“The Political Officer”
“Magic’s Price”
“The Chief Designer”
Solitaire
“A stylistic and psychological tour de force.”—The New York Times Book Review
Jackal Segura is a Hope: born to responsibility and privilege as a symbol of a fledgling world government. Soon she’ll become part of the global administration, sponsored by the huge corporation that houses, feeds, employs, and protects her and everyone she loves. Then, just as she discovers that everything she knows is a lie, she becomes a pariah, a murderer: a person with no community and no future. Grief-stricken and alone, she is put into an experimental program designed to inflict the experience of years of solitary confinement in a few short months: virtual confinement in a sealed cell within her own mind. Afterward, branded and despised, she returns to a world she no longer knows. Struggling to make her way, she has a chance to rediscover her life, her love, and her soul—in a strange place of shattered hopes and new beginnings called Solitaire.
Picoverse
Robert Metzger writes classic hard SF but he does so in a way that emphasizes excitement and adventure and which shows the science in a way that makes it accessible and fascinating. In PICOVERSE, a team of physicists in 2007 is trying to develop fusion power via a new development in plasma physics, a Sonomak, but accidentally stumbles on a method to create new, smaller-than-usual universes, which they call picoverses. These replicate everything in our universe but on a smaller scale.
A disastrous test of the Sonomak machine shakes things up and a new project director, previously unknown to the group, is appointed. Alexandra has her own secret priorities and one of them is to escape from her superiors into one of the picoverses. To do this, she needs the researchers to execute her plan. Unfortunately, things go amiss and the team finds itself stuck in a picoverse duplicating 1920s Earth, but with its own version of a Sonomak, vacuum tubes and all. Among the local team are Werner Heisenberg and Albert Einstein.
As the pace of the story accelerates, the original team races from one picoverse to another, trying to return to their home base and thwart Alexandra’s plans. In a clash of alternate realities, the fate of Earth and the entire universe hangs in the balance. Cosmic rabbits need to be pulled from alternate universe hats before this tale comes to a satisfying–and scientifically rigorous–end.
Perdido Street Station
Beneath the towering bleached ribs of a dead, ancient beast lies New Crobuzon, a squalid city where humans, Re-mades, and arcane races live in perpetual fear of Parliament and its brutal militia. The air and rivers are thick with factory pollutants and the strange effluents of alchemy, and the ghettos contain a vast mix of workers, artists, spies, junkies, and whores. In New Crobuzon, the unsavory deal is stranger to none—not even to Isaac, a brilliant scientist with a penchant for Crisis Theory.
Isaac has spent a lifetime quietly carrying out his unique research. But when a half-bird, half-human creature known as the Garuda comes to him from afar, Isaac is faced with challenges he has never before fathomed. Though the Garuda’s request is scientifically daunting, Isaac is sparked by his own curiosity and an uncanny reverence for this curious stranger.
While Isaac’s experiments for the Garuda turn into an obsession, one of his lab specimens demands attention: a brilliantly colored caterpillar that feeds on nothing but a hallucinatory drug and grows larger—and more consuming—by the day. What finally emerges from the silken cocoon will permeate every fiber of New Crobuzon—and not even the Ambassador of Hell will challenge the malignant terror it invokes . . .
A magnificent fantasy rife with scientific splendor, magical intrigue, and wonderfully realized characters, told in a storytelling style in which Charles Dickens meets Neal Stephenson, Perdido Street Station offers an eerie, voluptuously crafted world that will plumb the depths of every reader’s imagination.
The Other Wind
“[Le Guin] reconsiders the relationship between magic and something more basic: life and death itself.”—Publishers Weekly
The archipelago of Earthsea is in turmoil. The dragons are breaking old truces, and even the dead threaten to return from the afterlife, using the sorcerer Alder’s dreams as a conduit. Alder seeks advice from Ged, once Archmage. It’s decided that the threat can only be confronted on the holy isle of Roke. In this magnificent grand finale to the Earthsea Cycle, Le Guin ties up many loose ends from her previous novels and brings back favorite characters to the delight of her fans.
Bones of the Earth
World-renowned paleontologist Richard Leyster’s universe changedforever the day a stranger named Griffin walked into his office with a remarkable job offer . . . and an ice cooler containing the head of a freshly killed Stegosaurus. For Leyster and a select group of scientific colleagues an impossible fantasy has come true: the ability to study dinosaurs up close, in their own era and milieu. But tampering with time and paradox can have disastrous effects on the future and the past alike, breeding a violent new strain of fundamentalist terror — and, worse still, encouraging brilliant rebels like Dr. Gertrude Salley to toy with the working mechanisms of natural law, no matter what the consequences. And when they concern the largest, most savage creatures that ever walked the Earth, the consequences may be too horrifying to imagine . . .