Date: 1990-2010

Cosmonaut Keep: The Opening Novel in An Astonishing New Future History (Engines of Light Book 1)

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Cosmonaut Keep: The Opening Novel in An Astonishing New Future History (Engines of Light Book 1)
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Ranging from a gritty near-future Earth to a distant alien world, Ken MacLeod’s Cosmonaut Keep is contemporary science fiction at its highest level. A visionary epic filled with daring individuals seeking a place for themselves in a vast, complex, and enigmatic universe.

Matt Cairns is a 21st-century outlaw Programmer who takes on the shady jobs no one else will touch. Against his better judgment, he accepts an assignment to crack the Marshall Titov, a top-secret orbital station operated by the European Space Agency. But what Matt will discover there will propel him on an extraordinary and quite unexpected journey.

Gregor Cairns is an exobiology student and descendant of one of Terra Nova’s first families. Hopelessly infatuated with a lovely young trader’s daughter, he is unaware that his research partner, Elizabeth, has fallen in love with him. Together, Gregor and Elizabeth confront the great work his family began three centuries earlier-to rediscover the secret of interstellar travel.

Cryptonomicon

Cryptonomicon
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Neal Stephenson hacks into the secret histories of nations and the private obsessions of men, decrypting with dazzling virtuosity the forces that shaped this century.

In 1942, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse – mathematical genius and young Captain in the US Navy – is assigned to Detachment 2702. It is an outfit so secret that only a handful of people know it exists, and some of those people have names like Churchill and Roosevelt. The mission of Watrehouse and Detachment 2702 – commanded by Marine Raider Bobby Shaftoe – is to keep the Nazis ignorant of the fact that Allied Intelligence has cracked the enemy’s fabled Enigma code. It is a game, a cryptographic chess match between Waterhouse and his German counterpart, translated into action by the gung-ho Shaftoe and his forces.

Fast-forward to the present, where Waterhouse’s crypto-hacker grandson, Randy, is attempting to create a “data haven” in Southeast Asia – a place where encrypted data can be stored and exchanged free of repression and scrutiny. As governments and multinationals attack the endeavor, Randy joins forces with Shaftoe’s tough-as-nails granddaughter, Amy, to secretly salvage a sunken Nazi submarine that holds the key to keeping the dream of a data haven afloat.

But soon their scheme brings to light a massive conspiracy, with its roots in Detachment 2702, linked to an unbreakable Nazi code called Arethusa. And it will represent the path to unimaginable riches and a future of personal and digital liberty…or to universal totalitarianism reborn.

A breathtaking tour de force, and Neal Stephenson’s most accomplished and affecting work to date, Cryptonomicon is profound and prophetic, hypnotic and hyper-driven, as it leaps forward and back between World War II and the World Wide Web, hinting all the while at a dark day-after-tomorrow. It is a work of great art, thought, and creative daring.

Kings of the High Frontier

Kings of the High Frontier
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Three-time Prometheus Award-winning novelist Victor Koman, who tracked down God in The Jehovah Contract and solved the abortion dilemma in Solomon’s Knife, brings you his epic novel of a past that might have been and a future that will drive humanity’s next stage of evolution: the jump into Space.

America, 1994. Nearly everything seems familiar: the World Trade Center twin towers watch proudly over Manhattan; the Russian space station Mir still orbits Earth; the International Space Station has yet to be built. This America, however, is not quite as we remember it: a sixth shuttle, Constitution, prepares to make its maiden voyage; Senator Ludlow Woolsey III and Dr. Barry Gibbon conspire to place the U.S. space program under the authority of the United Nations Interplanetary Treaty Organization; and the National Security Agency allies with NASA to prevent anyone from challenging the government’s monopoly on Space.

Tammy Reis, NASA Space Shuttle commander, works for the most highly funded, technologically advanced space program in the world. So why do nightmares of the Challenger disaster haunt her sleep? And why does her beloved NASA seem no longer capable of matching the stunning successes of its glorious past?

Billionaire Laurence Poubelle wants to build his own orbital X-15 spaceplane. Can his keen marketing skills overcome a decadent culture hostile to wealth and contemptuous of adventure? Can he single-handedly launch the greatest Space Race in history?

The great-great-great-great grand nephew of Davy Crockett and his cadre of college students secretly build a single-stage-to-orbit rocket-copter in an abandoned warehouse in the South Bronx. Can anyone stop them before their low-rent launch attempt sets the New York skyline ablaze?

Russian nuclear missile commander Col. Vladimir Tuchapski subverts a disarmament treaty to attempt an impossible theft. Can he hijack the abandoned space station Mir and restore the glory of the crumbled Soviet Union?

Rocket engineer Gerald Cooper struggles in a tiny spacecraft-design company in the Mojave Desert. Who wants him stopped — or dead?

NSA operative Montgomery Barron fights to construct his own answer to clandestine launch-vehicle efforts: the orbital killer-spaceplane Huntress. Will he achieve the goal of Project Stark Fist to control the spaceways?

Shadowy black-marketeer and smuggler Marcus Aurelius Grant — hidden from scrutiny in a failed African state — concocts an ambitious conspiracy more daring than anyone can imagine. Tammy Reis — stripped of her astronaut wings for resisting a politician’s brutal advances in orbit — is recruited by the National Security Agency to infiltrate Grant’s inner circle. When she discovers his deepest secret, she faces an impossible choice: duty to her government or loyalty to her heart, mind, and soul.

Molon Labe!

Molon Labe!
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After a decade of retaking their stolen freedoms, the people of Wyoming (many of them newcomers) are forced to finally confront their jealous masters in the U.S. Government. Can a lone, courageous state successfully resist federal tyranny, or has the Bill of Rights been reduced to a myth? Can an allegedly free people act free, or is our liberty just a 4th of July farce?
These issues weigh heavily on the shoulders of Governor James Wayne Preston, a decorated Desert Storm Marine helo pilot. Elected in 2014 on the Laissez-Faire Party ticket, he enjoys nearly full support of the legislature to return Wyoming to a long-lost era of liberty. But how far can he and the people of his state go before Washington, D.C. feels compelled to act? Will Wyoming’s free and independent course reach actual secession? Will President Melvin Connor suppress the maverick Western state with federal troops? Will anybody come to Wyoming’s aid?
Molon Labe! is a fictional account of a real-world blueprint for a free state initiative focused on Wyoming. If enough freedom-loving individuals will relocate there under a useful pattern, they can “liberate” the Cowboy State on many levels. In Wyoming we could truly enjoy our rights of gun ownership, privacy, schooling, health and diet, unrestricted travel, and property. Boston shows us how it actually can be done!

A Talent For War (Alex Benedict serie)

A Talent For War (Alex Benedict serie)
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The acclaimed classic novel and fan favorite—the far-future story of one man’s quest to discover the truth behind a galactic war hero.

Christopher Sim changed mankind’s history forever when he forged a rag-tag group of misfits into the weapon that broke the alien Ashiyyur. But now, one man believes Sim was a fraud, and Alex must follow the legend into the heart of the alien galaxy to confront a truth far stranger than any fiction. Reissue.

Singularity Sky

Singularity Sky
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In a technologically suppressed future, information demands to be free in the debut novel from Hugo Award-winning author Charlie Stross.

In the twenty-first century, life as we know it changed. Faster-than-light travel was perfected, and the Eschaton, a superhuman artificial intelligence, was born. Four hundred years later, the far-flung colonies that arose as a result of these events—scattered over three thousand years of time and a thousand parsecs of space—are beginning to rediscover their origins.

The New Republic is one such colony. It has existed for centuries in self-imposed isolation, rejecting all but the most basic technology. Now, under attack by a devastating information plague, the colony must reach out to Earth for help. A battle fleet is dispatched, streaking across the stars to the rescue. But things are not what they seem—secret agendas and ulterior motives abound, both aboard the ship and on the ground. And watching over it all is the Eschaton, which has its own very definite ideas about the outcome…

Beggars in Spain

Beggars in Spain
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In a world where the slightest edge can mean the difference between success and failure, Leisha Camden is beautiful, extraordinarily intelligent … and one of an ever-growing number of human beings who have been genetically modified to never require sleep.

Once considered interesting anomalies, now Leisha and the other “Sleepless” are outcasts — victims of blind hatred, political repression, and shocking mob violence meant to drive them from human society … and, ultimately, from Earth itself.

But Leisha Camden has chosen to remain behind in a world that envies and fears her “gift” — a world marked for destruction in a devastating conspiracy of freedom … and revenge.

Days of Infamy: A Novel of Alternate History

Days of Infamy: A Novel of Alternate History
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On December 7, 1941, the Japanese launched an attack against U.S. naval forces stationed in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. But what if the Japanese followed up their air assault with an invasion and occupation of Hawaii? This is the question explored by Harry Turtledove in Days of Infamy, with frightening implications.

With American military forces subjugated and civilians living in fear of their conquerors, there is no one to stop the Japanese from using the islands’ resources to launch an offensive against America’s western coast.

American Front (The Great War series Book 1)

American Front (The Great War series Book 1)
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“This is state-of-the-art alternate history, nothing less.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

When the Great War engulfed Europe in 1914, the United States and the Confederate States of America, bitter enemies for five decades, entered the fray on opposite sides: the United States aligned with the newly strong Germany, while the Confederacy joined forces with their longtime allies, Britain and France. But it soon became clear to both sides that this fight would be different—that war itself would never be the same again. For this was to be a protracted, global conflict waged with new and chillingly efficient innovations—the machine gun, the airplane, poison gas, and trench warfare.

Across the Americas, the fighting raged like wildfire on multiple and far-flung fronts. As President Theodore Roosevelt rallied the diverse ethnic groups of the northern states—Irish and Italians, Mormons and Jews—Confederate President Woodrow Wilson struggled to hold together a Confederacy still beset by ignorance, prejudice, and class divisions. And as the war thundered on, southern blacks, oppressed for generations, found themselves fatefully drawn into a climactic confrontation . . .

How Few Remain

How Few Remain
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From the master of alternate history comes an epic of the second Civil War. It was an epoch of glory and success, of disaster and despair. . . .

1881: A generation after the South won the Civil War, America writhed once more in the bloody throes of battle. Furious over the annexation of key Mexican territory, the United States declared total war against the Confederate States of America in 1881.

But this was a new kind of war, fought on a lawless frontier where the blue and gray battled not only each other but the Apache, the outlaw, the French, and the English. As Confederate General Stonewall Jackson again demonstrated his military expertise, the North struggled to find a leader who could prove his equal. In the Second War Between the States, the times, the stakes, and the battle lines had changed–and so would history. . .