy's island, where his actions have devastating consequences for his friend, toward Mecha where he will find either salvation... or death.ReVThe Rapture, which vN were engineered for, finally comes to pass. Now that the failsafe that once kept vN from harming humans has been hacked, all are discovering the promise – and the peril – of free will. With her consciousness unleashed across computer systems all across the world, the vicious vN Portia stands poised to finally achieve her lifelong dream of bringing humanity to its knees. The old battle between her and her granddaughter Amy comes to an epic conclusion in the war for the very systems that keeps the planet running. Can Amy get her family to the stars before Portia destroys every opportunity for escape and freedom?File Under: Science Fiction [ Von Neumann Sisters | Fail Safe Fail | Robot Nation | Internet Ex-Portia ]
It's election time in New Babylon, and President Maggie Delgado is running for re-election but is threatened by the charismatic… populist Ted Rust. Newly appointed City Commissioner Georg Ratner is given the priority task to fight the recent invasion of Synth in the streets of the capital, a powerful hallucinogen drug with a mysterious origin. When his old colleague asks him for help on another case and gets murdered, things become more and more complicated, and his official neutrality becomes a burden in the political intrigue he his gradually sucked into. Supported by Laura, his trustful life partner and the Egyptian goddess Nut, Ratner decides to fight for what he believes in, no matter the cost.
An original novel based on the thrilling new Star Trek movies!Based on the &“Kelvin Universe&” movie saga! Captain James T.… Kirk and the Enterprise crew escort Spock&’s father, Ambassador Sarek of Vulcan, to a dilithium-rich planet called Akiron. They arrive to find this world under siege by creatures that some of the planet&’s denizens believe are demons. Sarek orders Kirk to abandon the mission, but the young captain won&’t turn his back on people in danger. After a harrowing encounter with the dark-energy &“demons,&” Kirk&’s belief in a rational universe is challenged by a mystic who insists that it wasn&’t coincidence that brought Kirk to Akiron, but the alien equivalent of a Karmic debt. Meanwhile, aboard the Enterprise, Sarek&’s young Vulcan aide L&’Nel has a sinister agenda—and its chief objective appears to be the cold-blooded murder of Spock!
LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2020"The New Wilderness is a virtuosic debut, brutal and beautiful in equal measure."—Emily St. John… Mandel, New York Times bestselling author of Station ElevenMargaret Atwood meets Miranda July in this wildly imaginative debut novel of a mother's battle to save her daughter in a world ravaged by climate change; A prescient and suspenseful book from the author of the acclaimed story collection, MAN V. NATURE. Bea’s five-year-old daughter, Agnes, is slowly wasting away, consumed by the smog and pollution of the overdeveloped metropolis that most of the population now calls home. If they stay in the city, Agnes will die. There is only one alternative: the Wilderness State, the last swath of untouched, protected land, where people have always been forbidden. Until now. Bea, Agnes, and eighteen others volunteer to live in the Wilderness State, guinea pigs in an experiment to see if humans can exist in nature without destroying it. Living as nomadic hunter-gatherers, they slowly and painfully learn to survive in an unpredictable, dangerous land, bickering and battling for power and control as they betray and save one another. But as Agnes embraces the wild freedom of this new existence, Bea realizes that saving her daughter’s life means losing her in a different way. The farther they get from civilization, the more their bond is tested in astonishing and heartbreaking ways. At once a blazing lament of our contempt for nature and a deeply humane portrayal of motherhood and what it means to be human, The New Wilderness is an extraordinary novel from a one-of-a-kind literary force.
A dark and masterful portrait of a generation in crisis, from one of the most exciting young voices in international… literatureThe world had been theirs in the late 90s: they were the young provocateurs behind a countercultural scene, digital bohemians creating a new future. But fifteen years later, Duke, the leader and undisputed genius of their group, has been murdered, and the three remaining members of their circle reunite to piece together what became of their lives and how they fell so short of their expectations.Now in their thirties, Aurora, Antero, and Emiliano have succumbed to the pressures of adulthood, the exigencies of carving out a life in a country that is fraying at the seams. Reunited after years of long-held grudges and painful crushes, the three try to resurrect the spirit of the all-night parties and early morning trysts, the protests and pornography of their youths. Lurking over them, as they puzzle out their fates, is the question of whether or not there is a future for them to believe in, or if the end has already arrived.Twenty After Midnight is a portrait of the first generation of the digital age, a group that was promised everything but handed a fractured world. Daniel Galera has written a pre-apocalyptic tale of millennial longings.
&“In a world where we are so often dividing ourselves into us and them, this book feels like a kind… of magic, celebrating all beliefs, ethnicities, and unknowns.&” —The New York Times Book Review Aristotle & Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe meets Roswell by way of Laurie Halse Anderson in this astonishing, genre-bending novel about a Mexican American teen who discovers profound connections between immigration, folklore, and alien life.It&’s been three years since ICE raids and phone calls from Mexico and an ill-fated walk across the Sonoran. Three years since Sia Martinez&’s mom disappeared. Sia wants to move on, but it&’s hard in her tiny Arizona town where people refer to her mom&’s deportation as &“an unfortunate incident.&” Sia knows that her mom must be dead, but every new moon Sia drives into the desert and lights San Anthony and la Guadalupe candles to guide her mom home. Then one night, under a million stars, Sia&’s life and the world as we know it cracks wide open. Because a blue-lit spacecraft crashes in front of Sia&’s car…and it&’s carrying her mom, who&’s very much alive. As Sia races to save her mom from armed-quite-possibly-alien soldiers, she uncovers secrets as profound as they are dangerous in this stunning and inventive exploration of first love, family, immigration, and our vast, limitless universe.
"The novel is as tense and thrilling as any of Brown's work, and as full of rage and hope. It's… a novel that truly reckons with the enormity of both our climate emergency and the system that produced it - a tale of human imperfection and redemption." -- Cory Doctorow, bestselling author of WalkawayIn this second dystopian legal thriller from the author of the acclaimed Rule of Capture and Tropic of Kansas, lawyer Donny Kimoe juggles two intertwined cases whose outcomes will determine the course of America’s future—and his own. In the aftermath of a second American revolution, peace rests on a fragile truce. The old regime has been deposed, but the ex-president has vanished, escaping justice for his crimes. Some believe he is dead. Others fear he is in hiding, gathering forces. As the factions in Washington work to restore order, Donny Kimoe is in court to settle old scores—and pay his own debts come due.Meanwhile, the rebels Donny once defended are exacting their own kind of justice. In the ruins of New Orleans, they are building a green utopia—and kidnapping their defeated adversaries to pay for it. The newest hostage is the young heiress to a fortune made from plundering the country—and the daughter of one of Donny’s oldest friends. In a desperate gambit to save his own skin, Donny switches sides to defend her before the show trial. If he fails, so will the truce, dragging the country back into violence. But by taking the case, he risks his last chance to expose the atrocities of the dictatorship—and being tried for his own crimes against the revolution.To save the future, Donny has to gamble his own. The only way out is to find the evidence that will get both sides back to the table, and secure a more lasting peace. To do that, Donny must betray his clients’ secrets. Including one explosive secret hidden in the ruins, the discovery of which could extinguish the last hope for a better tomorrow—or, if Donny plays it right, keep it burning.
The second book in the Web Shifter's Library series returns to the adventures of Esen, a shapeshifting alien who must… navigate the perils of a hostile universe.Relationships get complicated when you don&’t know who—or what—you really are. Esen must find a way to rescue a hapless group of chimeras, beings who are a new and unique blend of species she knows, when she can&’t become one herself. When Evan Gooseberry tries to help, he is shattered to learn he himself isn&’t entirely Human and begins to suspect his new friend Esen isn&’t what she seems.Complicating matters, a mysterious contagion has killed the crew of the ship that brought the chimeras—and Evan—to Botharis. Everyone&’s been quarantined inside the All Species&’ Library of Linguistics and Culture, including over a hundred disgruntled alien scholars. The risks climb as Skalet and Lionel continue their quest to solve the disappearance of Paul&’s mother&’s ship, the Sidereal Pathfinder, only to find themselves caught in a tangle of loyalties as Skalet is betrayed by her own Kraal affiliates, who infiltrate the Library.All of which would be quite enough for one Web-being&’s day, but Paul Ragem hopes to rekindle the romance of his first love. A shame Esen hasn&’t told him who&’s hiding in their greenhouse.
Memory, morality, and immortality merge in this &“haunting and lyrical triumph&” from the bestselling author of Schismatrix Plus (Time). … In the late twenty-first century, technology has lengthened lifespans far beyond what was once medically possible. Existence itself has become relatively easy—if boring. In this futuristic paradise, ninety-four-year-old Mia Ziemann longs for something different and undergoes a radical new treatment that restores both her body and mind to that of a twenty-year-old. After her dramatic transformation, Mia finds herself lost in an avant-garde world of passion, designer drugs, and creative expression . . . &“Ideas—big ideas—lurk beneath Mia&’s romp through Sterling&’s delightfully imagined newly post-human Earth. Art, artifice, the pursuit of immortality, and youth and aging bounce around the story, the characters, and their conversations in imaginative, engaging fashion. . . . In the end, Holy Fire is one of the most interesting, imaginative, and subtly humorous—and relevant for it—novels the cyberpunk/post-human era has produced. . . . Holy Fire may very well be [Sterling&’s] best work.&” —Speculiction &“An intellectual feat, it is also a treat for the spirit and the senses.&” —Wired &“A patented Sterling extra-special.&” —Newsday &“The future Sterling traces is plausible and provocative, particularly his consideration of several contrasting cultures, and of the disenfranchised who are unable to become &‘post-human.&’ Those interested in serious speculative conversation set within a very strange near-future will find this much to their taste.&” —Publishers Weekly