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One night in October when he was ten years old, Tyler Dupree stood in his back yard and watched the stars go out. They all flared into brilliance at once, then disappeared, replaced by a flat, empty black barrier. He and his best friends, Jason and Diane Lawton, had seen what became known as the Big Blackout. It would shape their lives. The effect is worldwide. The sun is now a featureless disk - a heat source, rather than an astronomical object. The moon is gone, but tides remain. Not only have the world's artificial satellites fallen out of orbit, their recovered remains are pitted and aged, as though they'd been in space far longer than their known lifespans. As Tyler, Jason, and Diane gr...
At the foot of a chalk hill a stream rises in a silent copse, and is soon lost under the car parks and streets of the town its waters once gave life to. Captivated by the fate of this forgotten stream Charles Rangeley-Wilson sets out one winter’s day to uncover its story. Distilled into the timeless passage of the river’s flow, buried under the pavements that cover meadow, marsh and hill he finds dreamers and visionaries, a chronicle of paradises lost or never found, men who shaped the land and its history.
Scott Warden is a man haunted by the past - and soon to be haunted by the future. In early twenty-first-century Thailand, Scott is an expatriate slacker. Then, one day, he inadvertently witnesses an impossible event: the violent appearance of a 200-foot stone pillar in the forested interior. Its arrival collapses trees for a quarter mile around its base, freezing ice out of the air and emitting a burst of ionizing radiation. It appears to be composed of an exotic form of matter. And the inscription chiseled into it commemorates a military victory...sixteen years in the future. Shortly afterwards, another, larger pillar arrives in the center of Bangkok - obliterating the city and killing thousands. Over the next several years, human society is transformed by these mysterious arrivals from, seemingly, our own near future. Who is the warlord "Kuin" whose victories they note? Scott wants only to rebuild his life. But some strange look of causality keeps drawing him in, to the central mystery and a final battle with the future.
A radical reappraisal of Charles Darwin from the bestselling author of Victoria: A Life. With the publication of On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin—hailed as the man who "discovered evolution"—was propelled into the pantheon of great scientific thinkers, alongside Galileo, Copernicus, and Newton. Eminent writer A. N. Wilson challenges this long-held assumption. Contextualizing Darwin and his ideas, he offers a groundbreaking critical look at this revered figure in modern science. In this beautifully written, deeply erudite portrait, Wilson argues that Darwin was not an original scientific thinker, but a ruthless and determined self-promoter who did not credit the many great sages w...
The Hugo Award–winning author of Spin, praised as “a hell of a storyteller” by Stephen King, gives time travel his own mind-bending twist . . . Two events made September 1st a memorable day for Jesse Cullum. First, he lost a pair of Oakley sunglasses. Second, he saved the life of President Ulysses S. Grant. In the near future of Robert Charles Wilson’s Last Year, the technology exists to open doorways into the past—but not our past, not exactly. Each “past” is effectively an alternate world, identical to ours but only up to the date on which we access it. And a given “past” can only be reached once. After a passageway is open, it’s the only road to that particular past; o...
The World Next Door. Engineered by the mysterious Hypotheticals to support human life, it's connected to Earth by way of the Arch that towers hundreds of miles over the Indian ocean. Humans are colonizing this new world - and, predictably, exploiting its resources, chiefly large deposits of oil in the western deserts of the continent of Equatoria. Lise Adams is a young woman attempting to uncover the mystery of her father's disappearance ten years ago. Turk Findley is an ex-sailor and sometime drifter. They come together when an infall of cometary dust seeds the planet with tiny Hypothetical machines. Now Lise, Turk, a Martian woman, and a boy who has been engineered to communicate with the Hypotheticals, are drawn to a place in the desert where this seemingly hospitable world has become suddenly very alien indeed - and the nature of time is being once again twisted by entities unknown.
This collection of original essays written by friends, colleagues and former students is a tribute to Charles Wilson. Running through the essays is the theme of enterprise in history and especially in the two fields in which Charles Wilson has been pre-eminent: business history and the economic relations of England and the Netherlands. This volume presents a comprehensive set of studies of diverse examples of the forms, consequences and interpretations of economic enterprise in history.
Chew On This should be on every teenager's essential reading list. Based on Eric Schlosser's bestselling Fast Food Nation, this is the shocking truth about the fast food industry - how it all began, its success, what fast food actually is, what goes on in the slaughterhouses, meatpacking factories and flavour labs, global advertising, merchandising in UK schools, mass production and the exploitation of young workers in the thousands of fast-food outlets throughout the world. It also takes a look at the effects on the environment and the highly topical issue of obesity. Meticulously researched, lively and informative, with first-hand accounts and quotes from children and young people, Eric Schlosser presents the facts in such a way that allows readers to make up their own minds about the incredible fast food phenomenon. Eric Schlosser is an author and investigative journalist based in New York. His first book, FAST FOOD NATION was a major international bestseller. His work has appeared in 'Atlantic Monthly', 'Rolling Stone' and the Guardian. CHEW ON THIS is his first book for children.
Spin ended with the alien Hypotheticals setting a vast Arch over the Indian Ocean. Those who sailed under it found themselves on Equatoria, another planet entirely. In Axis, a secretive Equatorian community of Fourths - humans who've had their lives extended by illegal Martian technology - raised a boy, Isaac Dvali, to communicate with the Hypotheticals. Interstellar clouds of tiny fragmented Hypothetical nanomachines rained down on Equatoria, an some began to grow. Isaac and Turk Findley, a tough bush pilot an former drifter, were absorbed by a vast concatenation of those growths. Now, Turk Findley has awakened ten thousand years later, to be collected by the people of Vox - an Equatorian group that's obsessed with the Hypotheticals. The Vox have been waiting for Turn and Isaac for a very long time. Meanwhile, the story of Turk and Isaac among the people of Vox is being scrawled in notebooks by a disturbed man in a hospital on twenty-first-century Earth, in the years following the Spin . . .