Download or read book Venomous Lumpsucker written by Ned Beauman and published by Soho Press. This book was released on 2022-07-12 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A dark and witty story of environmental collapse and runaway capitalism from the Booker-listed author of The Teleportation Accident. The near future. Tens of thousands of species are going extinct every year. And a whole industry has sprung up around their extinctions, to help us preserve the remnants, or perhaps just assuage our guilt. For instance, the biobanks: secure archives of DNA samples, from which lost organisms might someday be resurrected . . . But then, one day, it’s all gone. A mysterious cyber-attack hits every biobank simultaneously, wiping out the last traces of the perished species. Now we’re never getting them back. Karin Resaint and Mark Halyard are concerned with one species in particular: the venomous lumpsucker, a small, ugly bottom-feeder that happens to be the most intelligent fish on the planet. Resaint is an animal cognition scientist consumed with existential grief over what humans have done to nature. Halyard is an exec from the extinction industry, complicit in the mining operation that destroyed the lumpsucker’s last-known habitat. Across the dystopian landscapes of the 2030s—a nature reserve full of toxic waste; a floating city on the ocean; the hinterlands of a totalitarian state—Resaint and Halyard hunt for a surviving lumpsucker. And the further they go, the deeper they’re drawn into the mystery of the attack on the biobanks. Who was really behind it? And why would anyone do such a thing? Virtuosic and profound, witty and despairing, Venomous Lumpsucker is Ned Beauman at his very best.
Download or read book The Routledge Handbook of Fiction and Belief written by Alison James and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-12-22 with total page 815 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Handbook of Fiction and Belief offers a fresh reevaluation of the relationship between fiction and belief, surveying key debates and perspectives from a range of disciplines including narrative and cultural studies, science, religion, and politics. This volume draws on global, cutting edge research and theory to investigate the historically variable understandings of fictionality, and allows readers to grasp the role of fictions in our understanding of the world. This interdisciplinary approach provides a thorough introduction to the fundamental themes of: Theoretical and Philosophical Perspectives on Fiction Fiction, Fact, and Science Social Effects and Uses of Fiction Fiction and Politics Fiction and Religion Questioning how fictions in fact shape, mediate or distort our beliefs about the real world, essays in this volume outline the state of theoretical debates from the perspectives of literary theory, philosophy, sociology, religious studies, history, and the cognitive sciences. It aims to take stock of the real or supposed effects that fiction has on the world, and to offer a wide-reaching reflection on the implications of belief in fictions in the so-called “post-truth” era.
Download or read book The Teleportation Accident written by Ned Beauman and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2013-02-26 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Long-listed for the 2012 Man Booker Prize, The Teleportation Accident is a hilarious sci-fi noir about sex, Satan, and teleportation devices. When you haven't had sex in a long time, it feels like the worst thing that could ever happen. If you're living in Germany in the 1930s, it probably isn't. But that's no consolation to Egon Loeser, whose carnal misfortunes will push him from the experimental theaters of Berlin to the absinthe bars of Paris to the physics laboratories of Los Angeles, trying all the while to solve two mysteries: Was it really a deal with Satan that claimed the life of his hero, Renaissance set designer Adriano Lavicini, creator of the so-called Teleportation Device? And why is it that a handsome, clever, modest guy like him can't-just once in a while-get himself laid? Ned Bauman has crafted a stunningly inventive, exceptionally funny, dangerously unsteady and (largely) coherent novel about sex, violence, space, time, and how the best way to deal with history is to ignore it.
Download or read book Glow written by Ned Beauman and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2015-01-20 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: South London, May 2010: foxes are behaving strangely, Burmese immigrants are going missing, and everyone is trying to get hold of a new party drug called Glow. A young man suffering from a rare sleep disorder will uncover the connections between all these anomalies in this taut, riveting new novel by a young writer hailed by The Guardian as “playful, arresting, unnerving, opulent, rude and—above all—deliciously, startlingly, exuberantly fresh.” Twenty-two-year-old Raf spends his days walking Rose, a bull terrier who guards the transmitters for a pirate radio station, and his nights at raves in warehouses and launderettes. When his friend Theo vanishes without a trace, Raf’s efforts to find him will lead straight into the heart of a global corporate conspiracy. Meanwhile, he’s falling in love with a beautiful young woman he met at one of those raves, but he’ll soon discover that there is far more to Cherish than meets the eye. Combining the pace, drama, and explosive plot twists of a thriller with his trademark intellectual, linguistic, and comedic pyrotechnics, Glow is Ned Beauman’s most compelling, virtuosic, and compulsively readable novel yet.
Download or read book Hearts of Oak written by Eddie Robson and published by Tordotcom. This book was released on 2020-03-17 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "[Hearts of Oak packs in] the sort of profound and lacerating laughter that Robson's countrymen Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett perfected." –NPR Hearts of Oak is a delightful science fiction adventure from Eddie Robson, the creator of the acclaimed Welcome to Our Village, Please Invade Carefully. The buildings grow. And the city expands. And the people of the land are starting to behave abnormally. Or perhaps they’ve always behaved that way, and it’s normality that’s at fault. And the king of the land confers with his best friend, who happens to be his closest advisor, who also happens to be a talking cat. But that’s all perfectly natural and not at all weird. Iona, close to retirement, finds that the world she has always known is nothing like she always believed it to be. There are dark forces . . . not dark. There are uncanny forces . . . no, not uncanny. There are forces, anyway, mostly slightly odd ones, and they appear to be acting in mysterious ways. It’s about town planning, it’s about cats and it’s about the nature of reality. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Download or read book Girl in Landscape written by Jonathan Lethem and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-04-13 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Girl in Landscape is a daring exploration of the violent nature of sexual awakening, a meditation on language and perception, and an homage to the great American tradition of the Western. • "Jonathan Lethem's imagination [is]...marvelously fertile." --Newsday The heroine is young Pella Marsh, whose mother dies just before her family flees a post-apocalyptic Brooklyn for the frontier of a recently discovered planet. Hating her ineffectual father, and troubled by a powerful attraction to a virile but dangerous loner who holds sway over the little colony, Pella sets out on a course of discovery that will have tragic and irrevocable consequences for the humans in the community and the ancient inhabitants, known only as archbuilders. Girl in Landscape finds Jonathan Lethem twisting forms and literary conventions to create a dazzling, completely unconventional tale.
Download or read book Steel Beach written by John Varley and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1993-08-01 with total page 652 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A science fiction epic from "the best writer in America" (Tom Clancy)—Hugo and Nebula award-winning author John Varley. Fleeing Earth after an alien invasion, the human race stands on the threshold of evolution. Their new home is Luna, a moon colony blessed with creature comforts, prolonged lifespans, digital memories, and instant sex changes. But the people of Luna are bored, restless, suicidal—and so is the computer that monitors their existence...
Download or read book Bimbos of the Death Sun written by Sharyn McCrumb and published by RosettaBooks. This book was released on 2010-07-01 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A sci-fi convention gets a dose of true crime in this Edgar Award-winning mystery by the New York Times bestselling author of the Ballad novels. When Virginia Tech professor James Owen Mega wrote a fictional account of his real-life research, he hardly expected it to get published. But when a publisher changed the title of his novel to Bimbos of the Death Sun, James—under the pen name Jay Omega—becomes an overnight sci-fi star. Invited to the annual fan convention Rubicon, James is both a fish out of water and a Guest of Honor among the Trekkies and sword-wielding cosplayers. But he’s not the only VIP at the overrun hotel. Revered fantasy author Appin Dungannon never misses a Rubicon—or a chance to belittle his legions of devotees. But when Dungannon turns up dead, police wonder if a die-hard fan finally turned to murder. As the list of suspects grows and hucksters hunt for the victim’s autograph, James devises an ingenious way to catch a killer.
Download or read book Do Not Resuscitate written by Nicholas Ponticello and published by Nicholas Ponticello. This book was released on 2015-04 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jim Frost thinks that when you're dead, you're dead. Gone. Finished. Kaput. But on the eve of his seventy-third birthday, his daughter suggests he have his brain downloaded to a microchip for safekeeping, and Jim is forced to consider what it really means to die--and what it might mean to live forever.Do Not Resuscitate is the firsthand account of Jim Frost, an aging misanthropist who witnessed the rise and fall of the United States as a world power, the digitalization of the planet, the advent of the water wars, and the near collapse of the global economy. Yet he remains impervious to it all. Concerned more with his plasma TV, high-speed Internet, and continual supply of hash, twentysomething Jim takes an under-the-table job off Craigslist delivering mysterious red coolers to strangers in cafés in an effort to pay the bills. But when Jim's enigmatic employer asks him to fly to North Korea for a delivery, Jim starts to wonder what he's gotten himself into.
Download or read book Battle of the Linguist Mages written by Scotto Moore and published by Tordotcom. This book was released on 2022-01-11 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “This is a stand-alone novel with material enough for six... By the halfway point, it had blown my mind twice... an audacious, genre-bending whirlwind.” —New York Times “It reads like Snow Crash had a dance-off with Gideon the Ninth, in a world where language isn't a virus from outer space, it's a goddamn alien invasion.” —Charles Stross In modern day Los Angeles, a shadowy faction led by the Governor of California develops the arcane art of combat linguistics, planting the seeds of a future totalitarian empire. Isobel is the Queen of the medieval rave-themed VR game Sparkle Dungeon. Her prowess in the game makes her an ideal candidate to learn the secrets of "power morphemes"—unnaturally dense units of meaning that warp perception when skilfully pronounced. But Isobel’s reputation makes her the target of a strange resistance movement led by spellcasting anarchists, who may be the only thing stopping the cabal from toppling California over the edge of a terrible transformation, with forty million lives at stake. Time is short for Isobel to level up and choose a side—because the cabal has attracted much bigger and weirder enemies than the anarchist resistance, emerging from dark and vicious dimensions of reality and heading straight for planet Earth! At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Download or read book Terminal World written by Alastair Reynolds and published by Orbit. This book was released on 2021-12-21 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the last surviving human city, an ex-spy gets sucked into a dangerous quest that will take him beyond the city walls when a winged man turns up dead in his morgue in this innovative and original dystopian space adventure. Spearpoint, the last human city, is an enormous atmosphere-piercing spire. Clinging to its skin are the zones, a series of semi-autonomous city-states, each of which enjoys a different—and rigidly enforced—level of technology. Following an infiltration mission that went tragically wrong, Quillon has been living incognito, working as a pathologist in the district morgue. But when a near-dead angel drops onto his dissecting table, Quillon's world is wrenched apart one more time, for the angel is a winged posthuman from Spearpoint's Celestial Levels—and with the dying body comes bad news. If Quillon is to save his life, he must leave his home and journey into the cold and hostile lands beyond Spearpoint's base, starting an exile that will take him further than he could ever imagine. But there is far more at stake than just Quillon's own survival, for the limiting technologies of the zones are determined not by governments or police, but by the very nature of reality—and reality itself is showing worrying signs of instability . . .
Download or read book Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits written by Jason Pargin and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2015-10-06 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York Times bestselling author Jason Pargin takes readers to a whole new level with his darkly comic sci-fi thriller, Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits. An Alex Award Winner Nightmarish villains with superhuman enhancements. An all-seeing social network that tracks your every move. Mysterious, smooth-talking power players who lurk behind the scenes. A young woman from the trailer park. And her very smelly cat. Together, they will decide the future of mankind. Get ready for a world in which anyone can have the powers of a god or the fame of a pop star, in which human achievement soars to new heights while its depravity plunges to the blackest depths. A world in which at least one cat smells like a seafood shop's dumpster on a hot summer day. This is the world in which Zoey Ashe finds herself, navigating a futuristic city in which one can find elements of the fantastic, nightmarish and ridiculous on any street corner. Her only trusted advisor is the aforementioned cat, but even in the future, cats cannot give advice. At least not any that you'd want to follow. Will Zoey figure it all out in time? Or maybe the better question is, will you? After all, the future is coming sooner than you think.
Download or read book A Darkling Sea written by James L. Cambias and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2014-01-28 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the planet Ilmatar, under a roof of ice a kilometer thick, a team of deep-sea diving scientists investigates the blind alien race that lives below. The Terran explorers have made an uneasy truce with the Sholen, their first extraterrestrial contact: so long as they don't disturb the Ilmataran habitat, they're free to conduct their missions in peace. But when Henri Kerlerec, media personality and reckless adventurer, ends up sliced open by curious Ilmatarans, tensions between Terran and Sholen erupt, leading to a diplomatic disaster that threatens to escalate to war. Against the backdrop of deep-sea guerrilla conflict, a new age of human exploration begins as alien cultures collide. Both sides seek the aid of the newly enlightened Ilmatarans. But what this struggle means for the natives—and the future of human exploration—is anything but certain, in A Darkling Sea by James Cambias. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Download or read book Honor Among Thieves written by Rachel Caine and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2018-02-13 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Meet your new favorite kickass heroine in this daring YA series by New York Times bestselling authors Rachel Caine and Ann Aguirre, a thrilling yet romantic futuristic adventure perfect for fans of Claudia Gray’s A Thousand Pieces of You. Petty criminal Zara Cole has a painful past that’s made her stronger than most, which is why she chose life in New Detroit instead moving with her family to Mars. In her eyes, living inside a dome isn’t much better than a prison cell. Still, when Zara commits a crime that has her running scared, jail might be exactly where she’s headed. Instead Zara is recruited into the Honors, an elite team of humans selected by the Leviathan—a race of sentient alien ships—to explore the outer reaches of the universe as their passengers. Zara seizes the chance to flee Earth’s dangers, but when she meets Nadim, the alien ship she’s assigned, Zara starts to feel at home for the first time. But nothing could have prepared her for the dark, ominous truths that lurk behind the alluring glitter of starlight.
Download or read book City of Orange written by David Yoon and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2023-05-23 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A man wakes up in an unknown landscape, injured and alone. He used to live in a place called California, but how did he wind up here with a head wound and a bottle of pills in his pocket? He navigates his surroundings, one rough shape at a time. Here lies a pipe, there a reed that could be carved into a weapon, beyond a city he once lived in. He could swear his daughter’s name began with a J, but what was it, exactly? Then he encounters an old man, a crow, and a boy—and realizes that nothing is what he thought it was, neither the present nor the past. He can’t even recall the features of his own face, and wonders: who am I? Harrowing and haunting but also humorous in the face of the unfathomable, David Yoon’s City of Orange is a novel about reassembling the things that make us who we are, and finding the way home again.
Download or read book Bad Hair Day written by Jim Benton and published by Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers. This book was released on 2019-07-23 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Franny K. Stein is back with another laugh-out-loud experimental adventure in the eighth book in the Mad Scientist series from Jim Benton, the New York Times bestselling author-illustrator of the Dear Dumb Diary and It’s Happy Bunny series. Franny K. Stein isn’t a fan of glamour. She doesn’t style her hair, the thought of wearing makeup makes her want to gag, and she couldn’t care less about wearing dressy dresses when she’d much prefer her lab coat. But sometimes Franny wonders if her mom wishes she were different. Which gives Franny an idea…for an experiment! What if she can turn the beauty products her mom loves into something more exciting? Every experiment has its experimental error, and when Franny’s hair takes on a life of its own, Franny must save the day (and her hair) to finally realize her mom loves her just the way she is.
Download or read book Star Eater written by Kerstin Hall and published by Tordotcom. This book was released on 2021-06-22 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Nommo Award finalist Kerstin Hall comes “a layered and incisive examination of power.”—Rory Power, New York Times bestselling author of Wilder Girls All martyrdoms are difficult. Elfreda Raughn will avoid pregnancy if it kills her, and one way or another, it will kill her. Though she’s able to stomach her gruesome day-to-day duties, the reality of preserving the Sisterhood of Aytrium’s magical bloodline horrifies her. She wants out, whatever the cost. So when a shadowy faction approaches Elfreda with an offer of escape, she leaps at the opportunity. As their spy, she gains access to the highest reaches of the Sisterhood, and enters a glittering world of opulent parties, subtle deceptions, and unexpected bloodshed. A phantasmagorical indictment of hereditary power, Star Eater takes readers deep into a perilous and uncanny world where even the most powerful women are forced to choose what sacrifices they will make, so that they might have any choice at all. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
