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A MODERN SCIENCE FICTION CLASSIC FROM WIL MCCARTHY In the eighth decade of the Queendom of Sol, three commodities rule the day. The first is wellstone, a form of programmable matter capable of emulating almost any substance: natural, artificial, even hypothetical. The second is collapsium, a deadly crystal composed of miniature black holes, vital for the transmission of information and matter—including humans—throughout the solar system. The third is the bitter rivalry between Her Majesty's top scientists. Bruno de Towaji, famed lover and statesman, dreams of building an arc de fin, an almost mythical device capable of probing the farthest reaches of spacetime. Marlon Sykes, de Towaji's ...
A man-made fungus called mycora has wiped out most of humanity on Earth and on several planets, but reports persist of human survivors in colder climes. A voyage of exploration is mounted to contact them, but the ship is attacked by mycora's allies.
EXILED FROM IMMORTALITY!The third entry in McCarthy's groundbreaking, mind-bending Queendom of Sol series back in print. Brash and idealistic, they were rebels without a cause in a world governed by science, reason . . . and immortality. Banished for their troubles to the starship Newhope, they now face a bold future: to settle the worlds of Barnard’s Star. Now King Bascal Edward de Towaji Lutui, former prince of the Queendom of Sol, together with Captain Xiomara “Xmary” Li Weng and her lover, first mate Conrad Mursk, face a perilous voyage with thousands of their fellow exiles. The journey will last a century, but with Queendom technology it’s no problem to step into a fax machine and “print” a fresh, youthful version of yourself. But what this crew of rebels will find is far from the paradise they seek. Before long, their optimistic young colony has started to show signs of strain. And worst of all, death itself has returned with a vengeance.
Programmable matter is probably not the next technological revolution, nor even perhaps the one after that. But it's coming, and when it does, it will change our lives as much as any invention ever has. Imagine being able to program matter itself-to change it, with the click of a cursor, from hard to soft, from paper to stone, from fluorescent to super-reflective to invisible. Supported by companies ranging from Levi Strauss to IBM and the Defense Department, solid-state physicists in laboratories at MIT, Harvard, Sun Microsystems, and elsewhere are currently creating arrays of microscopic devices called "quantum dots" that are capable of acting like programmable atoms. They can be configure...
A NEW NOVEL OF REAL SF FROM WIL McCARTHY Space: a tycoon's playground. From a space station full of women to a monastery on the Moon, from a Martian reality-TV contest to a solar shade large enough to cool the Earth, the dreams of a handful of trillionaires dictate the future of humanity. Outside the reach of Earthly law and with the vast resources of the inner solar system at their disposal, the “Four Horsemen” do exactly as they please. The governments of Earth are not amused; an international team of elite military women, masquerading as space colonists, are set to infiltrate and neutralize the largest and most dangerous project in human history. But nothing is that simple when rich m...
A wildly original alien contact novel, set against a vivid backdrop of near-Earth corporate intrigue. Trillionaire Igbal Renz has constructed a starship capable of making the twenty-year journey to Alpha Centauri. So why is he stopping at barely one-tenth that distance, with a cargo of a hundred frozen scientists and diplomats? Rumors abound that Renz Ventures, Inc., has made contact with . . . something. And yet, as deadly stealth ships prowl the space lanes and as the corporate space race threatens to devolve into outright warfare, the Four Horsemen of space industry are discovering firsthand that even in a limitless and lawless frontier, no one can ever be truly self-sufficient. At the pu...
In the conclusion to this epic interstellar adventure by Nebula Award nominee Wil McCarthy, humanity stands at a crossroads as the heroes who fashioned a man-made heaven must rescue their descendants from eternal damnation…. TO CRUSH THE MOON Once the Queendom of Sol was a glowing monument to humankind’s loftiest dreams. Ageless and immortal, its citizens lived in peaceful splendor. But as Sol buckled under the swell of an immorbid population, space itself literally ran out…. Conrad Mursk has returned to Sol on the crippled starship Newhope. His crew are the frozen refugees of a failed colony known as Barnard’s Star. A thousand years older, Mursk finds Sol on the brink of rebellion, while a fanatic necro cult is reviving death itself. Now Mursk and his lover, Captain Xiomara “Xmary” Li Weng, are sent on a final, desperate mission by King Bruno de Towaji–one of the greatest terraformers of the ages–to literally crush the moon. If they succeed, they’ll save billions of lost souls. If they fail, they’ll strand humanity between death–and something unimaginably worse…. From the Paperback edition.
This collection of original new stories by today's masters of science fiction and fantasy contains classic fairy tales gone "techno, " with such familiar favorites as "Sleeping Beauty, " "The Emperor's New Clothes, " and "Goldilocks and the Three Bears" given an outer-space spin. Authors include Thomas Wylde, Ronnie Seagren, Stanley Schmidt, Tanya Huff, and Bruce Holland Rogers.
What if all our legends are true? A rousing, fast-paced novel of time travel unlike any other, from acclaimed author Wil McCarthy. What if our legends are older than we think? All the Stone Age has left behind are rocks and bones; all other materials have rotted away, leaving no trace. But what if “cave men” never existed, and the Stone Age was a time of great sophistication still preserved in our oldest stories? In a brilliant and dangerous brain hacking experiment, Harv Leonel and Tara Mukherjee are about to discover entire lifetimes of human memory coded in our genes, and reveal ancient legends – from knights and trolls, to flood myths, to the birth of humanity itself – that are a...
This hard-science, page-turning suspense novel of one man's battle to save his life, career, and country in 21st-century America provides a Heinleinesque examination of how nanotechnology offers both the possibility of unparalleled freedom and the danger of inescapable totalitarianism.