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The Sun is about to go Nova. Earth and Moon have ceased their axial rotation and present one face continuously to the sun. The bright side of Earth is covered with carnivorous forest. This is the Age of vegetables. Gren and his lady - not to mention the tummybelly men - journey to the even more terrifying Dark side. One of Aldiss' most famous and long-enduring novels, fast moving, packed with brilliant imagery. Views: 61
Generations have passed since the Colony Board ordered the outpost on Hobb's End to be abandoned, but not all of the scientists chose to leave. Now, their descendants struggle to keep the illicit colony going as their population dwindles and the moon's already harsh climate undergoes a dramatic shift. But not all of Hobb's End's secrets have been buried under its new mantle of ice, and suddenly the long absent government has a reason to ask questions. Views: 61
Magic, time travel and football, not exactly your everyday combination - but the fate of mankind hangs upon the result. And everything. Views: 61
Life under the thumb of the Spark Lords — the League's Earthly representatives — is dull but comfortable for Philemon Abu Dhubhai and the other teachers at a third-rate private school for second-rate rich kids. But all that changes when a female student is found murdered by an unknown alien organism, and her boyfriend, the prime suspect, goes missing. Suddenly an unofficial homicide investigation has snared Philemon and five other "misfits" — plus one of the planet's most powerful criminals, the mother of the murdered girl — trapping them all in a web of terrifying conspiracy that could involve the Spark Lords… and even the League of Peoples itself. For all is perilously not what it seems, on Earth and in the heavens. But then again, neither are Phil and his compatriots… Views: 61
From Publishers WeeklyIn the sequel to Timeweb (2006), bestseller Herbert (Sandworms of Dune) offers readers a space opera where interstellar travel is mostly embargoed and characters spend over a third of the book in solitary self-reflection. When the alien Parvii cut two empires off from the podship networks, the Parvii derail a war between humankind and the shape-shifting Mutati and forcibly separate many members of Herbert's large cast. Frequent viewpoint shifts and lengthy stretches of internal monologue make character development all but impossible. Neither guerrilla mystic Noah Watanabe nor his nemesis, Doge Lorenzo, are more than cartoon archetypes, and hardly anyone else has enough time onstage to acquire much depth. The short chapters also create an odd tonal dissonance, with heavy-handed philosophical musing regularly interrupted by crisp plot newsbreaks. Pacing improves somewhat in the book's second half (a grisly torture sequence marks the turning point), but in the end, ideas are spread too thin and most characters drawn too broadly to lift the novel above pulp-era comic strip quality. (Dec.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Views: 61
Six-time Hugo-Award winner Ben Bova presents Farside.Farside, the side of the Moon that never faces Earth, is the ideal location for an astronomical observatory. It is also the setting for a tangled web of politics, personal ambition, love, jealousy, and murder.Telescopes on Earth have detected an Earth-sized planet circling a star some thirty light-years away. Now the race is on to get pictures of that distant world, photographs and spectra that will show whether or not the planet is truly like Earth, and if it bears life.Farside will include the largest optical telescope in the solar system as well as a vast array of radio antennas, the most sensitive radio telescope possible, insulated from the interference of Earth’s radio chatter by a thousand kilometers of the Moon’s solid body.Building the Farside observatory is a complex, often dangerous task. On the airless surface of the Moon, under constant bombardment of hard radiation and infalling micrometeoroids, builders must work in cumbersome spacesuits and use robotic machines as much as possible. Breakdowns—mechanical and emotional—are commonplace. Accidents happen, some of them fatal.What they find stuns everyone, and the human race will never be the same.About the AuthorBEN BOVA is a six-time winner of the Hugo Award, a former editor of Analog, former editorial director of Omni, and a past president of both the National Space Society and the Science Fiction Writers of America. Bova is the author of more than a hundred works of science fact and fiction. He lives in Florida. Views: 61
Artemis is at boarding school on Ireland when he suddenly receives an urgent video e-mail from Russia. In it is plea from his father, who has been kidnapped by Russian Mafiya. As Artemis rushes to his rescue, he is stopped by Captain Holly Short of the LEPrecon fairy police. But this time, instead of battling the fairies, he is going to have to join forces with them if he wants to save one of the few people in the world he loves. Views: 61
FromComputer scientist turned wandering swords-man Aristide travels the accidental spaces in the artificial universes of a postsingularity existence in which memory backups are standard and a matrioshka cluster of computers runs the worlds’ workings. On Midgarth, where he has been traversing a desert full of common spiders and ants, he discovers a group of priests involved in a plot that could take down all civilization because of one man’s existential crisis. Williams takes on the artificial-world topos with great style and characterization, enlivening it with spectacular philosophical conversations between Bitsy, avatar of one of the matrioshka brains, and Aristide. Between the implications of living in a world in which death is a minor inconvenience but the loss of time can change relationships forever, and the implications of the theory upon which the yarn’s impending doom depends (a take on the nested multiple universe concept) and the ways in which different experiences can change a person, even starting from exactly the same baseline, Implied Spaces is a thoughtful work of world building and an engaging mystery. --Regina Schroeder Product DescriptionFrom Walter Jon Williams, the celebrated and influential author of Hardwired, Voice of the Whirlwind, and Angel Station comes Implied Spaces, a new novel of post-singularity action, pyrotechnics, and intrigue. Aristide, a semi-retired computer scientist turned swordsman, a scholar of the implied spaces, seeking meaning amid the accidents of architecture in a universe where reality itself has been sculpted and designed by superhuman machine intelligence. While exploring the pre-technological world Midgarth, one of four dozen pocket universes created within a series of vast, orbital matrioshka computer arrays, Aristide uncovers a fiendish plot threatening to set off a nightmare scenario, perhaps even bringing about the ultimate Existential Crisis: the end of civilization itself! Traveling the pocket universes with his wormhole-edged sword Tecmessa in hand and talking cat Bitsy, avatar of the planet-sized computer Endora, at his side, Aristide must find a way to save the multiverse from subversion, sabotage, and certain destruction.
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One day Kil Bruner was a solid Class A engineer in a society of Police and citizen Files, jet-set migrants and status-ranking Stability Keys. But the Police ordered Kil to forget about his missing wife Ellen--and that was a mistake. Because Kil would move Heaven and Earth to find the woman he loved. Views: 61
