With over fifty unpredictable, scathing, hilarious, and more-than-occasionally moving essays about science, politics, family, pop culture, religion and more, Peter Watts — Hugo Award-winning author, former marine biologist, and “angry sentient tumor” (via Annalee Newitz, author of Autonomous) — shows why he is the savage dystopian optimist whom you can’t look away from ... even when you probably should. [STARRED REVIEW] “Irreverent, self-depreciating, profane, and funny, showcasing a Hunter S. Thompson–esque studied rage and dissatisfaction with the status quo combined with the readability and humor of John Scalzi.” —Booklist Which of the following is true? Peter Watts is banned from the U.S. Watts almost died from flesh-eating bacteria. A schizophrenic man living in Watts’s backyard almost set the house on fire. Watts was raised by Baptists who really sucked at giving presents. Peter Watts said to read this book. Or else. With Watts's infamous penchant for blunt, honest, and deep reflection, these retrospective essays provide a view inside his head and even into his heart.
A huge international corporation has developed a facility along the Juan de Fuca Ridge at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean to exploit geothermal power. They send a bio-engineered crew--people who have been altered to withstand the pressure and breathe the seawater--down to live and work in this weird, fertile undersea darkness. Unfortunately the only people suitable for long-term employment in these experimental power stations are crazy, some of them in unpleasant ways. How many of them can survive, or will be allowed to survive, while worldwide disaster approaches from below? Starfish, the first installment in Peter Watts' Rifters Trilogy At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Hugo and Shirley Jackson award-winning Peter Watts stands on the cutting edge of hard SF with his acclaimed novel, Blindsight Two months since the stars fell... Two months of silence, while a world held its breath. Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune's orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Whatever's out there isn't talking to us. It's talking to some distant star, perhaps. Or perhaps to something closer, something en route. So who do you send to force introductions with unknown and unknowable alien intellect that doesn't wish to be met? You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees x-rays and tastes ultrasound. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won't be needed. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called vampire, recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. And you send a synthesist—an informational topologist with half his mind gone—as an interface between here and there. Pray they can be trusted with the fate of a world. They may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Prepare for a different kind of singularity in Peter Watts' Echopraxia, the follow-up to the Hugo-nominated novel Blindsight It's the eve of the twenty-second century: a world where the dearly departed send postcards back from Heaven and evangelicals make scientific breakthroughs by speaking in tongues; where genetically engineered vampires solve problems intractable to baseline humans and soldiers come with zombie switches that shut off self-awareness during combat. And it's all under surveillance by an alien presence that refuses to show itself. Daniel Bruks is a living fossil: a field biologist in a world where biology has turned computational, a cat's-paw used by terrorists to kill thousands. Taking refuge in the Oregon desert, he's turned his back on a humanity that shatters into strange new subspecies with every heartbeat. But he awakens one night to find himself at the center of a storm that will turn all of history inside-out. Now he's trapped on a ship bound for the center of the solar system. To his left is a grief-stricken soldier, obsessed by whispered messages from a dead son. To his right is a pilot who hasn't yet found the man she's sworn to kill on sight. A vampire and its entourage of zombie bodyguards lurk in the shadows behind. And dead ahead, a handful of rapture-stricken monks takes them all to a meeting with something they will only call "The Angels of the Asteroids." Their pilgrimage brings Dan Bruks, the fossil man, face-to-face with the biggest evolutionary breakpoint since the origin of thought itself. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
“This—THIS—is the cutting edge of science fiction.” —Richard K. Morgan, author of Altered Carbon How do you stage a mutiny when you're only awake one day in a million? How do you conspire when your tiny handful of potential allies changes with each job shift? How do you engage an enemy that never sleeps, that sees through your eyes and hears through your ears, and relentlessly, honestly, only wants what's best for you? Trapped aboard the starship Eriophora, Sunday Ahzmundin is about to discover the components of any successful revolution: conspiracy, code—and unavoidable casualties. Note from the publisher: The red letters in the print edition (highlighted letters in the e-book) indicate special bonus content.
From the author of Blindsight comes Peter Watts's sci-fi adventure story "The Colonel," an action-packed Tor.com Original Colonel Keaton is in trouble. His wife has retreated into a virtual heaven and his son remains missing after joining an extrasolar mission to track down an alien race. He is presently tasked by his superiors with the threat assessment of hived human intelligences, one of which successfully attacks a compound under his watch. Now, one of the strongest hive minds in the world approaches Keaton with an offer that could completely change his world. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Skillfully combining complex science with finely executed prose, these edgy, award-winning tales explore the always-shifting border between the known and the alien. The beauty and peril of technology and the passion and penalties of conviction merge in stories that are by turns dark, satiric, bold, and introspective. A seemingly humanized monster from John Carpenter’s The Thing reveals the true villains in an Antarctic showdown. An artificial intelligence shields a biologically-enhanced prodigy from her overwhelmed parents. A deep-sea diver discovers that her true nature lies not within the confines of her mission but in the depths of her psyche. A court psychologist analyzes a psychotic graduate student who has learned to reprogram reality itself. A father tries to hold his broken family together in the wake of an ongoing assault by sentient rainstorms. Gorgeously saturnine and exceptionally powerful, these collected fictions are both intensely thought-provoking and impossible to forget.
This ebundle includes: Blindsight, Echopraxia, and The Colonel. From Hugo, Nebula, and John W. Campbell award-nominated author Peter Watts, Firefall is a far-future, science fiction saga of first contact with an alien species at the edge of the solar system–and of the evolution of humanity into a myriad of subspecies. Blindsight: Two months since the stars fell. Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune's orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Whatever's out there isn't talking to us. So who do you send to force introductions with unknown and unknowable alien intellect that doesn't wish to be met? You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees x-rays and tastes ultrasound. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won't be needed. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called vampire, recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. And you send a synthesist—an informational topologist with half his mind gone—as an interface between here and there. Pray they can be trusted with the fate of a world. They may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find. Echopraxia: Daniel Bruks is a living fossil: a field biologist in a world where biology has turned computational, a cat's-paw used by terrorists to kill thousands. Taking refuge in the Oregon desert, he's turned his back on a humanity that shatters into strange new subspecies with every heartbeat. But he awakens one night to find himself trapped on a ship bound for the center of the solar system. Their pilgrimage brings Dan Bruks, the fossil man, face-to-face with the biggest evolutionary breakpoint since the origin of thought itself. The Colonel: Colonel Keaton is in trouble. His wife has retreated into a virtual heaven and his son remains missing after joining an extrasolar mission to track down an alien race. He is presently tasked by his superiors with the threat assessment of hived human intelligences, one of which successfully attacks a compound under his watch. Now, one of the strongest hive minds in the world approaches Keaton with an offer that could completely change his world. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Firefall is the omnibus edition of the novels Blindsight and Echopraxia. February 13, 2082, First Contact. Sixty-two thousand objects of unknown origin plunge into Earth's atmosphere – a perfect grid of falling stars screaming across the radio spectrum as they burn. Not even ashes reach the ground. Three hundred and sixty degrees of global surveillance: something just took a snapshot. And then... nothing. But from deep space, whispers. Something out there talks – but not to us. Two ships, Theseus and the Crown of Thorns, are launched to discover the origin of Earth's visitation, one bound for the outer dark of the Kuiper Belt, the other for the heart of the Solar System. Their crews can barely be called human, what they will face certainly can't. 'A tour de force, redefining the First Contact story for good.' Charles Stross. 'If you only read one science fiction novel this year, make it this one!... It puts the whole of the rest of the genre in the shade... It deserves to walk away with the Clarke, the Hugo, the Nebula, the BSFA, and pretty much any other genre award for which it's eligible. It's off the scale... F**king awesome!' Richard Morgan. 'State-of-the-art science fiction: smart, dark and it grabs you by the throat from page one' Neal Ascher.
MANHATTAN IS UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT. THEY’RE NOT FROM AROUND HERE. Welcome to the Big Apple, son. Welcome to the city that never sleeps: invaded by monstrous fusions of meat and machinery, defended by a private army that makes Blackwater look like the Red Cross, ravaged by a disfiguring plague that gifts its victims with religious rapture while it eats them alive. You’ve been thrown into this meat grinder without warning, without preparation, without a clue. Your whole squad was mowed down the moment they stepped onto the battlefield. And the chorus of voices whispering in your head keeps saying that all of this is on you: that you and you alone might be able to turn the whole thing around if you only knew what the hell was going on. You’d like to help. Really you would. But it’s not just the aliens that are gunning for you. Your own kind hunts you as a traitor, and your job might be a bit easier if you didn’t have the sneaking suspicion they could be right. . . .
Lenie Clarke--amphibious cyborg, Meltdown Madonna, agent of the Apocalypse--has grown sick to death of her own cowardice. For five years (since the events recounted in Maelstrom), she and her bionic brethren (modified to work in the rift valleys of the ocean floor) have hidden in the mountains of the deep Atlantic. The facility they commandeered was more than a secret station on the ocean floor. Atlantis was an exit strategy for the corporate elite, a place where the world's Movers and Shakers had hidden from the doomsday microbe ßehemoth--and from the hordes of the moved and the shaken left behind. For five years "rifters" and "corpses" have lived in a state of uneasy truce, united by fear of the outside world. But now that world closes in. An unknown enemy hunts them through the crushing darkness of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. ßehemoth--twisted, mutated, more virulent than ever--has found them already. The fragile armistice between the rifters and their one-time masters has exploded into all-out war, and not even the legendary Lenie Clarke can take back the body count. Billions have died since she loosed ßehemoth upon the world. Billions more are bound to. The whole biosphere came apart at the seams while Lenie Clarke hid at the bottom of the sea and did nothing. But now there is no place left to hide. The consequences of past acts reach inexorably to the very floor of the world, and Lenie Clarke must return to confront the mess she made. Redemption doesn't come easy with the blood of a world on your hands. But even after five years in pitch-black purgatory, Lenie Clarke is still Lenie Clarke. There will be consequences for anyone who gets in her way-and worse ones, perhaps, if she succeeds... Behemoth: Seppuku concludes the final act (begun in ßehemoth: ß-Max) of Peter Watts's chilling and powerful Rifters series. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Hiding out with her fellow cyborgs and their surviving creators for five years, Lenie Clarke is horrified when they are discovered by the doomsday microbe Behemoth, a situation that forces Lenie to take responsibility for her role in billions of deaths.
Starfish lit the fuse. Maelstrom was the explosion. But five years into the aftermath, things aren't quite so simple as they once seemed... Lenie Clarke--rifter, avenger, amphibious deep-sea cyborg--has destroyed the world. Once exploited for her psychological addiction to dangerous environments, she emerged in the wake of a nuclear blast to serve up vendetta from the ocean floor. The horror she unleashed--an ancient, apocalyptic microbe called ßehemoth--has been free in the world for half a decade now, devouring the biosphere from the bottom up. North America lies in ruins beneath the thumb of an omnipotent psychopath. Digital monsters have taken Clarke's name, wreaking havoc throughout the decimated remnants of something that was once called Internet. Governments have fallen across the globe; warlords and suicide cults rise from the ashes, pledging fealty to the Meltdown Madonna. All because five years ago, Lenie Clarke had a score to settle. But she has learned something in the meantime: she destroyed the world for a fallacy. Now, cowering at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, rifters and the technoindustrial "corpses" who created them hide from a world in its death throes. But they cannot hide forever: something is tracking them, down amongst the lightless cliffs and trenches of the Midatlantic Ridge. The consequences of past acts reach inexorably towards the very bottom of the world, and Lenie Clarke must finally confront the mess she made. Redemption doesn't come easy with the blood of a world on your hands. But even after five years in purgatory, Lenie Clarke is still Lenie Clarke. There will be consequences for anyone who gets in her way-and worse ones, perhaps, if she succeeds. . . . Behemoth: ß-Max is the first of two volumes. The story will conclude in ßehemoth: Seppuku. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Chloroform is a clear, colourless, volatile liquid which is used in the production of refrigerants and as a fluoropolymer feedstock. It may be released into the environment from chlorodifluoromethane plants and from pulp and paper mills using chlorine-based chemicals for bleaching and disinfection purposes. Chloroform is also the principal by-product of water disinfectant processes. It is estimated that the vast majority of chloroform emissions into the environment are natural in origin. This publication, part of a series from the International Programme on Chemical Safety, evaluates the risk to human health and the environment posed by exposures to chloroform.
When avenger and amphibious deep-sea cyborg Lenie Clarke learns that she has been duped into destroying the world by a corporate group, she emerges in the wake of a nuclear blast to serve up a vendetta from the ocean floor.
As General Secretary of the Labour Party, Peter Watt was at the heart of government and personally witnessed one of the most tumultuous periods in recent political history. 'Inside Out' is the ultimate insider expose: an intimate viewpoint onto the personalities at the heart of government.
Jenseits der Evolution An der Schwelle des zweiundzwanzigsten Jahrhunderts hat sich die Menschheit völlig verwandelt. Wissenschaft und Glaube durchdringen einander, genetisch optimierte Menschen können ihr Bewusstsein abschalten, und Evolution ist zum Alltagsprodukt geworden. In dieser Welt ist Daniel Bruks ein lebendes Fossil: ein Biologe, der der Menschheit den Rücken gekehrt hat. Doch dann wird er auf einem Raumschiff ins Zentrum unseres Sonnensystems geschickt – wo auf ihn eine Entdeckung wartet, die den Lauf des Universums ändern wird ...
Lachlan, John and Phoebe MacDonald, three young children tragically separated after the massacre at the Ballarat goldfields, try to make their way in a world filled with poverty and war. John is determined to find his lost siblings and meanwhile works hard to make a name for himself. A business partnership leads to riches and rewards that he never dreamed of. Lachlan has always known what it is to struggle for survival. But even a life of bare knuckle fighting and destitution cannot prepare him for the war he finds himself in against the Maori of New Zealand, nor the feelings he has for his commanding Officer's sister. Phoebe barely remembers what it is to have a family and yearns for a love that will make her feel complete, and a home to call her own. Three tales of courage, hope and forbidden love set against the backdrop of the New Zealand Maori wars and an emerging Australian nation.
One of Australia's best historical fiction authors' Canberra Weekly Peter Watt brings to the fore all the passion, adventure and white-knuckle battle scenes that made his beloved Duffy and Macintosh novels so popular. It is 1857. Colonial India is a simmering volcano of nationalism about to erupt. Army surgeon Peter Campbell and his wife Alice, in India on their honeymoon, have no idea that they are about to be swept up in the chaos. Ian Steele, known to all as Captain Samuel Forbes, is fighting for Queen and country in Persia. A world away, the real Samuel Forbes is planning to return to London - with potentially disastrous consequences for Samuel and Ian both. Then Ian is posted to India, but not before a brief return to England and a reunion with the woman he loves. In India he renews his friendship with Peter Campbell, and discovers that Alice has taken on a most unlikely role. Together they face the enemy and the terrible deprivations and savagery of war - and then Ian receives news from London that crushes all his hopes... PRAISE FOR THE QUEEN'S TIGER 'Watt has a true knack for producing captivating historical adventures filled with action, intrigue and family drama' Canberra Weekly
Sometimes the fate for which you are destined is not your own... 1845, a village outside Sydney Town. Humble blacksmith Ian Steele struggles to support his widowed mother. All the while he dreams of a life in uniform, serving in Queen Victoria's army. 1845, Puketutu, New Zealand. Second Lieutenant Samuel Forbes, a young poet from an aristocratic English family, wants nothing more than to run from the advancing Maori warriors and discard the officer's uniform he never sought. When the two men cross paths in the colony of New South Wales, they are struck by their brotherly resemblance and quickly hatch a plan for Ian to take Samuel's place in the British army. Ian must travel to England, fool the treacherous Forbes family and accept a commission into their regiment as a company commander. Once in London, he finds love with an enigmatic woman, but must part with her to face battle in the bloody Crimean war. In this first instalment of Peter Watt's new series, Captain Ian Steele stares down the relentless Russian military...but he will soon learn that there are even deadlier enemies close to home.
It is the turn of the 20th century - an era of tumultuous change. What is it that draws Tung Chi, a former Shaolin priest in the service of the Chinese emperor, to the Australian colony of Queensland? This mystery ensnares local businessman John Wong, who fears for his daughter, living across the world in Peking at a time when a revolutionary force known as the Boxers is on the rise. Together Tung and John, with his son, Andrew, embark on a dangerous journey that will lead them into a conflict in which everything is at stake, but allegiances uncertain. The sleeping dragon of China is awakening... From the tropics of Queensland to the heart of the Chinese empire, The Stone Dragon is a gripping tale of rebellion, survival and the powerful influence of loyalty and love.
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