In Cuba, meanwhile, nuclear tensions are at breaking point. The end of the whole world could be just days away. 14 year-old Laura Mann is at the heart of it all. She's on the run, hunted by strange forces fighting over the future of humanity.

    In the near future, when medical nanotechnology has made it possible to map a model of the living human brain, radical psychologist Natalie Armstrong sees her work suddenly become crucial to a cutting-edge military project for creating comprehensive mind-control. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, Jude Westhorpe, FBI specialist, is tracking a cold war defector long involved in everything from gene sequencing to mind-mapping. But his investigation has begun to affect matters of national security-throwing Jude and Natalie together as partners in trouble-deep trouble from every direction. This fascinating novel explores the nature of humanity in the near future, when the power and potential of developing technologies demand that we adapt ourselves to their existence-whatever the price.

    Here a man is drawn into a gritty postmodern subculture and a secret kingdom of otherworldly beings to find what he lost long ago: a reason to live.Kit Nouveau figured he'd already come to the end of the world. An Iraqi war veteran, expatriate, and part owner of Pirate Mary's, the best Irish bar in Tokyo, Kit had settled down to await the inevitable with barely a whimper. It wasn't exactly how Kit thought he'd end up, and he was right.It's going to end up a lot worse.A teenage runaway with fifteen million dollars in stolen cash and a taste for cosplay is about to save Kit's life in a lethal swirl of scarlet and bridal lace. Lady Neku, a.k.a. Countess of High Strange, has her own dangerous destiny to fulfill and it's mysteriously connected to Kit's ravaged past. Now Kit's only hope for redemption is to save an ex-girlfriend he tragically failed once before. But everyone says it's already too late. And she's left behind only one ominous clue: her suicide note.

    Fay was as an all-too-human correspondent, assigned to deliver him to a country from which she had barely escaped with her sanity. She didn't know it was a setup...until it was too late. And the only one she could trust -- the only one who hadn't betrayed her -- was the android himself.

    It amounts to the sudden and complete abolition of human privacy--forever. Then, as society reels, the same technology proves able to look backwards in time as well. What happens next is a story only Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter could tell. The Light of Other Days is a novel that will change your view of what it is to be human.

    Days is the grandest of department stores, whose security men are licensed to kill and whose seven owners, a group of very different brothers, brood in a penthouse, fetched endless vast meals by a grumpy butler. James Lovegrove's novel inhabits that realm where satire borders on allegory and realism is full of wild magic; it was, nonetheless, shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke prize. Security man Frank has reached a point of alienation such that he can no longer see himself in the mirror; Gordon and Linda have just got their first Days storecard, and are keen to undergo the Days experience; the Book Department's feud for space with their neighbours in Computers is about to enter a new phase. There are flash sales in Ties and Dolls, and a riot in Third World Musical Instruments. And who is sleeping in the Bed Department's four- poster? Endlessly inventive and savage in its humour, Lovegrove's novel will change for ever the way you feel about superstores, and gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "shop till you drop". --Roz Kaveney

    Gerald Livingston is an orbital garbage collector. For a hundred years, people have been abandoning things in space, and someone has to clean it up. But there’s something spinning a little bit higher than he expects, something that isn’t on the decades’ old orbital maps. An hour after he grabs it and brings it in, rumors fill Earth’s infomesh about an “alien artifact.” Thrown into the maelstrom of worldwide shared experience, the Artifact is a game-changer. A message in a bottle; an alien capsule that wants to communicate. The world reacts as humans always do: with fear and hope and selfishness and love and violence. And insatiable curiosity.

    to restore their freedom in a world run mad.Nickie Halflinger, the only person to escape from Tarnover—where they raise hyper-intelligent children to maintain the political dominance of the USA in the 21st century—is on the run, dodging from loophole to crevice to crack in the computerised data-net that binds the continent like chains. After years of flight and constant changes of identity, at the strange small town called Precipice he discovers he is not alone in his quest. But can his new allies save him when he falls again into the sinister grasp of Tarnover...?

    After the bombing. After the Iraq war. After 7/7. After the Iran war. After the nukes. After the flu. After the Straits. After Rosyth. In a world just down the road from our own, on-line bloggers vie with old-line political operatives and new-style police to determine just where reality lies. James Travis is a British patriot and a French spy. On the day the Big One hits, Travis and his daughter must strive to make sense of the nuclear bombing of Scotland and the political repercussions of a series of terrorist attacks. With the information war in full swing, the only truth they have is what they're able to see with their own eyes. They know that everything else is--or may be--a lie.

    It is told through the eyes of three characters and against a background where mankind's rush into space has faded away leaving individual pioneers to force their way independently into space after the collapse of the big government space agencies. They ride up into space on the lines of electromagnetic force that flower into space from earth like the mighty Yggradisil - the earth tree of Norse myth. Leaving their weight behind they still carry a cargo of enmities and hatreds.Roberts has a unique approach to SF and is one of the genre's premier stylists. This is one of his most original novels yet.

    On all the radio bands there is nothing now but static, and beyond the glowing paisley barrier there may be only a radioactive waste. Yet in Coomey life goes on quietly. Until Loretta Harper, the pudgy Mary Kay rep and perennial Homemaker of the Month, is found dead in the woods. It's the first murder in six years, and police chief DeWitt Dawson, with a curse, starts his investigation. Did the Torku kill her? Or was it Foster, the town banker-cum-flower child? Even Janet, the police chief's own wife, may be involved. Both lyrical and humorous, Happy Policeman is a story of everyday people trapped in an existential test tube. A story of duty and rebellion. And of aliens who watch—and wait—to see if DeWitt will learn the truth about time, responsibility, and universes that leak.

    Past, present, and future Brazil, with all its color, passion, and shifting realities, come together in a novel that is part SF, part history, part mystery, and entirely enthralling.Three separate stories follow three main characters:--Edson is a self-made talent impressario one step up from the slums in a near future São Paulo of astonishing riches and poverty. A chance encounter draws Edson into the dangerous world of illegal quantum computing, but where can you run in a total surveillance society where every move, face, and centavo is constantly tracked?--Marcelina is an ambitious Rio TV producer looking for that big reality TV hit to make her name. When her hot idea leads her on the track of a disgraced World Cup soccer goalkeeper, she becomes enmeshed in an ancient conspiracy that threatens not just her life, but her very soul. --Father Luis is a Jesuit missionary sent into the maelstrom of 18th-century Brazil to locate and punish a rogue priest who has strayed beyond the articles of his faith and set up a vast empire in the hinterland. In the company of a French geographer and spy, what he finds in the backwaters of the Amazon tries both his faith and the nature of reality itself to the breaking point.Three characters, three stories, three Brazils, all linked together across time, space, and reality in a hugely ambitious story that will challenge the way you think about everything.

    He co-authored, with William Gibson, the critically acclaimed novel "The Difference Engine." He lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife and daughter.

    The invention of the Hotline -- a constant stream of data from a star in the constellation Ophiuchus -- facilitates survival and enables the development of amazing new technologies. Then, after 400 years, humanity's unknown helpers send a bill for their services...and suddenly everything is threatened once again.The Ophiuchi Hotline was John Varley's first novel, and it received nominations for both the Hugo and Nebula awards; he later won both for his book Persistence of Vision.

    A constant stream of new technology spawns crime before it hits the streets; the human mind and the external landscape have fused to the point where any encounter with "reality" is incidental.