Hopkinson made her debut with “Brown Girl in the Ring (Aspect, 1998), receiving the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Now, with a body of work that invokes comparison to such writers as Jamaica Kincaid and Edwidge Danticat, she is poised to claim her place in the mainstream spotlight.- “Skin Folk (Aspect 12/01), the author’s previous book, won the World Fantasy Award for Best Collection, was named Recommended Fiction for 21102 by “Black Issues Book Review, and was named a “New York Times Best Book of the Year.- “Midnight Robber (Aspect, 2000), a “New York Times Recommended Book of Summer 2000, received Honorable Mention for the Casa de las Americas Prize, and was a finalist for the Nebula Award for Best Novel, the Hugo Award, and the Philip K Dick Award.- The author’s unique style of magical realism will attract the same audiences that catapulted Toni Morrison’s “Beloved and Edwidge Danticat’s “Breath, Eyes, Memory (Random House, 1998) to bestsellerdom.

* Philip K. Dick Award Winner
* Best of the Year: Locus, Village Voice, San Francisco Chronicle, Book Magazine
* Nominated for the Impac Award

Charley is an athlete. He wants to grow up to be the fastest runner in the world, like his father. He wants to be painted crossing the finishing line, in his racing silks, with a medal around his neck. Charley lives in a stable. He isn’t a runner, he’s a mount. He belongs to a Hoot: The Hoots are alien invaders. Charley hasn’t seen his mother for years, and his father is hiding out in the mountains somewhere, with the other Free Humans. The Hoots own the world, but the humans want it back. Charley knows how to be a good mount, but now he’s going to have to learn how to be a human being.

Once the world worked differently — before the Silence from space quieted the airwaves and rendered electronics useless.Once there was a haven called Crescent City, built through the wonders of nanotechnology to transport its enlightened inhabitants into the cosmos, far away from the chaos and terrors of a world gone mad. But humanity has failed the city. And carelessness has left it vulnerable to attack from those who covet the health and prosperity it offers.One of the original pioneers — a recipient of the DNA-altering virus affecting a remarkable few who were born at the Silence’s onset-Jason Peabody must now flee in the wake of an unanticipated assault on Crescent City by pirates. In the city-imposed persona of musical six-gun-toting Radio Cowboy, entrusted with the recovery of lost technology needed to heal the sentient metropolis and rocket it upward, he embarks on a bizarre odyssey across a perilous, unrecognizable outside — through a landscape of Western round-ups and tragically “youngening” children; of plague-ravaged humans in foreboding flower cities; of conscious machines, talking animals, and toys that long to be real. With him is Dania, a brilliant scientist and resilient survivor whose hidden, troubled past is now painfully remembered beyond the walls of her urban sanctuary.But even as Dania and her Cowboy journey westward, others are being relentlessly drawn to Crescent City from all parts of the globe — and two from the moon, the last humans remaining from the inexplicably vanished Unity colony.For an existence that is not as it was is on the brink of yet another astonishing transformation — either by grand design or random cosmic accident. And the appearance on Earth of strange unearthly illuminations is causing widespread fear and panic — as pilgrims from everywhere gather in Crescent City seeking answers to the Silence’s long-concealed mysteries, responding to the hypnotic light music that’s calling them toward a remarkable destiny in the stars.

A rich Komarran merchant fleet has been impounded at Graf Station, in distant Quaddiespace, after a bloody incident on the station docks involving a security officer from the convoy’s Barrayaran military escort. Lord Miles Vorkosigan of Barrayar and his wife, Lady Ekaterin, have other things on their minds.

The universe has been explored–and humanity has all but given up on finding other intelligent life. Then an alien satellite orbiting a distant star sends out an unreadable signal. Is it the final programmed gasp of an ancient, long-dead race? Or the first greeting of an undiscovered life form?