Showing results by publisher "W. F. Howes Ltd" in Hard Science Fiction

In the thousand-sun network of humanity's expansion, new colony worlds are struggling to find their way. Every new planet lives on a knife-edge between collapse and wonder, and the crew of the aging gunship Rocinante have their hands more than full keeping the fragile peace. In the vast space...

A GRIPPING TECHNO-THRILLER BY THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF NEUROMANCER, THE THIRD NOVEL IN THE BRIDGE TRILOGY The Bridge, San Francisco, after the quake: Ex-cop Berry Rydell has been hired by Colin Laney - who is hooked deep into the network of things - to go to San Francisco and act in such a way...

Count Zero is a rustbelt data-hustler totally unprepared for what comes his way when the designer's defection triggers war in cyberspace. With voodoo gods in the Net and angels in the software, he can only hope that the megacorps and the super-rich have their virtual hands too full to notice the amateur hacker with the black market kit trying desperately to stay alive....

Household gizmos with a mind of their own. the wrong kind of cold calls. And the creeping suspicion that none of this is real. Reality, and Other Stories is a gathering of deliciously chilling entertainments - stories to be listened to as the evenings draw in and the days are haunted by uncanny technologies and the absurd horrors of modern life. 

From the author of The Three-Body Problem, a collection of award-winning short stories - a breathtaking selection of diamond-hard science fiction. Stories included are 'The Village Teacher', 'The Time Migration', '2018-04-01', 'Fire in the Earth', 'Contraction', 'Mirror', 'Ode to Joy', 'Full Spectrum Barrage Jamming', 'Sea of Dreams', 'Cloud of Poems' and 'The Thinker'. 

When the silent spacecraft arrived and took the light from the world, no one knew what to expect. When the Overlords finally showed themselves it was a shock but one that humankind could now cope with, and an era of peace, prosperity and endless leisure began. But the children of this utopia dream strange dreams of distant suns and alien planets, and soon they will be ready to join the Overmind...and, in a grand and thrilling metaphysical climax, leave Earth behind.

Throughout the universe, intelligence is a rare and fragile commodity - a fleeting glimmer in the long night of cosmic history. That Earth should harbour not just one but two intelligent species at the same time defies the odds. That these species, so unalike - and yet so complementary - should forge an alliance that kindled a civilisation defies logic. But time is endless and everything comes to pass eventually....

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.

"Flowers in the rain, indeed. Big jump in the grain count. I can hear them jumping. This old hippy is sneezing already. Ya Ya! The flowers are spurting pollen all over the Manchester map. Gumbo never seen such a giant, golden step before." In a strange re-mixed future Manchester a cloud of...

Totally feathered up and living on the dub side... Take a trip in a stranger’s head. Travel rain-shot streets with a gang of hip malcontents, hooked on the most powerful drug you can imagine. Yet Vurt feathers are not for the weak. As the mysterious Game Cat says, ‘Be careful, be very...

Grad-school dropout Matt Fuller is toiling as a lowly research assistant at MIT when, while measuring quantum relationships between gravity and light, his calibrator disappears - and reappears, one second later. In fact, every time Matt hits the reset button, the machine goes missing twelve...

Ray Bradbury meets The Martian in this chilling tale of Mars' first colony, fallen to madness after all contact with Earth ceased, perfect for fans of Jeff VanderMeer. Anabelle Crisp is fourteen when the Silence arrives, severing all communication between Earth and her new home on Mars. One...

Fourteen people arrive on the strange planet of Delmak-O. They have nothing in common other than a desire to make a fresh start–and they have no idea why they are there and no way of escaping. And then the first murder takes place....

Val and Julie just want what's best for their kids, David and Sophie. So when teenage son David comes home one day asking for a Pilot, a new brain implant to help with school, they reluctantly agree. This is the future, after all. Soon, Julie feels mounting pressure at work to get a Pilot to keep pace with her colleagues, leaving Val and Sophie part of the shrinking minority of people without the device.

Gundersen returns to Holman’s World seeking atonement for his harsh years as colonial governor. But now this lush, exotic planet of mystery is called by its ancient name of Belzagor, and it belongs once again to its native alien races, the nildoror and the sulidoror. Drawn by its spell, Gundersen begins a harrowing pilgrimage to its mist-shrouded north to witness a strange ritual rebirth that will alter him forever.

Four students discover a manuscript, The Book of Skulls, which reveals the existence of a sect, now living in the Arizona desert, whose members can offer immortality to those who can complete its initiation rite. To their surprise, they discover that the sect exists, and is willing to accept them as acolytes. But for each group of four who enter the rite, two must die in order for the others to succeed.