The first one was a bar at the Settlement. The second was the lady who ran the bar; though her title was strictly informal, having been bestowed on her by the regular customers, and her domain extended no further than the pleasantly gloomy walls of the only place you could get beer on the Tharsis Bulge. The third one was the Queen of England."

    But an unspeakable disaster devastates the colony. Six of its children are found dead, their bodies marked in a bizarre parody of the puberty rites of the Dancers, Bountiful's enigmatic sentient race. Even more horrifying is the news that the murderers are not the Dancers--but eight other children of the colony.What happens when small children are changed by their environment, made into something other, not wholly human or alien? What will become of a society irrevocably torn by nightmarish acts carried out by its most innocent members? And how far will one young man go in his obsessive quest to bring healing to eight shattered children...even if he must cross the boundaries of death itself?

    A hustling young artist finds himself on the run from warring tribes, mysterious conspirators, body-swapping hackers and more, as he tries to both survive and strike it rich on the vertical surface of a skyscraper big enough to be its own world.

    And, the strangest thing of all is everybody believes him.

    What she can get is the captaincy of a rich old lady's space yacht...a rich old horsewoman, who has little liking for the military, and whose spoiled nephew Ronnie (and his equally spoiled friends) have been foisted on her after his folly embarrassed the family. Lady Cecelia's only apparent interest is horses--she intends to go fox hunting on the private pleasure planet of a friend of hers, Lord Thornbuckle. But events conspire to make it far more than a fox hunt.

    In a feverish race against the inevitable, nations around the globe band together to devise an ambitious plan to ensure the survival of humanity far beyond our atmosphere, in outer space.But the complexities and unpredictability of human nature coupled with unforeseen challenges and dangers threaten the intrepid pioneers, until only a handful of survivors remain . . .Five thousand years later, their progeny—seven distinct races now three billion strong—embark on yet another audacious journey into the unknown . . . to an alien world utterly transformed by cataclysm and time: Earth.A writer of dazzling genius and imaginative vision, Neal Stephenson combines science, philosophy, technology, psychology, and literature in a magnificent work of speculative fiction that offers a portrait of a future that is both extraordinary and eerily recognizable. As he did in Anathem, Cryptonomicon, the Baroque Cycle, and Reamde, Stephenson explores some of our biggest ideas and perplexing challenges in a breathtaking saga that is daring, engrossing, and altogether brilliant.

    Science Fiction, Fantasy, Adventure