When a class war erupts inside a luxurious apartment block, modern elevators become violent battlegrounds and cocktail parties degenerate into marauding attacks on “enemy” floors. In this visionary tale, human society slips into violent reverse as once-peaceful residents, driven by primal urges, re-create a world ruled by the laws of the jungle.
In a near-future new age of corporate control, hacker mercenaries, and electronic terrorism, a public relations executive on the rise finds herself caught in the violent epicenter of a data war
Two decades into the twenty-first century, the world’s nations are becoming irrelevant. Corporations are the true global powers, with information the most valuable currency, while the smaller island nations have become sanctuaries for data pirates and terrorists. A globe-trotting PR executive for the large corporate economic democracy Rizome Industries Group, Laura Webster is present when a foreign representative is assassinated on Rizome soil during a conference for offshore data havens. Dispatched immediately on an international mission of diplomacy, Laura hopes she can make a difference in a volatile, unsteady world, but instead finds herself trapped on the front lines of rapidly escalating third-world hostilities and caught up in an inescapable net of conspiracy, terrorism, post-millennial voodoo, and electronic warfare.
During the 1980s, science fiction luminary Bruce Sterling envisioned the future . . . and hit it almost dead-on. The author who, along with William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, and Rudy Rucker, helped create and define the cyberpunk subgenre imagines a world of tomorrow in Islands in the Net that bears a striking—and disturbing—resemblance to our present-day information-age reality. Nominated for the Hugo and Locus Awards and winner of the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, Sterling’s extraordinary novel is a gripping, eye-opening, and remarkably prescient science fiction classic.
The Nebula-nominated novel of “abrave new world of nearly constant future shock”—plus all the short fiction of the Shaper/Mechanist universe (The Washington Post).
Acclaimed science fiction luminary and a godfather of the genre’s remarkable offspring—cyberpunk—Bruce Sterling carries readers to a far-future universe where stunning achievements in human development have been tainted by a virulent outbreak of prejudice and hatred.
Many thousands of years in the future, the human race has split into two incompatible factions. The aristocratic Mechanists believe that humans can only achieve their greatest potential through technology and enhancing their bodies with powerful prosthetics. The rebel Shapers view these “improvements” as abominations, and their faith in genetic enhancements over mechanical ones has led to violent, even murderous, clashes between the two sects.
One man is caught in the middle. The child of Mechanists, Abelard Lindsay is a former Shaper diplomat who was betrayed and cast out of the fold. Scrupulously trained in the fine art of treachery and deceit, he travels freely between the warring camps during his never-ending exile, embracing piracy and revolution all along the way. But while saving his own skin is Lindsay’s main motivation, a greater destiny awaits him, one that could offer a bold new hope for a tragically sundered humankind.
A breathtaking flight of unparalleled imagination, Bruce Sterling’s Schismatrix Plus also includes every subsequent excursion into the Mechanist and Shaper universe, complementing his acclaimed novel with the complete collection of mind-boggling Schismatrix short fiction. The result is is a total immersion into the Mechanist/Shaper universe from the Hugo, Campbell, and Arthur C. Clarke Award–winning author called “a writer of excellent fineness” by Harlan Ellison and “one of the very best” by Publishers Weekly.
In a world drowning in data, a fugitive tries to outrun the forces that want to reprogram him, in this smart, edgy novel by a Hugo Award–winning author.
Constantly shifting his identity among a population choking on information, innovation, and novelty, Nickie Haflinger is a most dangerous outlaw, yet he doesn’t even appear to exist. As global society falls apart in all directions, with corporate power run amok and personal freedom surrendered to computers and bureaucrats, Haflinger is caught and about to be re-programmed. Now he has to try to escape once again, defy the government—and turn the tide of organizational destruction, in this visionary science fiction novel by the author of The Sheep Look Up and Stand on Zanzibar.
“Brunner writes about the future as if he and the reader were already living in it.” —The New York Times Book Review
“When John Brunner first told me of his intention to write the book, I was fascinated—but I wondered whether he, or anyone, could bring it off. Bring it off he has, with cool brilliance. A hero with transient personalities, animals with souls, think tanks and survival communities fuse to form a future so plausibly alive it as twitched at me ever since.” —Alvin Toffler, author of Future Shock
“One of the most important science fiction authors. Brunner held a mirror up to reflect our foibles because he wanted to save us from ourselves.” —SF Site
A MOST UNIQUE APOCALYPSE from Grand Master Gordon R. Dickson
RIDERS ON THE TIME STORM
The time storm had devastated the Earth, and all but a small fraction of humankind has vanished. In the rubble of the world, three survivors had formed an unlikely trio: Marc Despard, determined to find a way to stop the time storm; a leopard, dazed by the storm and following after Despard like a kitten; and a young woman with an unbreakable bond to the leopard.
Now, Marc searches relentlessly for a clue to the nature of the storm, not guessing that the time storm threatens not just the Earth but the entire universe—and that his two companions were the only hope of reversing the distortions in the fabric of the cosmos that were about to bring an end to all of space and time . . .
After the collapse of civilization, when the social fabric of America has come apart in bloody rags, when every man’s hand is raised against another, and only the strong survive. “Jeebee” Walther was a scientist, a student of human behavior, who saw the Collapse of the world economy coming, but could do nothing to stop it.
Now he must make his way across a violent and lawless America, in search of a refuge where he can keep the spark of knowledge alive in the coming Dark Age. He could never make it on his own, but he has found a companion who can teach him how to survive on instinct and will. Jeebee has been adopted by a great Gray Wolf.
There is also a little known novelette published 3 years after in the same universe available here
Hardwired, the acknowledged inspiration for the games Cyberpunk Red and Cyberpunk 2077, is now available in a deluxe edition for its thirtieth anniversary, with new content by the author.
Earth lies prostrate beneath the lash of the Orbital powers, and Earth’s Balkanized nations have no choice but to let the Orbitals plunder their remaining wealth. Below the zone of Orbital control, buttonheads, panzerjocks, dirtgirls, and hustlers scramble for their ticket out of the gravity well.
But now, if the criminal underworld and the guerrilla underground can join forces, there is a chance to shift the balance of power— in a war fought on the ground by hardwired commandos, in the air by high-flying deltajocks, and by genius hackers in the neural interface.
In the high-tech laboratories of tomorrow a new breed of super-soldier is born!
The brutal face of warfare has been dramatically altered. Armored giants now roam the explosive fields of battle. Massive instruments of devastation with computer minds inseparably linked with the brainwaves of their human masters. They are the Warbots. Men and machines combined to create the most lethal warriors in the history of armed conflict.
But a monstrous challenge emerges for the mechanical gladiators emanating from a country that technology forgot. As Captain Curt Carson leads his robot infantry in a daring attempt to rescue 105 hostages from the sadistic clutches of a bloodthirsty terrorist army, the soldiers of tomorrow face the butchers of yesterday in a battle for the future of the free world.
The first book in a 12-part series that has been out of print for many years is now back!
THE INSPIRATION FOR JUSTIFIED: CITY PRIMEVAL ON FX
“As gritty and hard-driving a thriller as you’ll find….The action never stops, the language sings and stings.” —Washington Post
The City Primeval in Elmore Leonard’s relentlessly gripping classic noir is Detroit, the author’s much-maligned hometown and the setting for many of the Grand Master’s acclaimed crime novels. The “Alexander the Great of crime fiction” (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) shines in these urban mean streets, setting up a downtown showdown between the psychopathic, thrill-killing “Oklahoma Wildman” and the dedicated city cop who’s determined to take him down. The creator of U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens of TV’s Justified fame, Elmore Leonard is the equal of any writer who has ever captivated readers with dark tales of heists, hijacks, double-crosses, and murder—John D. MacDonald, Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, and Robert Parker included—and nobody then or now is better.
From the master of high action comes a classic espionage thriller that changed the way spy novels were written, the first to combine the British tradition of authentic espionage tradecraft with the American tradition of non-stop action.
He visited them in the orphanage. He brought them candy and taught them to love him as a father. He trained them to be assassins. Now he is trying desperately to have them killed. Spanning the globe and decades of CIA history, THE BROTHERHOOD OF THE ROSE is a thriller of fierce loyalty and violent betrayal, of murders planned and coolly executed, of revenge bitterly, urgently desired.
“David Morrell is a master of suspense. He wields it like a stiletto—know just where to stick it and how to turn it. If you’re reading Morrell, you’re sitting on the edge of your seat.”
—Michael Connelly
“Imagine a suspense thriller as riveting as The Thirty-Nine Steps or Rogue Male, featuring heroes the equal of Adam Hall’s Quiller, and crackling with more action than The Road Warrior, Dirty Harry, and The Seven Samurai. Sounds too good to be true? Then just read David Morrell’s THE BROTHERHOOD OF THE ROSE.”—Washington Post Book World
“Fast-paced, intelligent, exciting and hard-hitting.”
—Nelson DeMille, New York Times bestselling author of The Panther
“David Morrell is, to me, the finest thriller writer living today.”
—Steve Berry, New York Times bestselling author of The Columbus Affair
