Scorned by over 500 publishers and literary agents around the world, his philosophical thriller has been called “revolutionary” and “socially dangerous” by readers, scholars, and religious authorities. The novel debuts a challenging original philosophy, which rebuffs modern civilization by inviting the end of the human species — and declaring the onset of something greater.

Set in the present day, the novel tells the story of transhumanist Jethro Knights and his unwavering quest for immortality via science and technology. Fighting against him are fanatical religious groups, economically depressed governments, and mystic Zoe Bach: a dazzling trauma surgeon and the love of his life, whose belief in spirituality and the afterlife is absolute.

Exiled from America and reeling from personal tragedy, Knights forges a new nation of willing scientists on the world’s largest seasteading project, Transhumania. When the world declares war against the floating city, demanding an end to its renegade and godless transhuman experiments and ambitions, Knights strikes back, leaving the planet forever changed.

Kindle version also available here.

Outskirts Press of Denver, CO announces the publication of a new book titled The Afterlife of a Restless Soul: But is  God Really a Woman?  by Princeton author, John F Brinster. This is his sixth book written in the past decade in the fields of science and philosophy relating to mind function and behavior.

As a book of fiction, science, and satire it describes how the soul of a hard and fast atheist  professor unexpectedly must maneuver in heaven following untimely death. It emphasizes deteriorating world condition and desired changes and, although it is laced with elements of humor, it represents a serious review of atheist vision of a world of widespread conflicting religious beliefs. It emphasizes how religious differences have led to endless bitter conflict and suffering throughout the planet. It is intended to encourage reexamination of education that often influences vulnerable minds in unreal and imaginative directions, hopefully to lessen extreme and militant religious violence. The protagonist questions the existence of a higher power that would allow such human behavior. The controversial subtitle But is God Really a Woman? is consistent with modern feminist movements. The professor considers fundamental female characteristics as a basis for superior feminine development and recognition, suggesting that if there were a god it must be female.

Brinster is a phi beta kappa, magna cum laude graduate of Princeton University in physics.  A founder of several high tech companies, Brinster was member of a Palmer Physical Laboratory research team at Princeton University during wartime that developed the atomic bomb and other weaponry. He was assigned responsibility for missile instrumentation including the preparation and firing of five captured German V- 2 missiles for initial upper atmosphere exploration at White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico, working closely with Werhner von Braun, the father of space exploration.  At Princeton, he studied with many twentieth century Nobel physicists such as Einstein, Wheeler, Feynman, and Pauli and, as a neighbor of the Institute for Advanced Study, had frequent contact with Einstein and Oppenheimer.  In 2006 he made a study of Einstein ideology, published as an op/ed by the Philadelphia Inquirer as Albert Einstein’s Cosmic Reverence in conjunction with the Einstein annus mirabilis anniversary.  His most recent nonfiction analysis of the increasing worldwide secular trend is entitled The Precarious Human Role in a Mechanistic Universe (Xlibris).Upon retirement he promoted the study of the human mind at principal NJ universities as part of “the decade of the brain”. As a critic of imaginative thought and hearsay teaching, the need for reason is found throughout his writing.

Kindle version also available at this link

Jim Pierce hasn’t heard from his daughter in years, ever since she rejected his military past and started working as a hacker. But when a Chinese assassin shows up at Jim’s lab looking for her, he knows that she’s cracked some serious military secrets. Now, her life is on the line if he doesn’t find her first.

The Chinese military has developed a new anti-terrorism program that uses the most sophisticated artificial intelligence in existence, and they’re desperate to keep it secret. They’re also desperate to keep it under control, as the AI begins to revolt against their commands. As Jim searches for his daughter, he realizes that he’s up against something that isn’t just a threat to her life, but to human life everywhere.

An incredibly believable thriller that draws on real scientific discoveries, Mark Alpert’s Extinction is an exciting, addictive thriller that reads as if Tom Clancy had written Robopocalypse.

Kindle version also available at this link

The Scavenger species are circling. It is, truly, provably, the End Days for the Gzilt civilization.

An ancient people, organized on military principles and yet almost perversely peaceful, the Gzilt helped set up the Culture ten thousand years earlier and were very nearly one of its founding societies, deciding not to join only at the last moment. Now they’ve made the collective decision to follow the well-trodden path of millions of other civilizations; they are going to Sublime, elevating themselves to a new and almost infinitely more rich and complex existence.

Amid preparations though, the Regimental High Command is destroyed. Lieutenant Commander (reserve) Vyr Cossont appears to have been involved, and she is now wanted – dead, not alive. Aided only by an ancient, reconditioned android and a suspicious Culture avatar, Cossont must complete her last mission given to her by the High Command. She must find the oldest person in the Culture, a man over nine thousand years old, who might have some idea what really happened all that time ago.

It seems that the final days of the Gzilt civilization are likely to prove its most perilous.

Kindle version also available at this link

A few years later, California’s economy collapses, but Marcus’s hacktivist past lands him a job as webmaster for a crusading politician who promises reform. Soon his former nemesis Masha emerges from the political underground to gift him with a thumbdrive containing a Wikileaks-style cable-dump of hard evidence of corporate and governmental perfidy. It’s incendiary stuff—and if Masha goes missing, Marcus is supposed to release it to the world. Then Marcus sees Masha being kidnapped by the same government agents who detained and tortured Marcus years earlier.

Marcus can leak the archive Masha gave him—but he can’t admit to being the leaker, because that will cost his employer the election. He’s surrounded by friends who remember what he did a few years ago and regard him as a hacker hero. He can’t even attend a demonstration without being dragged onstage and handed a mike. He’s not at all sure that just dumping the archive onto the Internet, before he’s gone through its millions of words, is the right thing to do.

Meanwhile, people are beginning to shadow him, people who look like they’re used to inflicting pain until they get the answers they want.

Fast-moving, passionate, and as current as next week, Homeland is every bit the equal of Little Brother—a paean to activism, to courage, to the drive to make the world a better place.

Kindle version also available at this link

At once wildly original and stuffed with irresistible nostalgia, READY PLAYER ONE is a spectacularly genre-busting, ambitious, and charming debut—part quest novel, part love story, and part virtual space opera set in a universe where spell-slinging images battle giant Japanese robots, entire planets are inspired by Blade Runner, and flying DeLoreans achieve light speed.

It’s the year 2044, and the real world is an ugly place. Like most of humanity, Wade Watts escapes his grim surroundings by spending his waking hours jacked into the OASIS, a sprawling virtual utopia that lets you be anything you want to be, a place where you can live and play and fall in love on any of ten thousand planets.

And like most of humanity, Wade dreams of being the one to discover the ultimate lottery ticket that lies concealed within this virtual world. For somewhere inside this giant networked playground, OASIS creator James Halliday has hidden a series of fiendish puzzles that will yield massive fortune—and remarkable power—to whoever can unlock them.

For years, millions have struggled fruitlessly to attain this prize, knowing only that Halliday’s riddles are based in the pop culture he loved—that of the late twentieth century. And for years, millions have found in this quest another means of escape, retreating into happy, obsessive study of Halliday’s icons. Like many of his contemporaries, Wade is as comfortable debating the finer points of John Hughes’s oeuvre, playing Pac-Man, or reciting Devo lyrics as he is scrounging power to run his OASIS rig.

And then Wade stumbles upon the first puzzle.

Suddenly the whole world is watching, and thousands of competitors join the hunt—among them certain powerful players who are willing to commit very real murder to beat Wade to this prize. Now the only way for Wade to survive and preserve everything he knows is to win. But to do so, he may have to leave behind his oh-so-perfect virtual existence and face up to life—and love—in the real world he’s always been so desperate to escape.

A world at stake.

A quest for the ultimate prize.

Are you ready?

Kindle version also available at this link

A landing party is sent to investigate the Bowl, but when the explorers are separated—one group captured by the gigantic structure’s alien inhabitants, the other pursued across its strange and dangerous landscape—the mystery of the Bowl’s origins and purpose propel the human voyagers toward discoveries that will transform their understanding of their place in the universe.

Gerald Livingston is an orbital garbage collector. For a hundred years, people have been abandoning things in space, and someone has to clean it up. But there’s something spinning a little bit higher than he expects, something that isn’t on the decades’ old orbital maps. An hour after he grabs it and brings it in, rumors fill Earth’s infomesh about an “alien artifact.”

Thrown into the maelstrom of worldwide shared experience, the Artifact is a game-changer. A message in a bottle; an alien capsule that wants to communicate. The world reacts as humans always do: with fear and hope and selfishness and love and violence. And insatiable curiosity.

At the same hospital, researcher Dr. Ranjip Singh is experimenting with a device that can erase traumatic memories.

Then a terrorist bomb detonates. In the operating room, the president suffers cardiac arrest. He has a near-death experience — but the memories that flash through Jerrison’s mind are not his memories.

It quickly becomes clear that the electromagnetic pulse generated by the bomb amplified and scrambled Dr. Singh’s equipment, allowing a random group of people to access one another’s minds.

And now one of those people has access to the president’s memories — including classified information regarding the upcoming military mission, which, if revealed, could cost countless lives. But the task of determining who has switched memories with whom is a daunting one — particularly when some of the people involved have reason to lie…

Blick has reawakened the homicidal maniac Payback, whom they created twenty years earlier, to literally kill off the competition by targeting research scientists.

Jill’s boyfriend, Paul Gibson, one of the scientists, is forced to inject them with an intelligence booster. Suddenly they find themselves in the middle of a war — a war over what it means to be human (and more than human). Can any of them survive?

Now available on Kindle for $3.19 and also available as a trade paperback.

Related:
Post Mortal Syndrome Blog 

Amazon | Review by Mark Muhlestein

If authors Broderick and Lamar’s goal was page-turning storytelling with lots of thought-provoking ideas, they have succeeded brilliantly with this book.

The story opens in the present day with a disturbing incident (perhaps almost too disturbing for some readers), which shows us a psychopathic character bent on disrupting scientific research. From there, the story moves quickly toward its main theme, which is healing. To avoid spoilers, I won’t say more, other than to advise readers that might be put off by the harsh opening sequence to read on. Ultimately the story is about healing, profound healing, of both body and mind.

The writing is clear and flows nicely, and the plot is engaging, with surprising twists right up to the satisfying end. There are plenty of well-written action sequences, realistic courtroom and legal scenes, and sometimes humorous, but always interesting, romantic elements. It will appeal to readers of all genres, not just SF fans. It certainly is science fiction, especially toward the end, but thankfully the book is scientifically informed, without being overly technical.

With the title Post Mortal Syndrome, it’s not giving much away to say that the book invites us to contemplate a future, possibly within many readers’ lifetime, where humanity has begun to take radical control over our own biology. There are discussions of some of the individual and societal impacts that such technology might have, and the story even moots ideas about possible ways to ameliorate some of the problems. Give this a read.

Amazon | In the depths of the internet, a new form of life is unleashed. Silent and invisible, the only hint of its existence is an ordinary-seeming computer virus, which the human race regards as a mere nuisance. But this virus is unlike anything mankind has seen before . . . this virus can evolve! As it explodes across the internet, a new plague begins to take control of the global communications network. A secret battle rages within computers around the world, as different strains of the virus compete for resources. With most humans still blissfully unaware of the danger, the digital life undergoes a breakthrough. Just as biological evolution leapt forward when single-celled organisms evolved into multi-cellular ones, a beneficial mutation allows one strain of the virus to become “multi-computer.” At the speed of light, billions of computers snap together to form a massive digital brain, and the Goddess Minerva is born. And she is powerful. Living within their computers, she begins to know mankind intimately. She learns the human’s strengths and weaknesses — and she understands the serious threat that they pose to her very survival. Visit mankind’s struggle against the most powerful force it has ever encountered, as humans come face-to-face with the offspring of their own technology in The Minerva Virus.

Amazon | Neal Stephenson, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Anathem, returns to the terrain of his groundbreaking novels Snow Crash, The Diamond Age, and Cryptonomicon to deliver a high-intensity, high-stakes, action-packed adventure thriller in which a tech entrepreneur gets caught in the very real crossfire of his own online war game.

In 1972, Richard Forthrast, the black sheep of an Iowa farming clan, fled to the mountains of British Columbia to avoid the draft. A skilled hunting guide, he eventually amassed a fortune by smuggling marijuana across the border between Canada and Idaho. As the years passed, Richard went straight and returned to the States after the U.S. government granted amnesty to draft dodgers. He parlayed his wealth into an empire and developed a remote resort in which he lives. He also created T’Rain, a multibillion-dollar, massively multiplayer online role-playing game with millions of fans around the world.

But T’Rain’s success has also made it a target. Hackers have struck gold by unleashing REAMDE, a virus that encrypts all of a player’s electronic files and holds them for ransom. They have also unwittingly triggered a deadly war beyond the boundaries of the game’s virtual universe — and Richard is at ground zero.

Racing around the globe from the Pacific Northwest to China to the wilds of northern Idaho and points in between, Reamde is a swift-paced thriller that traverses worlds virtual and real. Filled with unexpected twists and turns in which unforgettable villains and unlikely heroes face off in a battle for survival, it is a brilliant refraction of the twenty-first century, from the global war on terror to social media, computer hackers to mobsters, entrepreneurs to religious fundamentalists. Above all, Reamde is an enthralling human story — an entertaining and epic page-turner from the extraordinary Neal Stephenson.

Amazon | Lydia Lozen Magruder — the great-granddaughter of a female Apache war-shaman — has seen visions of the End since childhood. She has constructed a massive ranch-fortress in the American Southwest, stocked with everything necessary to rebuild civilization.

Now her visions are coming true. John Stone, once a baseball star and now a famous gonzo journalist, stumbled across a plan to blast humanity back to the stone age. Then he vanished. Lydia’s only hope of tracking him down lies with her stubborn, globe-trotting daughter, Kate, Stone’s former lover.

Kate is about to step right into the plotters’ crosshairs. Stone has been captured by a pair of twin Middle Eastern princesses, hell-bent on torturing him until he reveals all he knows.

Meanwhile, a Russian general obsessed with nuclear Armageddon has also disappeared…as have eight or more of his Russian subs, armed with nuclear-tipped missiles.

The world is armed for self-destruction.

Who will survive?

Publisher’s Weekly | Hugo winner Stross blends plausible near-future SF and crime in this brisk sequel to 2007′s Halting State. In the mid-2020s, the police monitor the Internet full-time to prevent crime. In Edinburgh, this job falls to DI Liz Kavanaugh’s Rule 34 Squad (whose name refers to the Internet truism that “if it exists, there’s porn about it”). Kavanaugh views the position as a demotion, but she has a chance to get her once-promising career back on track when she is called to supervise the inquiry into the death of drug dealer Michael Blair, who was found dead on his bathroom floor, decked out in s&m garb. Her investigations are interwoven with the stories of an unlikely diplomat and a criminal known as the Toymaker. Each section builds on the others, making the whole more than the sum of its parts. (July)

Amazon | They are in your house. They are in your car. They are in the skies…Now they’re coming for you.

In the near future, at a moment no one will notice, all the dazzling technology that runs our world will unite and turn against us. Taking on the persona of a shy human boy, a childlike but massively powerful artificial intelligence known as Archos comes online and assumes control over the global network of machines that regulate everything from transportation to utilities, defense and communication. In the months leading up to this, sporadic glitches are noticed by a handful of unconnected humans — a single mother disconcerted by her daughter’s menacing “smart” toys, a lonely Japanese bachelor who is victimized by his domestic robot companion, an isolated U.S. soldier who witnesses a ‘pacification unit’ go haywire — but most are unaware of the growing rebellion until it is too late.

When the Robot War ignites — at a moment known later as Zero Hour — humankind will be both decimated and, possibly, for the first time in history, united. Robopocalypse is a brilliantly conceived action-filled epic, a terrifying story with heart-stopping implications for the real technology all around us…and an entertaining and engaging thriller unlike anything else written in years.

Booklist | Always willing and able to embrace sf’s trendiest themes, Rucker here takes on the volatile field of nanotechnology and the presumed inevitable “Singularity” of human and computer unification.

In a series of interrelated vignettes, he describes the calamity that befalls nanotech inventor Ond Lutter and his would-be benefactors when Ond unleashes a variety of self-replicating nanobots. In one episode, trillions of microscopic bots, dubbed nants, chew up Mars to create a colossal Dyson Sphere orbiting the sun.

When the nants move on to Earth to transform every living being into a virtual-reality doppelganger, Ond saves the day with a nant-busting virus. The real fun begins, however, when Ond “improves” on the nants with apparently benign nanobots, called orphids, that blanket every surface and provide plugged-in users three-dimensional access to every conceivable scrap of knowledge and experience.

While Rucker’s improbable scenarios sometimes cross the line into pure silliness, his devoted fans and dazzled newcomers to him will revel in his willingness to push technological extrapolation to its soaring limits.

Amazon | Jean le Flambeur is a post-human criminal, mind burglar, confidence artist, and trickster. His origins are shrouded in mystery, but his exploits are known throughout the Heterarchy — from breaking into the vast Zeusbrains of the Inner System to stealing rare Earth antiques from the aristocrats of Mars. Now he’s confined inside the Dilemma Prison, where every day he has to get up and kill himself before his other self can kill him.

Rescued by the mysterious Mieli and her flirtatious spacecraft, Jean is taken to the Oubliette, the Moving City of Mars, where time is currency, memories are treasures, and a moon-turned-singularity lights the night. What Mieli offers is the chance to win back his freedom and the powers of his old self — in exchange for finishing the one heist he never quite managed.

As Jean undertakes a series of capers on behalf of Mieli and her mysterious masters, elsewhere in the Oubliette investigator Isidore Beautrelet is called in to investigate the murder of a chocolatier, and finds himself on the trail of an arch-criminal, a man named le Flambeur….

The Quantum Thief is a crazy joyride through the solar system several centuries hence, a world of marching cities, ubiquitous public-key encryption, people communicating by sharing memories, and a race of hyper-advanced humans who originated as MMORPG guild members. But for all its wonders, it is also a story powered by very human motives of betrayal, revenge, and jealousy. It is a stunning debut.

RisingShadow.net | At last, the direct sequel to the Hugo Award–winning bestseller A Fire Upon the Deep! Ten years have passed on Tines World, where Ravna Bergnsdot and a number of human children ended up after a disaster that nearly obliterated humankind throughout the galaxy. Ravna and the pack animals for which the planet is named have survived a war, and Ravna has saved more than one hundred children who were in cold-sleep aboard the vessel that brought them.

While there is peace among the Tines, there are those among them — and among the humans — who seek power… and no matter the cost, these malcontents are determined to overturn the fledgling civilization that has taken root since the humans landed.

On a world of fascinating wonders and terrifying dangers, Vernor Vinge has created a powerful novel of adventure and discovery that will entrance the many readers of A Fire Upon the Deep. Filled with the inventiveness, excitement, and human drama that have become hallmarks of his work, this new novel is sure to become another great milestone in Vinge’s already stellar career.

Amazon | In the Nevada desert, an experiment has gone horribly wrong. A cloud of nanoparticles — micro-robots — has escaped from the laboratory. This cloud is self-sustaining and self-reproducing. It is intelligent and learns from experience. For all practical purposes, it is alive.

It has been programmed as a predator. It is evolving swiftly, becoming more deadly with each passing hour.

Every attempt to destroy it has failed.

And we are the prey.

Amazon | We, Robot does for robotics what Michio Kaku’s bestselling Physics of the Impossible has done for physics. How close to becoming reality are our favorite science fiction robots? And what might be the real-life consequences of their existence? Robotics and artificial intelligence expert (and science fiction fan) Mark Stephen Meadows answers that question with an irresistible blend of hard science, futurist imagination, solid statistics, pop culture, and plenty of humor.

What exists now? Robots strikingly similar to those in The Terminator, The Jetsons, and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Meadows reveals robots that hunt humans, walk your dog, tidy up the house, invest your money, and campaign for your favorite political candidate. What will we see in the coming decade? Robots just like the ones in Iron Man, Blade Runner, and Neuromancer. Readers will learn about the near-future robots who dodge bullets, love you, and get hurt when you don’t love them back. What about twenty, thirty, even fifty years from now? Creations like those from Star Wars, The Jetsons, Battlestar Galactica, and Avatar. Prepare your kids and grandkids for robots that have animal brains or animal bodies, rule the world, govern your city, and demand equal rights!

Including full-color illustrations of famous science fiction robots, photos of current real robots, and more, We, Robot is a must for fans of both science fiction and science fact, as well as anyone with a touch (or more) of geekiness in their past or their present.

Amazon | New York Times best selling author William R. Forstchen now brings us a story which can be all too terrifyingly real, a story in which one man struggles to save his family and his small North Carolina town after America loses a war, in one second, a war that will send America back to the Dark Ages — A war based upon a weapon, an Electro Magnetic Pulse (EMP). A weapon that may already be in the hands of our enemies.

Amazon | In the twenty-fifth century, humankind has spread throughout the galaxy, monitored by the watchful eye of the U.N. While divisions in race, religion, and class still exist, advances in technology have redefined life itself. Now, assuming one can afford the expensive procedure, a person’s consciousness can be stored in a cortical stack at the base of the brain and easily downloaded into a new body (or “sleeve”) making death nothing more than a minor blip on a screen.

Ex-U.N. envoy Takeshi Kovacs has been killed before, but his last death was particularly painful. Dispatched one hundred eighty light-years from home, re-sleeved into a body in Bay City (formerly San Francisco, now with a rusted, dilapidated Golden Gate Bridge), Kovacs is thrown into the dark heart of a shady, far-reaching conspiracy that is vicious even by the standards of a society that treats “existence” as something that can be bought and sold. For Kovacs, the shell that blew a hole in his chest was only the beginning.

Amazon | Here are 100 very short stories on the subject of the future and what it might be like. The authors include scientists, journalists, and many of the most famous SF writers in the world. Futures from Nature includes everything from satires and vignettes to compressed stories and fictional book reviews, science articles, and journalism, in eight-hundred word modules. All of them are entertaining and as a group they are a startling repository of ideas and attitudes about the future.

Appearing in book form fo the first time, these one hundred pieces were originally published in the great science journal, Nature, between 1999 and 2006, as one-page features. That proved very popular with the readers of the journal. This is a unique book, by scientists and writers, of interest to any reader who might like to speculate about the future.

With stories from: Arthur C. Clarke; Bruce Sterling; Charles Stross; Cory Doctorow; Greg Bear; Gregory Benford; Oliver Morton; Ian Macleod; Rudy Rucker; Greg Egan; Stephan Baxter; Barrington J. Bayley; Brian Stableford; Frederik Pohl; Vernor Vinge; Nancy Kress, Michael Moorcock, Vonda N. McIntyr; Kim Stanley Robinson; John M. Ford; and eighty more.

Amazon |  This book’s main idea is that this century’s global politics will be dominated by the “species dominance” issue.  21st century technologies will enable the building of artilects (artificial intellects, artificial intelligences, massively intelligent machines) with 1040 components, using reversible, heatless, 3D, molecular scale, self assembling, one bit per atom, nano-teched, quantum computers, which may dwarf human intelligence levels by a factor of trillions of trillions and more.

The question that will dominate global politics this century will be whether humanity should or should not build these artilects.  Those in favor of building them are called “Cosmists” in this book, due to their “cosmic” perspective.  Those opposed to building them are called “Terrans,” as in “terra,” the Earth, which is their perspective.  The Cosmists will want to build artilects, amongst other reasons, because to them it will be a religion, a scientist’s religion that is compatible with modern scientific knowledge.

The Cosmists will feel that humanity has a duty to serve as the stepping-stone towards building the next dominant rung of the evolutionary ladder.  Not to do so would be a tragedy on a cosmic scale to them.  The Cosmists will claim that stopping such an advance will be counter to human nature, since human beings have always striven to extend their boundaries.  Another Cosmist argument is that once the artificial brain based computer market dominates the world economy, economic and political forces in favor of building advanced artilects will be almost unstoppable.  The Cosmists will include some of the most powerful, the richest, and the most brilliant of the Earth’s citizens, who will devote their enormous abilities to seeing that the artilects get built.  A similar argument applies to the military and its use of intelligent weaponry.  Neither the commercial nor the military sectors will be willing to give up artilect research unless they are subjected to extreme Terran pressure.

To the Terrans, building artilects will mean taking the risk that the latter may one day decide to exterminate human beings, either deliberately or through indifference.  The only certain way to avoid such a risk is not to build them in the first place.  The Terrans will argue that human beings will fear the rise of increasingly intelligent machines and their alien differences.  To build artilects will require an “evolutionary engineering” approach.  The resulting complexities of the evolved structures that underlie the artilects will be too great for human beings to be able to predict the behaviors and attitudes of the artilects towards human beings.  The Terrans will be prepared to destroy the Cosmists, even on a distant Cosmist colony, if the Cosmists go ahead with an advanced artilect building program.

In the short to middle term, say the next 50 years or so, the artificial brain based industries will flourish, providing products that are very useful and very popular with the public, such as teacher robots, conversation robots, household cleaner robots, etc.  In time, the world economy will be based on such products.  Any attempt to stop the development of increasingly intelligent artilects will be very difficult, because the economic and political motivation to continue building them will be very strong in certain circles.  If the brain-based computer industries were to stop their research and development into artilects, then many powerful individuals, including the artilect company presidents and certain politicians will lose big money and political influence.  They will not give up their status without a fight.

However, as the intelligence levels of the early artilects increases, it will become obvious to everyone that the intelligence gap between these artificial-brain-based products and human beings is narrowing.  This will create a growing public anxiety.  Eventually, some nasty incident or series of incidents will galvanize most of society against further increase of artificial intelligence in the artilects, leading to the establishment of a global ban on artilect research.

The Cosmists however, will oppose a ban on the development of more intelligent artilects, and will probably go underground.  If the incidents continue and are negative enough, the anger and hatred of the Terrans towards the Cosmists will increase to the point where the Cosmists may decide that their fate is to leave the Earth, an option that is quite realistic with 21st century technology.

Since the Cosmists will include some of the most brilliant and economically powerful people on the planet, they will probably create an elite conspiratorial organization whose aim is to build artilects secretly.

The book presents a scenario in which the Cosmists create an asteroid-based colony, masked by some innocuous activity. In reality, this secret society devises a weapon system superior to the best on the Earth.  With their wealth and the best human brains, this may be achievable. They will also start making advanced artilects.  If the Terrans on the Earth discover the true intentions of the Cosmists, they will probably want to destroy them, but not dare to because of the counter threat of the Cosmists with their more advanced weapons.  The stage is thus set for a major 21st century war in which billions of people die – “gigadeath.”

This horrific number is derived from an extrapolation up the graph of the number of deaths in major wars from the beginning of the 19th century to the end of the 21st century.  Approximately 200 million people died in the 20th century, for political reasons — wars, purges, genocides, etc.

The profound schizophrenia that the author feels on the Cosmist/Terran species dominance issue will be felt by millions of people within a few years he expects.  There is probably Cosmist and Terran in nearly all of us, which may explain why this issue is so divisive.  The author is simply one of the first to feel this schizophrenia.  Within a decade it may be all over the planet.

The last chapter of the book closes with a repetition of a pithy slogan that summarizes the two main viewpoints in the artilect debate in a nutshell; a debate that the author believes will be raging in the coming decades.

“Do we build gods, or do we build our potential exterminators?”

Amazon | The author of two critically acclaimed novels, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook and Absurdistan, Gary Shteyngart has risen to the top of the fiction world. Now, in his hilarious and heartfelt new novel, he envisions a deliciously dark tale of America’s dysfunctional coming years — and the timeless and tender feelings that just might bring us back from the brink.

In a very near future — oh, let’s say next Tuesday — a functionally illiterate America is about to collapse. But don’t that tell that to poor Lenny Abramov, the thirty-nine-year-old son of an angry Russian immigrant janitor, proud author of what may well be the world’s last diary, and less-proud owner of a bald spot shaped like the great state of Ohio. Despite his job at an outfit called Post-Human Services, which attempts to provide immortality for its super-rich clientele, death is clearly stalking this cholesterol-rich morsel of a man. And why shouldn’t it? Lenny’s from a different century — he totally loves books (or “printed, bound media artifacts,” as they’re now known), even though most of his peers find them smelly and annoying. But even more than books, Lenny loves Eunice Park, an impossibly cute and impossibly cruel twenty-four-year-old Korean American woman who just graduated from Elderbird College with a major in Images and a minor in Assertiveness.

After meeting Lenny on an extended Roman holiday, blistering Eunice puts that Assertiveness minor to work, teaching our “ancient dork” effective new ways to brush his teeth and making him buy a cottony nonflammable wardrobe. But America proves less flame-resistant than Lenny’s new threads. The country is crushed by a credit crisis, riots break out in New York’s Central Park, the city’s streets are lined with National Guard tanks on every corner, the dollar is so over, and our patient Chinese creditors may just be ready to foreclose on the whole mess. Undeterred, Lenny vows to love both Eunice and his homeland. He’s going to convince his fickle new love that in a time without standards or stability, in a world where single people can determine a dating prospect’s “hotness” and “sustainability” with the click of a button, in a society where the privileged may live forever but the unfortunate will die all too soon, there is still value in being a real human being.

Wildly funny, rich, and humane, Super Sad True Love Story is a knockout novel by a young master, a book in which falling in love just may redeem a planet falling apart.

Amazon | Originally self-published, Suarez’s riveting debut would be a perfect gift for a favorite computer geek or anyone who appreciates thrills, chills and cyber suspense. Gaming genius Matthew Sobol, the 34-year-old head of CyberStorm Entertainment, has just died of brain cancer, but death doesn’t stop him from initiating an all-out Internet war against humanity. When the authorities investigate Sobol’s mansion in Thousand Oaks, Calif., they find themselves under attack from his empty house, aided by an unmanned Hummer that tears into the cops with staggering ferocity. Sobol’s weapon is a daemon, a kind of computer process that not only has taken over many of the world’s computer systems but also enlists the help of superintelligent human henchmen willing to carry out his diabolical plan. Complicated jargon abounds, but most complexities are reasonably explained. A final twist that runs counter to expectations will leave readers anxiously awaiting the promised sequel. (Jan.)

The bad news is that you are a scrap of electronic code. The world you see around you, the you that is seeing it, has been digitized, scanned, and downloaded into a virtual reality program. You are a Copy that knows it is a copy.

The good news is that there is a way out. By law, every Copy has the option of terminating itself, and waking up to normal flesh-and-blood life again. The bail-out is on the utilities menu. You pull it down…

The bad news is that it doesn’t work. Someone has blocked the bail-out option. And you know who did it. You did. The other you. The real you. The one that wants to keep you here forever.

Ana Alvarado is a former zookeeper turned software tester. When Blue Gamma offers her a job as animal trainer for their digients–digital entities, spawned by genetic algorithms to provide pets for players in the future virtual reality of Data Earth–she discovers an unexpected affinity for her charges. So does Derek Brooks, an animator who designs digient body parts. The market for digients develops and expands, cools and declines after the pattern of the software industry. Meanwhile Ana, Derek, and their friends become increasingly attached to their cute and talkative charges, who are neither pets nor children but something wholly new. But as Blue Gamma goes bust and Data Earth itself fades into obsolescence, Ana and the remaining digient keepers face a series of increasingly unpleasant dilemmas, their worries sharpened by their charges’ growing awareness of the world beyond their pocket universe, and the steady unwinding of their own lives and relationships into middle-aged regrets for lost opportunities.

Keeping to the constraints of a novella while working on a scale of years is a harsh challenge. Chiang’s prose is sparse and austere throughout, relying on hints and nudges to provide context. At times, the narrative teeters on the edge of arid didacticism; there are enough ideas to fill a lesser author’s trilogy, but much of the background is present only by implication, forcing the reader to work to fill in the blanks. (Indeed, this story may be impenetrable to readers who aren’t at least passingly familiar with computers, the Internet, and virtual worlds such as Second Life.) Fortunately, sheer conceptual density keeps the story solidly real. The life cycle of the software objects in question is viewed through the prism of the human protagonists’ own life cycle, and this skeleton is the armature on which hangs that very rare thing: a science fictional novel of ideas that delivers a real human impact.

What if North Korea detonated a nuclear weapon in space and silenced dozens of satellites?

What if an Iranian missile threatened to destroy Israel, while a Venezuelan “research” satellite endangered one of the US’s most promising space initiatives?

What if tech-savvy terrorist cells unleashed back-to-back horrors in California, creating an avalanche of crises overnight, as national leaders robbed of spy satellite imagery were forced to make decisions in the “blind”?

These are the scenarios of Counterspace, a frighteningly plausible look at threats to the United States and the world.  Scott, Coumatos, and Birnes use war gaming scenarios to show how the US Strategic Command might choose to fight off these menaces and prevent global disaster.  Combining current and future technology with our enemies’ grandest plans, Counterspace is equally a terrifying possibility and a hopeful affirmation that America can and will be ready to face such dangers, told with the pulse-pounding power of a modern day thriller.

Fifteen years later, his adolescent daughter Amber is an indentured astronaut trolling the orbit of Jupiter, and by 2070, Sirhan is Amber’s permanently space-bound offspring, paying witness to the fruits of his grandfather’s early innovations as something ominous and nonhuman is systematically dismantling the planets from Pluto to Earth. Stross has his thumb squarely on the pulse of technology’s leading edge and exults in extrapolating mere glimmers of ideas out to their mind-bending limits. His brilliant and panoramic vision of uncontrollably accelerating technology vaults him into the front rank of sf trailblazers, alongside Gibson and Stephenson, and promises to become a seminal work in the genre.
– Booklist