Bob Howard is a computer-hacker desk jockey, who has more than enough trouble keeping up with the endless paperwork he has to do on a daily basis. He should never be called on to do anything remotely heroic. But for some reason, he is.
[...]
In a balkanized future of dizzying possibilities, mercenaries contend with guns as smart as they are, nuclear deterrence is a commodity traded on the open market, teenagers deal in "theologically correct" software for fundamentalists, and anarchists have colonized a planet circling another star. Aga[...]
Winner of a Prometheus and Sidewise Award, this science fiction novella is a comedic and biting commentary on capitalism and an exploration of technological singularity in a posthuman civilization. As a world war rages on without an emerging victor, the story follows John Matheson, an idealistic tee[...]
There is no such place as Krassnia. Lucy Stone should know--she was born there. In that tiny, troubled region of the former Soviet Union, revolution is brewing. Its organizers need a safe place to meet, and where better than the virtual spaces of an online game? Lucy, who works for a start-up games [...]
What happens when humanity reaches out into the vastness of space? Including new stories by Alastair Reynolds, Greg Egan, Ian McDonald, Ken Macleod, Pat Cadigan, Karl Schroeder, Hannu Rajaniemi, Karen Lord, Adam Roberts, Kathleen Ann Goonan, Aliette de Bodard, Peter Watts, and others![...]
With its human crew aboard, the Bright Star reaches Croatan, a world light years from Earth, but whose inhabitants originate from our distant past. This is the Second Sphere, the new home of mankind and species long forgotten - but its alien gods have created an evolutionary battleground.[...]
The explosive final volume in Ken MacLeod's far-future trilogy. Nova Babylonia is in decline. The expected alien invaders never came and the Regime has fallen. Into this corrupt city arrives an outsider whose purpose is ambiguous. But businessman or spy, he is not the only visitor.[...]
The Hard Rapture took Earth's best minds away. Now the rest are about to find out where they went ...Centuries ago, space settlers and soldiers fled to the stars from the sentient AI war machines that engulfed Earth. They colonised Eurydice, a planet whose rocks contain traces of its own war machine[...]
The great sunliner 'But the Sky, My Lady! The Sky!' is nearing the end of a four-hundred-year journey. A ship-born generation is tense with expectation for the new system that is to be their home. Expecting to find nothing more complex than bacteria and algae, the detection of electronic signals fro[...]
Fighting has spread across the Middle East and Central Asia to the borders of China. In the US, refugees from climate-change disaster subsist in FEMA camps. Images of official executions circulate on the Internet like al Qaeda videos. State agencies sponsor conspiracy theories as cover-ups. As the t[...]
A priest is dead. Picking through the rubble of the demolished Edinburgh tenement, Detective Inspector Adam Ferguson discovers that the explosion wasn't an accident. When a bishop is assassinated soon afterwards, it becomes clear that a targeted campaign of killings is underway. No one has seen anyt[...]
Imagine a near-future city, say London, where medical science has advanced beyond our own and a single-dose pill has been developed that, taken when pregnant, eradicates many common genetic defects from an unborn child. Hope Morrison, mother of a hyperactive four-year-old, is expecting her second ch[...]
HOW FAR WOULD YOU GO FOR THE TRUTH? Ball lightning. Weather balloons. Secret military aircraft. Ryan knows all the justifications for UFO sightings. But when something falls out of the sky on the hills near his small Scottish town, he finds his cynicism can't identify or explain the phenomenon. And [...]
In a newer world order where the peace process is deadlier than the wars ...Moh Kohn is a security mercenary with a smart gun, reflexes to die for and memories he doesn't want to reach. Jamis Taine is a scientist with a new line in memory drugs, anti-tech terrorists on her case and the STASIS cops o[...]
The weather has gone crazy and the war has spread to China. Jase, Euan and Murdo are laggers: forced workers in a future Scotland. The laggers are helping to lay a new power line in the Highlands. Ailiss, a young woman from a secret settlement in the frozen hills, is going to strain their loyalties [...]
The first book in a major new space opera series by one of SF's most exciting new authors.