William Gibson continues the visionary Sprawl Trilogy that began with Neuromancer in this frighteningly probable parable of the future.
A corporate mercenary wakes in a reconstructed body, a beautiful woman by his side. Then Hosaka Corporation reactivates him, for a mission more dangerous than the one he’s recovering to get a defecting chief of R&D—and the biochip he’s perfected—out intact. But this proves to be of supreme interest to certain other parties—some of whom aren’t remotely human….
In reality, Hiro Protagonist delivers pizza for Uncle Enzo's CosoNostra Pizza Inc., but in the Metaverse he's a warrior prince. Plunging headlong into the enigma of a new computer virus that's striking down hackers everywhere, he races along the neon-lit streets on a search-and-destroy mission for the shadowy virtual villain threatening to bring about infocalypse. Snow Crash is a mind-altering romp through a future America so bizarre, so outrageous… you'll recognize it immediately.
From Karl Schroeder, author of Lockstep, comes the near-future, science fiction, hacker’s heist, Stealing Worlds.
Sura Neelin is on the run from her creditors, from her past, and her father’s murderers. She can’t get a job, she can’t get a place to live, she can’t even walk down the the total surveillance society that is mid-21st century America means that every camera and every pair of smart glasses is her enemy.
But Sura might have a chance in the alternate reality of the games. People can disappear in the LARP game worlds, into the alternate economy of Notchcoin and blockchains. The people who build the games also program the surveillance networks—she just needs an introduction, and the skills to play.
Turns out, she has very valuable skills, and some very surprising friends.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
When Robin wakes up in a clinic with most of his memories missing, it doesn’t take him long to discover that someone is trying to kill him. It’s the twenty-seventh century, when interstellar travel is by teleport gate and conflicts are fought by network worms that censor refugees’ personalities and target historians. The civil war is over and Robin has been demobilized, but someone wants him out of the picture because of something his earlier self knew.
On the run from a ruthless pursuer and searching for a place to hide, he volunteers to participate in a unique experimental polity, the Glasshouse, constructed to simulate a pre-accelerated culture. Participants are assigned anonymized identities: It looks like the ideal hiding place for a posthuman on the run. But in this escape-proof environment, Robin will undergo an even more radical change, placing him at the mercy of the experimenters—and at the mercy of his own unbalanced psyche...
Jules is a young man barely a century old. He's lived long enough to see the cure for death and the end of scarcity, to learn ten languages and compose three symphonies...and to realize his boyhood dream of taking up residence in Disney World.
Disney World! The greatest artistic achievement of the long-ago twentieth century. Now in the keeping of a network of "ad-hocs" who keep the classic attractions running as they always have, enhanced with only the smallest high-tech touches.
Now, though, the "ad hocs" are under attack. A new group has taken over the Hall of the Presidents, and is replacing its venerable audioanimatronics with new, immersive direct-to-brain interfaces that give guests the illusion of being Washington, Lincoln, and all the others. For Jules, this is an attack on the artistic purity of Disney World itself.
Worse: it appears this new group has had Jules killed. This upsets him. (It's only his fourth death and revival, after all.) Now it's war....
Second book in New York Times -bestselling author Tad Williams's cyberpunk fantasy series • “Tad Williams is the brightest and best of the fantasists.” ―Neil Gaiman, author of American Gods
Otherland. In many ways it is humankind's most stunning a private, multidimensional universe built over two generations by the greatest minds of the twenty-first century. But this most exclusive of places is also one of the world's best kept secrets, created and controlled by an organization made up of the world's most powerful and ruthless individuals, a private cartel known—to those who know of their existence at all—as The Grail Brotherhood.
Though their purpose in creating Otherland is still a mystery, it may not remain so for long. For they have exacted a terrible price from humanity in the process, and even their highly organized global conspiracy cannot hide the nature of their crimes forever. And now a small band of adventurers has penetrated the veil of secrecy that prevents the uninitiated from entering Otherland. But having broken into the amazing worlds within worlds that make up this universe, they are trapped, unable to escape back to their own flesh-and-blood bodies in the real world.
And as dangers and circumstances split their party into small, widely scattered groups, their only hope of reuniting lies in returning again and again to the River that flows—in one form or another—through all the worlds. But the odds seem to be completely against them as they—and the one outsider with whom they might join forces—become hopelessly lost in realms where an Ice Age tribe's fears can only be quenched in blood...where insects are as large and deadly as dinosaurs...where they are caught in the war between a man made of straw and one made of tin...where cartoon ads take on a life of their own...where humans strive to survive in the aftermath of an alien invasion...and where one among their party is actually The Grail Brotherhood's most terrifying weapon—a sociopathic killer who has never failed and whose current mission is to make certain that not even one member of this little invasion force lives long enough to reveal the truth about Otherland to the people of Earth...
This is high action, ideas driven noir SF of the highest order. Morgan has already established himself as an SF author of global significance.
Takeshi Kovacs has come home. Home to Harlan's World. An ocean planet with only 5 percent of its landmass poking above the dangerous and unpredictable seas. Try and get above the weather in anything more sophisticated than a helicopter and the Martian orbital platforms will burn you out of the sky.
And death doesn't just wait for you in the seas and the skies. On land, from the tropical beaches and swamps of Kossuth to the icy, machine-infested wastes of New Hokkaido the hard won gains of the Quellist revolution have been lost. The First Families, the corporations and the Yakuza have a stranglehold on everything.
Embarked on a journey of implacable retribution for a lost love, Kovacs is blown off course and into a maelstrom of political intrigue and technological mystery as the ghosts of Harlan's World and his own violent past rise to claim their due. Quellcrist Falconer is back from the dead, they say and hunting her down for the First Families is a savage young Envoy called Kovacs who's been in storage.
First contact gone wrong. Humanity judged and found wanting. Unlimited power up for grab.
The Galactic Consensus arrived on ships as large as skyscrapers, crafted from glittering alloys that no human scientist could even begin to understand. They followed the trail of century old television transmissions to welcome us into the galactic community… only to recoil in horror at what they found.
They concluded that humans were unfit to be trusted with the advanced technologies that member-states of the Consensus freely traded with each other, installing a relay to warn other ships that we were under embargo, but more importantly, allowing humans entrance into the Tower of Somnus, a multiplayer game of sorts that could be played in one’s sleep. The hope was that humanity would learn proper behavior from playing the game with our more civilized neighbors.
Katherine ‘Kat’ Debs, a hereditary employee of one of the megacorporations that ruled the world, eked out a meager existence in a massive arcology of glittering glass and chrome. She dreamt of one day earning enough money to buy her freedom, and was more than willing to break a law here or there in the process. When she is offered an opportunity to enter the Tower of Somnus free of corporate control, she jumps at the chance. After all, the 'game' was more than just a status symbol, players retained the fantastic powers they earned in the game in the waking world as well.
A perfect opportunity to take control of her destiny, or die trying.
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