Showing results for "William" in Hard Science Fiction

After an attack of scruples, Colin Laney's skipped out on his former employer Slitscan—avoiding the rash of media lawyers sent his way—and taken a job for the outfit managing Japanese rock duo, Lo/Rez. Rez has announced he's going to marry an "idoru" by the name of Rei Toi—she exists only in virtual reality—and this creates complications that Laney, a net runner, is supposed to sort out.

Leon Tsarev is a high school student set on getting into a great college program, until his uncle, a member of the Russian mob, coerces him into developing a new computer virus for the mob's botnet - the slave army of computers they used to commit digital crimes. The evolutionary virus Leon creates, based on biological principles, is successful - too successful. All the world's computers are infected.

More than a year after his girlfriend’s death, legendary hacker West Wilder receives a cryptic message: She’s alive. Who is trying to tear open his wounds? For what cruel reason? Teaming up with his tinker friend Jitterbug, West embarks on a desperate hunt for answers. Meanwhile, the digital world plunges into chaos as all transatlantic internet cables go dark. Governments execute contingency plans but stay mum, corporations panic, and the media struggles to inform the public what’s going on.

This hacker thriller, ripped from the headlines of today's newspapers, envisions a chilling future where citizen hackers are pitted against unaccountable global actors. Everyone who stands up against oppression has to ask themselves – is freedom worth it?

The military SF sequel to his extraordinary Old Man's War, John Scalzi's The Ghost Brigades is the second in The Old Man's War series. Who can you trust, if you can't trust yourself? Three hostile alien races have united against humanity, determined to halt our expansion into space. The...

Set in a lethal waterworld where sudden death is a way of life, The Skinner is the first novel in the far-future Spatterjay series by Neal Asher. The savage ocean planet of Spatterjay draws visitors with very different agendas. Erlin is immortal and seeks a reason to keep living. Janer hosts a...

Orbus continues the adventure of Captain Orbus in Neal Asher's high-octane, science fiction Spatterjay series. A cold war is turning white hot. Old Captain Orbus commandeered a ship to flee Spatterjay, desperate to escape the violent planet. Orbus’s alien enemy, the Prador Vrell, is also...

The Voyage of the Sable Keech returns to Neal Asher's water-bound world of Spatterjay, teeming with bizarre characters and gruesome monsters. Taylor Bloc is a walking dead man, determined to live again. He also wants adulation, power and control – and will do anything to get them. Of Bloc’s...

How did our long-lost ancestors affect our past? More importantly, how will they affect our future? Mark and Julie are brilliant scientists and Major Reagan has kept them and others alive to this point, but the most dangerous confrontations will not be with the Noridians, it will be with the Lower Houses of The Accord. Destiny is a thought-provoking journey that will cause you to inspect your basic values.

By day, Angie, a 20-year veteran of the tech industry, is a data analyst at Tomo, the world's largest social networking company; by night, she exploits her database access to profile domestic abusers and kill the worst of them. She can't change her own traumatic past, but she can save other women. When Tomo introduces a deceptive new product that preys on users' fears to drive up its own revenue, Angie sees Tomo for what it really is - another evil abuser.

Igloo and Angie are the co-founders of a new social network, Tapestry, based on the principles of privacy and data ownership. Two years later, with Tapestry poised to become the world’s largest social network, their rapid growth puts them under government scrutiny. Tapestry’s privacy and security is so effective that it impedes the government’s ability to monitor routine communications. Fearing Tapestry will spread to encompass the whole of the Internet, threatening America’s surveillance abilities around the globe, the government swoops in to stop Angie and company.

Something made a civilization vanish. Now it's coming for the crew of the Pioneer. Malick and the crew of the Pioneer embark on a new adventure to solve the mystery of the 'domes'. These strange shrines make it possible to travel vast distances across Sworld instantly and may offer a way home. Their quest leads them to an abandoned civilization. Its citizens are gone and have left no clues as to why they left or where they went. The capital of this once thriving society is meticulously maintained by sentient robots who offer little insight.

Harry can build a perfect android, but no one likes them unless he can make them more human. Harry's dead wife lends a hand, but Eva, the android, hates him. A first contact goes so smoothly that Ethan falls in love with a blue alien, but soon realizes that some erroneous assumptions have been made... An explorer becomes best friends with an artificial person that he found in his salvaged ship, and the mystery of why such a valuable machine was wiped and left for junk haunts them both. Cobb had an interest in both the vast AI systems that ran everything and how they came to be.

Humanity has existed in peace for over two millennia under the rule of Emperor Ovlour—until now. Wars have been erupting across the galactic colonies, and the Imperial Forces have been called upon to obliterate the aggressors. After his hometown is destroyed, Kass discovers the emperor himself is responsible for covertly inciting the wars. With the help of his new mentor, he vows vengeance against the man who destroyed everything he cared about.

In the aftermath of the Chemical Wars, nature has reclaimed humanity's infrastructure. This world, lush with life - yet dangerously uninhabitable for mankind - houses the remaining population that ekes out an existence in quarantined cities anchored off the mainland. David S. Sparks awakens into the chaos of this future world, unsure of his place in a reality wildly different from his fragmented memories. As the desire to retake the planet swells, so too does the question of how. Will the same mistakes be repeated? And what is David Sparks' role in it all?

For exobiologist Cassie Clearwater, the chance to explore the planet Obsidian is the opportunity of a lifetime. The austere black world has liquid water and a nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere that might support life. She discovers a mysterious species of plant that emits copious quantities of complex chemicals. Her colleagues on the mission care only about the diamonds they've discovered, but Cassie wonders how these plants, and nothing else, thrive in such a dark and barren environment.

Deke Sandborn is the executive officer on a cargo ship bound for deep space. He thinks it's just a regular run, but that was before they lost propulsion, had to land on an alien planet, and he killed his captain. Now he's been told by an alien mystic that he has to invent a time travel machine, go back in time, and talk a stranger into writing a book that will change civilization. And his day is just getting started.