This first episode is a FREE series-starter for the sci-fi world of The Beam: a dystopian technothriller full of intrigue and conspiracies ... and the unseen perils of our hyperconnected world. This chilling, intricately-plotted cyberpunk series is set in a futuristic dystopia where politics and technology have widened the gap between haves and have-nots -- and where power means everything. All of humanity is connected ... to The Beam and to the lie. In the year 2097, the only stable nation is the North American Union: a cyberpunk world exploding with new technologies and ruled by two political parties. The NAU allows people to choose either the Enterprise Party (sink-or-swim; effort and luck determine whether members prosper or starve) or the Directorate, where members are guaranteed safety but can never rise above their station. And above it all is The Beam: an AI-built computer network that serves every whim and connects citizens through implants and biological add-ons. The Beam anticipates every need and has created a world within the world. It permeates everything. And is everywhere. But the NAU's power is shifting. New powers are making their moves while others hang in the balance. Behind it all, a shadowy group is pulling strings, and guiding the upcoming election exactly where they want it to go. The Beam is coming alive; immersion is as real as reality. If the NAU's power goes unchecked, the actions of a shadowy few will shape the fate of millions forever. ★★★★★ "This series is one of the best from these authors, which is saying a lot because Sean Platt/Johnny B. Truant/David Wright (any combination of the three) are by far my favorite authors. The Beam is an extremely complex world with complex characters." -- Matt Browner ★★★★★ "I'd have to say this series has them all beat because all the technologies (or magic, if you will) in this series are better developed, the characters are more involved, and the story lines are better woven. And I'm not talking about twists and turns in the plot that require suspending disbelief (yeah right), or leave you confused as to what happened. It's pretty amazing and thought-provoking." -- Burton Kent Sci-fi fans of William Gibson and Neal Stephenson will love the visionary cyberpunk world of The Beam ... where politics, plots, conspiracies, and backstabbing matter as much as future itself.

2045. Kenneth Durand leads Interpol's most effective team against genetic crime, hunting down black market labs that perform illegal procedures, augmenting embryos and rapidly accelerating human evolution-- and preying on human-trafficking victims to experiment and advance their technology. One figure looms behind it all: Marcus Demang Wyckes, leader of a cartel known as the Huli jing. When Durand is forcibly dosed with a radical new change agent, he wakes from a coma weeks later to find he's been genetically transformed into Wyckes. Determined to restore his original DNA, Durand hasn't anticipated just how difficult locating his enemy will be.

“The ferociously talented Gibson delivers his signature mélange of technopop splendor and post-industrial squalor” (Time) in this New York Times bestseller that features his hero from Idoru... Colin Laney, sensitive to patterns of information like no one else on earth, currently resides in a cardboard box in Tokyo. His body shakes with fever dreams, but his mind roams free as always, and he knows something is about to happen. Not in Tokyo; he will not see this thing himself. Something is about to happen in San Francisco. The mists make it easy to hide, if hiding is what you want, and even at the best of times reality there seems to shift. A gray man moves elegantly through the mists, leaving bodies in his wake, so that a tide of absences alerts Laney to his presence. A boy named Silencio does not speak, but flies through webs of cyber-information in search of the one object that has seized his imagination. And Rei Toi, the Japanese Idoru, continues her study of all things human. She herself is not human, not quite, but she’s working on it. And in the mists of San Francisco, at this rare moment in history, who is to say what is or is not impossible...

Praised by Stephen Baxter and Adam Roberts, reviewed ecstatically by SFX magazine, Gavin Smith's first novel VETERAN announced an exciting new voice on the SF scene. WAR IN HEAVEN, set in the same universe, followed. Now comes a new standalone SF thriller. Of all the captains based out of Arclight only Eldon Sloper was desperate enough to agree to a salvage job in Red Space. And now he and his crew are living to regret his desperation. In Red Space the rules are different. Some things work, others don't. Best to stick close to the Church beacons. Don't get lost. Because there's something wrong about Red Space. Something beyond rational. Something vampyric... Long after The Loss, mankind is different. We touch the world via neunonics. We are machines, we are animals, we are hybrids. But some things never change. A Killer is paid to kill, a Thief will steal countless lives. A Clone will find insanity, an Innocent a new horror. The Church knows we have kept our sins. Gavin Smith's new SF novel is an epic slam-bang ride through a terrifyingly different future.

In a ravaged near-future England, a private detective with psychic powers might be the last hope standing between mankind and total collapse. Mindstar Rising is the first cyberpunk thriller in Peter F. Hamilton's hugely popular Greg Mandel series. For fans of James S.A. Corey. It's the 21st century and global warming is here to stay, so forget the way your country used to look. And get used to the free market, too – the companies possess all the best hardware, and they're calling the shots now. In a world like this, a man open to any offers can do just fine. A man like Greg Mandel for instance, who's psi-boosted, wired into the latest sensory equipment and carrying state-of-the-art weaponry. He's also been part of the English Army's Mindstar Battalion. As the cartels battle for control of a revolutionary new power source, and corporate greed outstrips national security, tension is mounting to boiling point. And Greg Mandel is about to face the ultimate test. Mindstar Rising is followed by A Quantum Murder and The Nano Flower to complete the Greg Mandel trilogy.

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “ONE OF THE MOST VISIONARY, ORIGINAL, AND QUIETLY INFLUENTIAL WRITERS CURRENTLY WORKING”* returns with a sharply imagined follow-up to the New York Times bestselling The Peripheral. William Gibson has trained his eye on the future for decades, ever since coining the term “cyberspace” and then popularizing it in his classic speculative novel Neuromancer in the early 1980s. Cory Doctorow raved that The Peripheral is “spectacular, a piece of trenchant, far-future speculation that features all the eyeball kicks of Neuromancer.” Now Gibson is back with Agency—a science fiction thriller heavily influenced by our most current events. Verity Jane, gifted app whisperer, takes a job as the beta tester for a new product: a digital assistant, accessed through a pair of ordinary-looking glasses. “Eunice,” the disarmingly human AI in the glasses, manifests a face, a fragmentary past, and a canny grasp of combat strategy. Realizing that her cryptic new employers don’t yet know how powerful and valuable Eunice is, Verity instinctively decides that it’s best they don’t. Meanwhile, a century ahead in London, in a different time line entirely, Wilf Netherton works amid plutocrats and plunderers, survivors of the slow and steady apocalypse known as the jackpot. His boss, the enigmatic Ainsley Lowbeer, can look into alternate pasts and nudge their ultimate directions. Verity and Eunice are her current project. Wilf can see what Verity and Eunice can’t: their own version of the jackpot, just around the corner, and the roles they both may play in it. *The Boston Globe

A collection of New York Times bestselling author William Gibson’s articles and essays about contemporary culture—a privileged view into the mind of a writer whose thinking has shaped not only a generation of writers but our entire culture... Though best known for his fiction, William Gibson is as much in demand for his cutting-edge observations on the world we live in now. Originally printed in publications as varied as Wired, the New York Times, and the Observer, these articles and essays cover thirty years of thoughtful, observant life, and are reported in the wry, humane voice that lovers of Gibson have come to crave. “Gibson pulls off a dazzling trick. Instead of predicting the future, he finds the future all around him, mashed up with the past, and reveals our own domain to us.”—The New York Times Book Review

The psychologist may appear in science fiction as the herald of utopia or dystopia; literary studies have used psychoanalytic theories to interpret science fiction; and psychology has employed science fiction as an educational medium. Science Fiction and Psychology goes beyond such incidental observations and engagements to offer an in-depth exploration of science fiction literature's varied use of psychological discourses, beginning at the birth of modern psychology in the late nineteenth century and concluding with the ascendance of neuroscience in the late twentieth century. Rather than dwelling on psychoanalytic readings, this literary investigation combines with history of psychology to offer attentive textual readings that explore five key psychological schools: evolutionary psychology, psychoanalysis, behaviourism, existential-humanism, and cognitivism. The varied functions of psychological discourses in science fiction are explored, whether to popularise and prophesy, to imagine utopia or dystopia, to estrange our everyday reality, to comment on science fiction itself, or to abet (or resist) the spread of psychological wisdom. Science Fiction and Psychology also considers how psychology itself has made use of science fiction in order to teach, to secure legitimacy as a discipline, and to comment on the present.

This book covers all Australian science fiction and fantasy authors, books and stories, as well as important magazines, sub-genres and works published electronically.

He was the most dangerous fugitive alive, but he didn't exist! Nickie Haflinger had lived a score of lifetimes . . . but technically he didn't exist. He was a fugitive from Tarnover, the high-powered government think tank that had educated him. First he had broken his identity code - then he escaped. Now he had to find a way to restore sanity and personal freedom to the computerised masses and to save a world tottering on the brink of disaster. He didn't care how he did it . . . but the government did. That's when his Tarnover teachers got him back in their labs . . . and Nickie Haflinger was set up for a whole new education! First published in 1975.