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Book III of The Ancient Future. An enormous vortex spiralled above the earth, out beyond the orbit of the moon. Its centre was expanding to form a huge glowing corridor through the fabric of space. This brilliant mass shot forth thousands of glowing balls of light that proceeded to descend toward our planet. As Tory awaits Maelgwn's return, she endeavours to find out the truth behind her ancestry and is shocked to discover that her clan is not the only tribe of immortals the Gods have nurtured. One by one, allies from Tory's past re-emerge to help her through a time of tribulation when her clan is made outcast from mainstream society ... an old enemy, incarnate, is seeking revenge on the Dragon's kin. And now, aided by a divine power, an interstellar army is set to destroy 'the Chosen' at the foretold Gathering of Kings. Cover art by David Harding. -
Book IV of The Long Earth. It is the middle of the twenty-first century. After the cataclysmic upheavals of Step Day and the Yellowstone eruption, humanity is spreading farther into the Long Earth. Society, on a battered Datum Earth and beyond, continues to evolve. And new challenges emerge. Now an elderly and cantankerous AI, Lobsang is living with Agnes in an exotic, far-distant world. He's determined to lead a normal life in New Springfield - they even adopt a child. But there are rumors, strange sightings in the sky. On this world, something isn't right...Millions of steps away - learning about a hidden family history and the father he never knew - Joshua receives an urgent summons from New Springfield. Lobsang has come to understand that what has blighted his Earth is also a threat to all the worlds of the Long Earth. Countering this threat will require the combined efforts of humankind, machine, and the super-intelligent Next. And some must make the ultimate sacrifice... -
First collection of Banks' short fiction. In this volume: Road Of Skulls: Two men in a carriage travel over the eponymous Road of Skulls, to reach a distant City that seems to be constantly retreating and producing the infinite road. A Gift From The Culture: A man in self-imposed exile from the Culture is pressured into committing an act of terrorism with the help of Culture technology. Odd Attachment: A lovesick alien encounters a humanoid explorer. Descendant: A Culture soldier and his sapient spacesuit struggle to survive after being shot down and crash-landing on a barren planet. Cleaning Up: An alien race discovers that a faulty teleporter has been sending junk onto the surface of Earth instead of the Sun, where scientists from across the world have been studying these "Gifts." Piece: A commentary on religion and fundamentalism in the form of a recovered letter from the Lockerbie disaster. The State Of The Art: A chronicle of a Culture mission to Earth in the late 1970s (prequel to Use of Weapons). Diziet Sma argues for contact with Earth, to try to fix the mess the human species has made of it; another Culture citizen, Linter, goes native, choosing to renounce his Culture body enhancements so as to be more like the locals; and Li, a Star Trek fan, argues that the whole "incontestably neurotic and clinically insane species" should be eradicated with a micro black hole. Scratch: A stream-of-consciousness narrative that samples random sections of the future, eventually ending in an abrupt nuclear apocalypse. Illustrated by Nick Day. -
The Chase for the Ghost Particle and the Secrets of the Universe. Before the Higgs boson, there was a maddening search for another particle – the ghostly neutrino. First detected in 1956, its fleeting appearances have teased answers to many mysteries: How did the Big Bang happen? Why is antimatter so rare? What might dark matter be made of? And could faster-than-light travel be possible, overturning Einstein’s theory of special relativity? But the quest for the neutrino also encompasses adventure, from Cold War defections and extra dimensions to mile-deep holes in the Antarctic ice and a troubled genius who disappeared without a trace...Detective thriller meets astrophysics in this adventure into neutrinos and the scientists who pursue them.
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Quantico: Greg Bear
$9.00Book I of Quantum Logic. It’s the second decade of the twenty-first century, and terrorism has escalated almost beyond control. New weapons are being spawned in remote basement labs, and no one feels safe. In North America, the FBI uses cutting-edge technology to thwart domestic terrorists. The War on Terror has reached a deadly stalemate. The FBI has been dispatched to deal with a new menace. Like the Anthrax threat of 2001, a plague targeted to ethnic groups has the potential to wipe out entire populations. But the FBI itself is under political assault. There’s a good chance that agents William Griffin, Fouad Al-Husam, and Jane Rowland will be part of the last class at Quantico. As the young agents hunt a brilliant homegrown terrorist, they join forces with veteran bio-terror expert Rebecca Rose. But the plot they uncover - and the man they chase - prove far more complex than anyone expects. -
Space and time form the very fabric of the cosmos. Yet they remain among the most mysterious of concepts. Is space an entity? Why does time have a direction? Could the universe exist without space and time? Can we travel to the past? Greene has set himself a daunting task: to explain non-intuitive, mathematical concepts like String Theory, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, and Inflationary Cosmology with analogies drawn from common experience. From Newton’s unchanging realm in which space and time are absolute, to Einstein’s fluid conception of spacetime, to quantum mechanics’ entangled arena where vastly distant objects can instantaneously coordinate their behavior, Greene takes us all, regardless of our scientific backgrounds, on an irresistible and revelatory journey to the new layers of reality that modern physics has discovered lying just beneath the surface of our everyday world. -
The Twelve: Justin Cronin
$45.00Book I of The Passage. It seemed like a good idea at the time...infecting twelve death-row prisoners with an ancient virus in order to create human weapons. Instead the virus turned them into ravening unstoppable monsters - and when the Twelve broke out of the underground facility where they had been born, all hell broke loose. In a world now ravaged by a viral plague, humanity is reduced to stubborn pockets of resistance. But if the human race is to have a future, survival is not enough. Against terrifying odds, they must hunt down and destroy the Twelve in their lairs. But the virals' behaviour is inexplicably changing - and all the clues point towards the Homeland, a sinister dictatorship where an unlikely trio are re-imagining humanity's destiny : Horace Guilder, a veteran of the original experiment with a blood-curdling vision of immortality; a mysterious woman whose tragic past has driven her into a world of fantasy; and Lawrence Grey, a man whose hunger for intimacy has been fulfilled in the most gruesome ways imaginable. And then there is Amy - the Girl from Nowhere. Once the thirteenth test subject and now the only human who can fathom the Homeland's secret and truly enter the hive-mind of the Twelve. But what she finds there may spell the end of everything... -
Book II of Pandora. Despite malevolent lifeforms and the implacable hostility of Ship, the self-styled god demanding WorShip, Mankind's struggle to colonise the bleak ocean planet of Pandora has been at least partially successful. But at what cost?! Genetic mutation has evolved two separate societies, human subspecies: The technologically advanced Mermen, who live in sophisticated undersea habitats and dream of plundering Ship itslef; and the Islanders, who inhabit huge organic raft cities and whose way of life depends on biological engineering. Their uneasy co-existence is always imperilled but the results of one Merman project threatens to precipitate open conflict and human extinction. Cover art by Fred Gambino. -
Humanity, facing extermination from all-but-omnipotent aliens, the Grand Galactics, must overcome differences of politics and religion and come together...or perish. In 1637, the French mathematician Pierre de Fermat scrawled a note in the margin of a book about an enigmatic “I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this proposition which this margin is too narrow to contain.” He also neglected to record his proof elsewhere. Thus began a search for the Holy Grail of mathematics–a search that didn’t end until 1994, when Andrew Wiles published a 150-page proof. But the proof was burdensome, overlong, and utilized mathematical techniques undreamed of in Fermat’s time, and so it left many critics unsatisfied – including young Ranjit Subramanian, a Sri Lankan with a special gift for mathematics and a passion for the famous “Last Theorem.” When Ranjit writes a three-page proof of the theorem that relies exclusively on knowledge available to Fermat, his achievement is hailed as a work of genius, bringing him fame and fortune. But it also brings him to the attention of the National Security Agency and a shadowy United Nations outfit Pax Per Fidem, or Peace Through Transparency, whose secretive workings belie its name. Suddenly Ranjit – together with his wife, Myra, an expert in artificial intelligence, and their burgeoning family – finds himself swept up in world-shaking events, his genius for abstract mathematical thought put to uses that are both concrete and potentially deadly. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to anyone on Earth, an alien fleet is approaching the planet at a significant percentage of the speed of light...Cover art by David Stevenson.
