This is a tough book that explores the illusion of free will and the limitations of consciousness. What's amazing is that it explores these ideas in a hard science fiction setting, with interesting characters and a mindblowing plot. But it's not easy to read, since a lot of the writing is poetica...
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, sh...
Some "science-fiction" writers have an excellent understanding of science. The science and technology employed in their stories is gritty and realistic, even when the story itself is thin and uninteresting. Others write great story. Their science is flaky and their characters often one dimensiona...
Although this faction shares tenuous historical kinship with the Dharmic religions behind the Moksha Mind, they do not appear to be pursuing that group’s explicit goal of self-annihilation; each Bicameral hive is small enough (hence, of sufficiently low latency) to sustain a coherent sense of con...
It was a pretentious moniker, no doubt, but this “samurai” was aiming to be the Samurai, and he was willing to pay respectably for it. At least he didn’t look that high-profile: black jeans, tastefully worn; thermaprint jacket from an ambiguous season; spiked hair in the vicinity of blue and a re...
She’s barefoot, clad in panties and a baggy T-shirt on which animated hatchet-fish swim endless circuits around her midriff. She breathes a recycled mixture of nitrogen and oxygen and trace gases, distinguishable from real air only by its extreme purity. The rifter floats in darkness, her contour...
She ignored it.It crushed the bodies of her friends. She forgot them.It drank the light, blinding even her miraculous eyes. It dared her to give in, to use her headlamp like some crippled dryback.She kept going, in darkness.Eventually the sea floor tilted into a great escarpment, leading into lig...
By the time the Colonel’s back in the game—processed the intel, found a vantage point, grabbed the nearest network specialist out of bed and plunked her down at the board—they’ve got the compound surrounded. Rainforest hides them from baseline vision but the Colonel’s borrowed eyes see well into ...
You can feel your blood, syrupy with dobutamine and leuenkephalin, forcing its way through arteries shriveled by months on standby. The body inflates in painful increments: blood vessels dilate; flesh peels apart from flesh; ribs crack in your ears with sudden unaccustomed flexion. Your joints ha...