The Ministry for the Future

Author: Kim Stanley Robinson
Publisher: Orbit
ISBN: 0316300160
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 579

Book Description
ONE OF BARACK OBAMA’S FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR “The best science-fiction nonfiction novel I’ve ever read.” —Jonathan Lethem "If I could get policymakers, and citizens, everywhere to read just one book this year, it would be Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future." —Ezra Klein (Vox) The Ministry for the Future is a masterpiece of the imagination, using fictional eyewitness accounts to tell the story of how climate change will affect us all. Its setting is not a desolate, postapocalyptic world, but a future that is almost upon us. Chosen by Barack Obama as one of his favorite books of the year, this extraordinary novel from visionary science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson will change the way you think about the climate crisis. "One hopes that this book is read widely—that Robinson’s audience, already large, grows by an order of magnitude. Because the point of his books is to fire the imagination."―New York Review of Books "If there’s any book that hit me hard this year, it was Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future, a sweeping epic about climate change and humanity’s efforts to try and turn the tide before it’s too late." ―Polygon (Best of the Year) "Masterly." —New Yorker "[The Ministry for the Future] struck like a mallet hitting a gong, reverberating through the year ... it’s terrifying, unrelenting, but ultimately hopeful. Robinson is the SF writer of my lifetime, and this stands as some of his best work. It’s my book of the year." —Locus "Science-fiction visionary Kim Stanley Robinson makes the case for quantitative easing our way out of planetary doom." ―Bloomberg Green

Shaman

Author: Kim Stanley Robinson
Publisher: Orbit
ISBN: 0316235571
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 368

Book Description
Kim Stanley Robinson, the New York Times bestselling author of science fiction masterworks such as the Mars trilogy and 2312, has, on many occasions, imagined our future. Now, in Shaman, he brings our past to life as never before. There is Thorn, a shaman himself. He lives to pass down his wisdom and his stories -- to teach those who would follow in his footsteps. There is Heather, the healer who, in many ways, holds the clan together. There is Elga, an outsider and the bringer of change. And then there is Loon, the next shaman, who is determined to find his own path. But in a world so treacherous, that journey is never simple -- and where it may lead is never certain. Shaman is a powerful, thrilling and heartbreaking story of one young man's journey into adulthood -- and an awe-inspiring vision of how we lived thirty thousand years ago.

Sixty Days and Counting

Author: Kim Stanley Robinson
Publisher: Spectra
ISBN: 0553903500
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 402

Book Description
By the time Phil Chase is elected president, the world’s climate is far on its way to irreversible change. Food scarcity, housing shortages, diminishing medical care, and vanishing species are just some of the consequences. The erratic winter the Washington, D.C., area is experiencing is another grim reminder of a global weather pattern gone haywire: bone-chilling cold one day, balmy weather the next. But the president-elect remains optimistic and doesn’t intend to give up without a fight. A maverick in every sense of the word, Chase starts organizing the most ambitious plan to save the world from disaster since FDR–and assembling a team of top scientists and advisers to implement it. For Charlie Quibler, this means reentering the political fray full-time and giving up full-time care of his young son, Joe. For Frank Vanderwal, hampered by a brain injury, it means trying to protect the woman he loves from a vengeful ex and a rogue “black ops” agency not even the president can control–a task for which neither Frank’s work at the National Science Foundation nor his study of Tibetan Buddhism can prepare him. In a world where time is running out as quickly as its natural resources, where surveillance is almost total and freedom nearly nonexistent, the forecast for the Chase administration looks darker each passing day. For as the last–and most terrible–of natural disasters looms on the horizon, it will take a miracle to stop the clock . . . the kind of miracle that only dedicated men and women can bring about.

New York 2140

Author: Kim Stanley Robinson
Publisher: Orbit
ISBN: 0316262331
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 624

Book Description
New York Times bestselling author Kim Stanley Robinson returns with a bold and brilliant vision of New York City in the next century. As the sea levels rose, every street became a canal. Every skyscraper an island. For the residents of one apartment building in Madison Square, however, New York in the year 2140 is far from a drowned city. There is the market trader, who finds opportunities where others find trouble. There is the detective, whose work will never disappear -- along with the lawyers, of course. There is the internet star, beloved by millions for her airship adventures, and the building's manager, quietly respected for his attention to detail. Then there are two boys who don't live there, but have no other home -- and who are more important to its future than anyone might imagine. Lastly there are the coders, temporary residents on the roof, whose disappearance triggers a sequence of events that threatens the existence of all -- and even the long-hidden foundations on which the city rests.

The High Sierra

Author: Kim Stanley Robinson
Publisher: Little, Brown
ISBN: 0316306819
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 714

Book Description
A “sublime” and “radically original” exploration of the Sierra Nevadas, the best mountains on Earth for hiking and camping, from New York Times bestselling novelist Kim Stanley Robinson (Bill McKibben, Gary Snyder). Kim Stanley Robinson first ventured into the Sierra Nevada mountains during the summer of 1973. He returned from that encounter a changed man, awed by a landscape that made him feel as if he were simultaneously strolling through an art museum and scrambling on a jungle gym like an energized child. He has returned to the mountains throughout his life—more than a hundred trips—and has gathered a vast store of knowledge about them. The High Sierra is his lavish celebration of this exceptional place and an exploration of what makes this span of mountains one of the most compelling places on Earth. Over the course of a vivid and dramatic narrative, Robinson describes the geological forces that shaped the Sierras and the history of its exploration, going back to the indigenous peoples who made it home and whose traces can still be found today. He celebrates the people whose ideas and actions protected the High Sierra for future generations. He describes uniquely beautiful hikes and the trails to be avoided. Robinson’s own life-altering events, defining relationships, and unforgettable adventures form the narrative’s spine. And he illuminates the human communion with the wild and with the sublime, including the personal growth that only seems to come from time spent outdoors. The High Sierra is a gorgeous, absorbing immersion in a place, born out of a desire to understand and share one of the greatest rapture-inducing experiences our planet offers. Packed with maps, gear advice, more than 100 breathtaking photos, and much more, it will inspire veteran hikers, casual walkers, and travel readers to prepare for a magnificent adventure.

A Climate Vocabulary of the Future

Author: Herb Simmens
Publisher: Wheatmark, Inc.
ISBN: 1627875085
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 227

Book Description
A Climate Vocabulary of the Future offers a compelling perspective on climate change that breaks down the formidable challenges facing our species and our planet -- rising temperatures, melting glaciers, and an indifferent global populace quietly overwhelmed by the science and inconceivable consequences of inaction. By skillfully explaining -- with humor, brevity, and clarity -- more than four hundred new, as well as often overlooked words and phrases, A Climate Vocabulary of the Future empowers readers with the information they need to both understand and act. For example, readers will learn the importance of dark snow, carbon war criminals, and negative emissions, as well as the background behind deceptively humorous phrases such as frozen chicken syndrome and robin carbon hood tax. Author Herb Simmens also offers many new ideas to inspire action before it is too late to save ourselves from ourselves. Use A Climate Vocabulary of the Future as a reference or as a creative way to learn the many dimensions of climate change. Above all, use it to acquire the words, images, ideas, and actions necessary to thrive in a world increasingly dominated by climate chaos.

Blue Mars

Author: Kim Stanley Robinson
Publisher: Spectra
ISBN: 0553898299
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 862

Book Description
Winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel • One of the most enthralling science fiction sagas ever written, Kim Stanley Robinson’s epic trilogy concludes with Blue Mars—a triumph of prodigious research and visionary storytelling. “A breakthrough even from [Kim Stanley Robinson’s] own consistently high levels of achievement.”—The New York Times Book Review The red planet is no more. Now green and verdant, Mars has been dramatically altered from a desolate world into one where humans can flourish. The First Hundred settlers are being pulled into a fierce new struggle between the Reds, a group devoted to preserving Mars in its desert state, and the Green “terraformers.” Meanwhile, Earth is in peril. A great flood threatens an already overcrowded and polluted planet. With Mars the last hope for the human race, the inhabitants of the red planet are heading toward a population explosion—or interplanetary war.

The Best of Kim Stanley Robinson

Author: Kim Stanley Robinson
Publisher: Start Publishing LLC
ISBN: 1597802514
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 482

Book Description
Kim Stanley Robinson has been an ongoing force in the Science Fiction genre for over twenty years, with his novels (Year’s of Rice and Salt, Forty Signs of Rain) crossing over to the mainstream, and routinely appearing on the New York Times best sellers list. During the 80s and early nineties, his short fiction continued to push the boundaries of science fiction, defining the science-focused side of the science fiction genre. Award-winning editor Jonathan Strahan worked with Kim Stanley Robinson to select the stories that make up this landmark volume. In addition to these reprints, The Best of Kim Stanley Robinson features a brand-new short story, "The Timpanist of the Berlin Philharmonic, 1942."

Another Now

Author: Yanis Varoufakis
Publisher: Melville House
ISBN: 1612199569
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Book Description
What would a fair and equal society actually look like? The world-renowned economist and bestselling author Yanis Varoufakis presents his radical and subversive answer in a work of speculative fiction that recalls William Morris and William Gibson The year: 2035. At a funeral for Iris, a revolutionary leftist feminist, Yango is approached by Costa, Iris’s closest comrade, who urges him to carry out Iris’s last wish: plough into her secret diaries to tell their story. “But”, Costa insists “leave out anything that might help Big Tech replicate my technologies!” That night Yango delves into Iris’s diaries. In them he discovers a chronicle of how Costa’s revolutionary technologies had unveiled an actually existing, fully democratized, postcapitalist society. Suddenly he understands Costa’s obsession with the hackers trying to steal his secrets. So begins Yanis Varoufakis’s extraordinary novelistic thought-experiment, where the world-famous economist offers an invigorating and deeply moving vision of an alternative reality. Another Now tells the story of Costa, a brilliant but deeply disillusioned, computer engineer, who creates a revolutionary technology that will allow the user a “glimpse of a life beyond their dreams” but will not enslave them. But an accident during one of its trial runs unveils a cosmic wormhole where Costa meets his DNA double, who is living in a 2025 very different than the one Costa is living in. In this parallel 2025 a global hi-tech uprising, begun in the wake of the collapse of 2008, has birthed a post-capitalist world in which work, money, land, digital networks and politics have been truly democratized. Banks have been eliminated, as well as predatory, data-mining digital monopolies; the gig economy is no more; and the young are free to experiment with different careers and to study ”non-lucrative topics, from Sumerian pottery to astrophysics.” Intoxicated, Costa travels to England to tell Iris, his old comrade, and her neighbor, Eva, a recovering banker turned neoliberal economics professor, of the parallel universe he has discovered. Costa eventually leads them back to his workshop in America where Iris and Eva meet their own doubles, and confront hard truths about themselves and the daunting political challenge that "the Other Now" presents. But, as their obsession with the Other Now deepens, time begins to run out, as the wormhole begins to deteriorate and hackers begin to unleash new attacks on Costa’s technology. The trio have to make a choice: which 2025 do they want to live in? Varoufakis has been claiming for a while that we already live in postcapitalist times. That, since the 2008 crisis, capitalism has been morphing into technofeudalism. Another Now, a riveting work of speculative fiction, shows that there is a realistic, democratic alternative to the technofeudalpostcapitalist dystopia taking shape all around us. It also confronts us with the greatest question: how far are we willing to go to bring it about?

Lay Ecclesial Ministry

Author: Seton Hall University
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
ISBN: 144220186X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 244

Book Description
The role of lay ecclesial ministers—professionally prepared laity who serve in leadership roles—is becoming critically more important in the life of the Catholic church. In Lay Ecclesial Ministry, theologians and pastoral leaders from diverse disciplines provide a deeper understanding, envision future direction, and offer inspiration for these new ministers and the community of the church. Building on the themes of the first official document addressing lay ecclesial ministry, Co-workers in the Vineyard of the Lord, approved by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in 2005, this book delves deeply into key topics. Authors reflect on dimensions of the Catholic tradition to enrich our understanding of this new reality of lay ministry in the church, to envision future developments, and to offer inspiration. Contributors draw on a variety of theological perspectives, including canon law, church history, ecclesiology, liturgy, and scripture, to ground understanding of lay ecclesial ministry within the Catholic tradition and to chart direction for further response to this newly emergent ministry. The book also offers inspiration and models of service to lay ministers, looking to stories of the saints and communities of vowed religious. Lay Ecclesial Ministry is an essential resource for the Catholic community in understanding and building upon this new and increasingly important component of church life.