At the Australian Solar Power facility that Tower City is built around, however, the inspector is about to learn that the man everyone thinks is hiding from the law is actually doing anything but.Thermals is a fast paced near future terrorism thriller that will keep you flipping the pages as fast as your reader, and your eyes, will allow. From the start it builds to a rising crescendo that will leave you breathless and cheering.

    Le Guin is renowned for her spare, elegant prose, rich characterization, and diverse worlds. "Semley's Necklace" is a short story originally published in the collection The Wind's Twelve Quarters.

    Mr. Gray sets an impossible condition for their marriage—Zadock must deliver a sealed and highly secretive letter to General Irion, fighting one thousand miles southwest, deep within the embattled and newly independent Republic of Texas. The fate of the Union lies within the mysterious contents of that sealed letter, but that is only the beginning . . .     Three hundred years later, in the dystopian city-state of the Texas Republic, Zeke Thomas has just received news of the death of his grandfather, an esteemed Chicago senator. The world has crumbled. Paper documents are banned, citizens are watched, and dissenters are thrown over the walls into "the rot." When Zeke inherits—and then loses—a very old, sealed letter from his grandfather, Zeke finds himself and the women he loves at the heart of a conspiracy whose secrets he must unravel, if it doesn't destroy his relationship, his family legacy, and the entire republic first.     The two propulsive narratives converge through a wildly creative assortment of documents, books within books, maps, notes, illustrations, and more. Zach Dodson has created a gorgeous work of art and an eye-popping commercial adventure for the 21st century.From the Hardcover edition.

    The Spires of Denon doesn’t involve Boss or her crew. Instead, this powerful short novel follows Meklos Verr, hired to guard an archeological dig near the mysterious Spires of Denon.

    Become entranced with the basic struggle of good vs. evil as you travel to a galaxy far, far away.

    When William III of England commissioned Capt. William Kidd to command the first expedition to Mars in the late 1600s, they proved that space travel was both possible and profitable. Now, one century later, a plantation in the flourishing British colony on Mars is home to Arabella Ashby. A tomboy who shares her father's deft hand with complex automatons. Being raised on the Martian frontier by her Martian nanny, Arabella is more a wild child than a proper young lady. Something her mother plans to remedy with a move to an exotic world Arabella has never seen: London, England. Arabella soon finds herself trying to navigate an alien world until a dramatic change in her family's circumstances forces her to defy all conventions in order to return to Mars in order to save both her brother and the plantation. To do this, Arabella must pass as a boy on the Diana, a ship serving the Mars Trading Company with a mysterious Indian captain who is intrigued by her knack with automatons. Arabella must weather the naval war between Britain and France, learning how to sail, and a mutinous crew if she hopes to save her brother from certain death.

    How do you break time? Can something so bad happen that you fracture the world?" Benjamin Travers has been electrocuted. What's worse, he and his friends have woken up in the past. As the friends search for a way home, they realize they're not alone. There are other time travelers, and some of them are turning up dead. When Ben meets an enigmatic scientist and his charming, time-traveling daughter, salvation seems at hand, but escaping the dangers of the past may lead to a deadly future. If he hopes to save his friends, Ben must learn to master space and time, and survive a journey where past and future violently collide.

    Even his lifelong best friend played a pivotal role in earning Joseph his seat on death row. A phenomenon occurs as the electricity meant to kill Joseph is sent through him, and his essence is ripped from the body he has known his entire life and thrown into a new one. Only the body he now inhabits isn’t new at all; it is the body of a person who lived over a hundred years before Joseph’s birth. Now living in an unfamiliar era of history and trapped inside a foreign body, Joseph learns he has been sent back for a reason: to earn redemption for his damned soul and to find a sense of peace he has never known. All he needs to do to get there is to prevent one of history’s most infamous murders.

    A new world rises--one of unshackled AIs, indestructible starships, ethereal quantum spaces & potent new weapons--& the race is on to determine who will control its future.When faced with its greatest challenge, will humanity rise to triumph or fall to ruin?*SIDESPACEHumanity is saved. But its troubles are just beginning.To achieve their extraordinary triumph over the Metigen armada, humanity put aside its myriad of conflicts & united against a common foe intent on annihilating civilization. In victory, unparalleled peace & prosperity are theirs for the taking--if they can keep hold of them.When the secrets behind the Metigens' defeat escape the shadows, the people who won the war find their lives in danger. Facing anti-synthetic terrorists who want them dead, power-hungry politicians who want them chained, & a rapidly dwindling number of people they can trust, the Prevos--individuals & AIs sharing a single body--must take their fate into their own hands.51 Portals. 51 Universes.Intent on learning the purpose behind the Metigens' elaborate multiverse network, Alex Solovy, Caleb Marano & Valkyrie embark on a gripping journey through the network's portals, each one leading to a universe not their own. In a mosaic of spaces inhabited by fantastical aliens & worlds both beautiful & deadly, they will be forced to question everything they thought they knew, including the nature of life itself.*DISSONANCEKnow this: you need not be afraid. They own the fear. They fear us because they believe we are powerful, and they are correct to do so.The technology behind Project Noetica is on the loose. Prevos are spreading across the galaxy. Now two opposing but inexorably related forces threaten to plunge the galaxy into chaos. The Order of the True Sentients believes Prevos are monsters who endanger humanity,& it intends to destroy them by any means necessary. Underworld despot Olivia Montegreu, now a radically enhanced Prevo, is its doomsday warnings made flesh.As society splinters from within & the Earth Alliance falls to reactionaries, a formidable new player emerges on the galactic stage, one not afraid to do whatever it takes to protect all sentient life--human, Artificial and Prevo.The Metigen surged forward to engulf her in light. I see you, Alexis Solovy.Killers & saviors. Deceivers & protectors. Destroyers & creators. Could the Metigens truly be all these things? The search for answers leads Alex and Caleb to the most shocking revelation of all--the true face of the enemy.*ABYSMIn the quest to be the masters of their own fate, will humanity rise to become liberators or follow the path of their ancestors into darkness?Alex Solovy & Caleb Marano risked everything to learn the hidden purpose behind the Metigens' multiverse portal network, but nothing prepared them for the answer. Humans are a genetic recreation of the Anaden, the dictators & overlords of the master universe. Aurora is a recreation of their origins created by the Metigens in a desperate gambit to understand their enemy & find a way to defeat them.Aurora's future hangs in the balance as the Earth Alliance goes to war with itself over the right of synthetics and Prevos--human/AI hybrids--to exist. Terrorists sow chaos in a wave of bombings and assassinations. The next evolution of the human species will not be so easily defeated, but they must move quickly to win the day, because the true enemy is closing in faster than anyone realizes.

    To some, the Miracle is an act of divine retribution; to others, it is an opportunity to carve out a new empire.Leaving an America now ruled by religious fundamentalism, young Guilford Law travels to Darwinia on a mission of discovery that will take him further than he can possibly imagine...to a shattering revelation about mankind's destiny in the universe. Darwinia is a 1999 Hugo Award Nominee for Best Novel.

    At least that was the theory American scientists were exploring in an effort to explain the new sources of knowledge the Russians possessed. Perhaps Russian scientists had discovered how to transport themselves back in time in order to learn long-forgotten secrets of the past. That was why young Ross Murdock, above average in intelligence but a belligerently independent nonconformist, found himself on a "hush-hush" government project at a secret base in the Arctic. The very qualities that made him a menace in civilized society were valuable traits in a man who must successfully act the part of a merchant trader of the Beaker people during the Bronze Age.For once they were transferred by time machine to the remote Baltic region where the Russian post was located, Ross and his partner Ashe were swept into a fantastic action-filled adventure involving Russians, superstitious prehistoric men, and the aliens of a lost galactic civilization that demanded every ounce of courage the Americans possessed.Approx. 7 hours

    With the Nazis recently defeated, Stalin gathers half a dozen of the top Soviet science fiction authors in a dacha in the countryside. Convinced that the defeat of America is only a few years away—and equally convinced that the Soviet Union needs a massive external threat to hold it together—Stalin orders the writers to compose a massively detailed and highly believable story about an alien race poised to invade the earth. The little group of writers gets down to the task and spends months working until new orders come from Moscow to immediately halt the project. The scientists obey and live their lives until, in the aftermath of Chernobyl, the survivors gather again, because something strange has happened: the story they invented in 1946 is starting to come true.

    Tom, a contemporary historian, and his theoretical physicist girlfriend Sharon, become interested. Tom indeed becomes obsessed. By all logic, the town should have survived, but it didn't and that violates everything Tom knows about history. What's was special about Eifelheim that it utterly disappeared more than 600 years ago? Father Dietrich is the village priest of Oberhochwald, the village that will soon gain the name of Teufelheim, in later years corrupted to Eifelheim, in the year 1348, when the Black Death is gathering strength across Europe but is still not nearby. Dietrich is an educated man, knows science and philosophy, and to his astonishment becomes the first contact between humanity and an alien race from a distant star when their interstellar ship crashes in the nearby forest. It is a time of wonders, in the shadow of the plague.Tom and Sharon, and Father Dietrich, have a strange and intertwined destiny of tragedy and triumph in this brilliant SF novel by the winner of the Robert A. Heinlein Award.

    It is based on notes handed down to Michael Moorcock from his great-grandfather. It's a story of a world of empires secured by airships, and a Chinese genius who invented the means of overthrowing the West's power!

    Blaylock"The Giving Mouth" by Ian R. MacLeod "A Sun in the Attic" by Mary Gentle "The God-Clown is Near" by Jay Lake"The Steam Man of the Prairie and the Dark Rider Get Down: A Dime Novel" by Joe R. Lansdale"The Selene Gardening Society" by Molly Brown"Seventy-Two Letters" by Ted Chiang"The Martian Agent, A Planetary Romance" by Michael Chabon"Victoria" by Paul Di Filippo"Reflected Light" by Rachel E. Pollock"Minutes of the Last Meeting" by Stepan Chapman"Excerpt from the Third and Last Volume of Tribes of the Pacific Coast" by Neal Stephenson"The Steam-Driven Time Machine: A Pop Culture Survey" by Rick Klaw"The Essential Sequential Steampunk: A Modest Survey of the Genre within the Comic Book Medium" by Bill Baker