The dark forces of the Neo Hegemony strike, sweeping across the worlds of the Arcadian sector and crushing all in their path. One system stands against the onslaught, the Kingdom of New Avalon. But the men and women of their expeditionary forces are trapped behind enemy lines on a besieged planet. Losing those troops will lose the war. Their only hope? A last-ditch rescue mission led by Captain Hal Cutter and his battleship, Achilles. Beset on all sides by lethal enemy warships, he must lead a rag-tag fleet of naval and civilian vessels across Hegemony-held space to save the beleaguered Kingdom soldiers. In the skies and orbit, Lieutenant Jason ‘Rick’ Richards and the untested pilots of Viper squadron clash in a furious battle for supremacy against elite enemy fighters. And on the ground, Private Patrick ‘Wink’ Goble and his platoon must hold the line against a ruthless commander and her overwhelming force of battle-tested mechs until salvation arrives. All will play their part in this desperate struggle for survival against impossible odds. The Great War has begun… Read the epic new military science fiction series from Ralph Kern, the best-selling author of the Locus series.

    That's an odd way to begin a work of popular science . . . . but amusing.Please heed the warning from the Introduction by Bruce Sterling: "If you are examining Saucer Wisdom imagining that Rudy (or some fictional 'Frank Shook') has been actually logging a lot of on board saucer time, well, you can knock that off right now. Rudy Rucker made up the flying saucer part. There is no actual flying saucer. The saucer is not an interplanetary faster-than-light device. Its what we professional authors like to call a narrative device."I'm going to spill the beans as directly as I can here: Saucer Wisdom is a work of popular science speculation. Its a nonfiction book in which Prof. Rucker takes a few quirky grains of modern scientific fact, drops them into the colorful tide pool of his own imagination, and harvests a major swarm of abalones, jellyfish, and giant anemones."Pop-science writers didn't used to treat 'science' in this boisterous way, but there might well be a trend here, there may be a real future in this. Saucer Wisdom is a book by a well-qualified mathematician and computer scientist, a veteran pop science writer, in which 'science' is treated, not as some distant and rarefied quest for absolute knowledge, but as naturally great source material for a really long, cool rant."Rucker, in character, describes, and illustrates with delightful cartoon sketches (the way he would use chalk and a blackboard while talking science), the world of the progressively more distant future as it is transformed by computer technology, biotechnology, and human evolution. He also describes a hell of a party in Berkeley. Popular science writing will never be the same.

    But first he must survive his mission inside enemy held Manhattan and face an unimaginable enemy.Since that fateful night more than three years ago, America is at war with an unknown enemy it cannot understand.Lieutenant Tom Riley has only a few days to learn to use his new Personal Battle Tank before he and his team are dropped into Manhattan.The team's clandestine mission can go sour in an instant and then Riley and his team will find themselves in an alien, hostile city unlike anything they have ever seen before.But the lies surrounding the enemy and the mission may prove the deadliest things yet.˃˃˃ An original and daring bookThis is an original and daring book, in which you will see Manhattan as you've never seen it before. Join the team in this one of the kind adventure.'Mechanical' is a military science fiction action thriller from the author of 'Dragon Over Washington', 'The Fire At The Gates' and 'Automatic Rebellion'