Firefall

Author: Peter Watts
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
ISBN: 9781786696106
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Firefall is the omnibus edition of the novels Blindsight and Echopraxia. February 13, 2082, First Contact. Sixty-two thousand objects of unknown origin plunge into Earth's atmosphere - a perfect grid of falling stars screaming across the radio spectrum as they burn. Not even ashes reach the ground. Three hundred and sixty degrees of global surveillance: something just took a snapshot. And then... nothing. But from deep space, whispers. Something out there talks - but not to us. Two ships, Theseus and the Crown of Thorns, are launched to discover the origin of Earth's visitation, one bound for the outer dark of the Kuiper Belt, the other for the heart of the Solar System. Their crews can barely be called human, what they will face certainly can't. 'A tour de force, redefining the First Contact story for good' Charles Stross. 'If you only read one science fiction novel this year, make it this one!... It puts the whole of the rest of the genre in the shade... It deserves to walk away with the Clarke, the Hugo, the Nebula, the BSFA, and pretty much any other genre award for which it's eligible. It's off the scale... F**king awesome!' Richard Morgan. 'State-of-the-art science fiction: smart, dark and it grabs you by the throat from page one' Neal Ascher.

Blindsight

Author: Peter Watts
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1429955198
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 388

Book Description
Hugo and Shirley Jackson award-winning Peter Watts stands on the cutting edge of hard SF with his acclaimed novel, Blindsight Two months since the stars fell... Two months of silence, while a world held its breath. Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune's orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Whatever's out there isn't talking to us. It's talking to some distant star, perhaps. Or perhaps to something closer, something en route. So who do you send to force introductions with unknown and unknowable alien intellect that doesn't wish to be met? You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees x-rays and tastes ultrasound. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won't be needed. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called vampire, recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. And you send a synthesist—an informational topologist with half his mind gone—as an interface between here and there. Pray they can be trusted with the fate of a world. They may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Echopraxia

Author: Peter Watts
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 142994806X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 384

Book Description
Prepare for a different kind of singularity in Peter Watts' Echopraxia, the follow-up to the Hugo-nominated novel Blindsight It's the eve of the twenty-second century: a world where the dearly departed send postcards back from Heaven and evangelicals make scientific breakthroughs by speaking in tongues; where genetically engineered vampires solve problems intractable to baseline humans and soldiers come with zombie switches that shut off self-awareness during combat. And it's all under surveillance by an alien presence that refuses to show itself. Daniel Bruks is a living fossil: a field biologist in a world where biology has turned computational, a cat's-paw used by terrorists to kill thousands. Taking refuge in the Oregon desert, he's turned his back on a humanity that shatters into strange new subspecies with every heartbeat. But he awakens one night to find himself at the center of a storm that will turn all of history inside-out. Now he's trapped on a ship bound for the center of the solar system. To his left is a grief-stricken soldier, obsessed by whispered messages from a dead son. To his right is a pilot who hasn't yet found the man she's sworn to kill on sight. A vampire and its entourage of zombie bodyguards lurk in the shadows behind. And dead ahead, a handful of rapture-stricken monks takes them all to a meeting with something they will only call "The Angels of the Asteroids." Their pilgrimage brings Dan Bruks, the fossil man, face-to-face with the biggest evolutionary breakpoint since the origin of thought itself. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Firefall

Author: Cameron Judd
Publisher: St. Martin's Paperbacks
ISBN: 1466867701
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 266

Book Description
He brings the Old West to vivid new life in his action-packed stories of heroism, adventure and excitement. With over two million of his books in print, Cameron Judd powerfully depicts, as no other writer can, the struggles of a generation of Americans on a harsh and beautiful frontier. Montana Territory, 1884. A huge fire has consumed the sin-soaked town of Gomorrah, just as crazy "Parson" Peabody, a drunken, broken-down preacher, had foretold. With the town in ruins, con man Gib Rankin sees a chance to profit from Parson's "gift." Meanwhile, young Alex Gunnison passes through Gomorrah looking for Brady Kenton, his friend and fellow Gunnison's Illustrated American reporter. Is the badly burned body he discovers really that of Kenton? What connection does Rankin--with Parson and a mysterious woman in tow--have to the lost reporter? And what of the unexplained "firefall" that seems to spontaneously ignite an entire town? Gunnison carves a trail through Montana and Idaho to find some hard answers--and test his own courage as a journalist, a friend, and a man . . . in Cameron Judd's Firefall.

Let the Fire Fall

Author: Michael Scanlan
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780940535138
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

Book Description
LET THE FIRE FALLThe fire of God's word has fallen on Michael Scanlan many times.' It fell on a confused 19-year-old undergraduate who didn't know whether God existed.' It fell on an ambitious student at Harvard Law School who didn't know what to do with his life.' It fell on an Air Force officer who wanted to serve the Lord.' It fell on a seminary rector who was in over his head.Here is the story of how the Lord molded Father Michael Scanlan, TOR, into a versatile charismatic leader. He is known today as a past university president, television personality, ecumenist, author, innovator in Catholic education, and a leader of FIRE, a vigorous, worldwide renewal ministry. This expanded version includes a foreword by Father Sean O. Sheridan, TOR, current president of Franciscan University of Steubenville, an afterword by James Manney, Father Michael's co-author, and a brief history of Franciscan University.

The Colonel

Author: Peter Watts
Publisher: Tor Books
ISBN: 1466876476
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 36

Book Description
From the author of Blindsight comes Peter Watts's sci-fi adventure story "The Colonel," an action-packed Tor.com Original Colonel Keaton is in trouble. His wife has retreated into a virtual heaven and his son remains missing after joining an extrasolar mission to track down an alien race. He is presently tasked by his superiors with the threat assessment of hived human intelligences, one of which successfully attacks a compound under his watch. Now, one of the strongest hive minds in the world approaches Keaton with an offer that could completely change his world. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Firefall

Author: Ed Ruggero
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780671730116
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 452

Book Description
A thundering new novel featuring combat-tough hero Mark Isen. Recession has hit Germany hard. Fearing revolution, the German Ministry of Defense requests U.S. Army Rangers to join the German Army in practice maneuvers. But the exercise explodes into real war, and Isen and his troops must gamble on a desperate plan for survival.

Crysis

Author: Peter Watts
Publisher: Del Rey
ISBN: 0440423597
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 322

Book Description
MANHATTAN IS UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT. THEY’RE NOT FROM AROUND HERE. Welcome to the Big Apple, son. Welcome to the city that never sleeps: invaded by monstrous fusions of meat and machinery, defended by a private army that makes Blackwater look like the Red Cross, ravaged by a disfiguring plague that gifts its victims with religious rapture while it eats them alive. You’ve been thrown into this meat grinder without warning, without preparation, without a clue. Your whole squad was mowed down the moment they stepped onto the battlefield. And the chorus of voices whispering in your head keeps saying that all of this is on you: that you and you alone might be able to turn the whole thing around if you only knew what the hell was going on. You’d like to help. Really you would. But it’s not just the aliens that are gunning for you. Your own kind hunts you as a traitor, and your job might be a bit easier if you didn’t have the sneaking suspicion they could be right. . . .

Let the Fire Fall

Author: Kate Wilhelm
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 0575119985
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 180

Book Description
The alien spaceship landed in a cornfield. Its crew died rapidly, leaving only one survivor - a baby, conceived on an unknown world, carried in its mother's womb across space and delivered even as the mother died on a hostile Earth. But the alien woman had given birth to more than a child. With her last act she had bequeathed to the Earth that hated her and her kind decades of turmoil and strife that would come close to tearing the whole planet apart.

Beyond the Rift

Author: Peter Watts
Publisher: Tachyon Publications
ISBN: 1616961260
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 242

Book Description
Skillfully combining complex science with finely executed prose, these edgy, award-winning tales explore the always-shifting border between the known and the alien. The beauty and peril of technology and the passion and penalties of conviction merge in stories that are by turns dark, satiric, bold, and introspective. A seemingly humanized monster from John Carpenter’s The Thing reveals the true villains in an Antarctic showdown. An artificial intelligence shields a biologically-enhanced prodigy from her overwhelmed parents. A deep-sea diver discovers that her true nature lies not within the confines of her mission but in the depths of her psyche. A court psychologist analyzes a psychotic graduate student who has learned to reprogram reality itself. A father tries to hold his broken family together in the wake of an ongoing assault by sentient rainstorms. Gorgeously saturnine and exceptionally powerful, these collected fictions are both intensely thought-provoking and impossible to forget.