Quicksilver is the story of Daniel Waterhouse, fearless thinker and conflicted Puritan, pursuing knowledge in the company of the greatest minds of Baroque-era Europe, in a chaotic world where reason wars with the bloody ambitions of the mighty, and where catastrophe, Read more
Before Sam Spade, before Philip Marlowe, before Mike Hammer, before Lew Archer, and before nearly every hard-boiled detective in mystery fiction, there was the Continental Op. Who was he? No one knows, since Dashiell Hammett never gives his name. Through Read more
The story revolves around Lawrence Smith—also known as “Lorenzo the Great”—a down-and-out actor wasting the remainder of his life in bars.
When he encounters a space-pilot who offers him a drink, before he knows what is going on, he is on Mars involved in a deep conspiracy with global consequences. He is given a mission where failure would not only mean his own death, it would almost certainly mean an all-out planetary war.
“Heinlein’s novels of the 1940s and 50s shaped every single science fiction writer of my generation and everyone currently writing science fiction. Or making science fiction movies … and Double Star is an excellent example of all the reasons why.”—Connie Willis
