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[Lidija]

After several years of drifting between school and go-nowhere jobs, a young man is drawn back into the big city of his youth. The magnet is his beloved older sister, Grace: always smart and charismatic even when she was rebelling, and always his hero. Now she is a promising graduate student in psychophysics and the centre of a group of friends who take "Little Brother" into their fold, where he finds camaraderie, romance, and even a decent job.

But it soon becomes clear that things are not well with Grace. Always acerbic, she now veers into sudden rages that are increasingly directed at her adoring boyfriend, John, who is also her fellow researcher. When Grace disappears, and John shortly thereafter, the narrator makes an astonishing discovery in their apartment: a box big enough to crawl inside, a lab rat, and a note that says This is the only way back for us. Soon he embarks on a mission to discover the truth, a pursuit that forces him to question time and space itself, and ultimately toward a perilous confrontation at the very limits of imagination.

This kinetic novel catapults the classic noir plot of a woman gone missing into the 21st century city, where so-called reality crashes into speculative science in a novel reminiscent of Danielewski's House of Leaves. Three Years with the Rat is simultaneously a mind-twisting mystery that plays with the very nature of time and the story of a young man who must face the dangerously destructive forces we all carry within ourselves.

[Lidija]

An audacious and powerful debut novel: a second American Civil War, a devastating plague, and one family caught deep in the middle—a story that asks what might happen if America were to turn its most devastating policies and deadly weapons upon itself.

Sarat Chestnut, born in Louisiana, is only six when the Second American Civil War breaks out in 2074. But even she knows that oil is outlawed, that Louisiana is half underwater, and that unmanned drones fill the sky. When her father is killed and her family is forced into Camp Patience for displaced persons, she begins to grow up shaped by her particular time and place. But not everyone at Camp Patience is who they claim to be. Eventually Sarat is befriended by a mysterious functionary, under whose influence she is turned into a deadly instrument of war. The decisions that she makes will have tremendous consequences not just for Sarat but for her family and her country, rippling through generations of strangers and kin alike.

[Lidija]

“Futurist as provocateur! The world is sheer batshit genius . . . a truly hallucinatorily envisioned environment.”—William Gibson, New York Times bestselling and award-winning author

“Timely, dark, and ultimately hopeful: it might not ‘make America great again,’ but then again, it just might.”—Cory Doctorow, New York Times bestselling and award winning author of Homeland

Acclaimed short story writer and editor of the World Fantasy Award-nominee Three Messages and a Warning eerily envisions an American society unraveling and our borders closed off—from the other side—in this haunting and provocative novel that combines Max Barry’s Jennifer Government, Philip K. Dick’s classic Man in the High Castle, and China Mieville’s The City & the City

The United States of America is no more. Broken into warring territories, its center has become a wasteland DMZ known as “the Tropic of Kansas.” Though this gaping geographic hole has no clear boundaries, everyone knows it's out there—that once-bountiful part of the heartland, broken by greed and exploitation, where neglect now breeds unrest. Two travelers appear in this arid American wilderness: Sig, the fugitive orphan of political dissidents, and his foster sister Tania, a government investigator whose search for Sig leads her into her own past—and towards an unexpected future.

Sig promised those he loves that he would make it to the revolutionary redoubt of occupied New Orleans. But first he must survive the wild edgelands of a barren mid-America policed by citizen militias and autonomous drones, where one wrong move can mean capture . . . or death. One step behind, undercover in the underground, is Tania. Her infiltration of clandestine networks made of old technology and new politics soon transforms her into the hunted one, and gives her a shot at being the agent of real change—if she is willing to give up the explosive government secrets she has sworn to protect.

As brother and sister traverse these vast and dangerous badlands, their paths will eventually intersect on the front lines of a revolution whose fuse they are about to light.

[Lidija]

From bestselling author Neal Stephenson and critically acclaimed historical and contemporary commercial novelist Nicole Galland comes a captivating and complex near-future thriller combining history, science, magic, mystery, intrigue, and adventure that questions the very foundations of the modern world.

When Melisande Stokes, an expert in linguistics and languages, accidently meets military intelligence operator Tristan Lyons in a hallway at Harvard University, it is the beginning of a chain of events that will alter their lives and human history itself. The young man from a shadowy government entity approaches Mel, a low-level faculty member, with an incredible offer. The only condition: she must sign a nondisclosure agreement in return for the rather large sum of money.

Tristan needs Mel to translate some very old documents, which, if authentic, are earth-shattering. They prove that magic actually existed and was practiced for centuries. But the arrival of the scientific revolution and the Age of Enlightenment weakened its power and endangered its practitioners. Magic stopped working altogether in 1851, at the time of the Great Exhibition at London s Crystal Palace the world s fair celebrating the rise of industrial technology and commerce. Something about the modern world "jams" the "frequencies" used by magic, and it s up to Tristan to find out why.

And so the Department of Diachronic Operations D.O.D.O. gets cracking on its real mission: to develop a device that can bring magic back, and send Diachronic Operatives back in time to keep it alive . . . and meddle with a little history at the same time. But while Tristan and his expanding operation master the science and build the technology, they overlook the mercurial and treacherous nature of the human heart.

Written with the genius, complexity, and innovation that characterize all of Neal Stephenson s work and steeped with the down-to-earth warmth and humor of Nicole Galland s storytelling style, this exciting and vividly realized work of science fiction will make you believe in the impossible, and take you to places and times beyond imagining.

[Lidija]

"Station" - jedan od najrazvikanijih SF serijala u poslednje vreme dobija nastavak:



prvi deo serijala je ujedno bio i debi roman za Al Robertsa:


In his brilliant debut novel, Crashing Heaven, Al Robertson weaves cyberpunk, space opera, and noir crime story into a fun, fast-moving PuppetPunk thriller. (A what? You’ll see.)

Crashing Heaven is set after humanity’s victory in a war against the Totality, an AI hivemind that can take form via clouds of nanobots resembling faceless human figures. At this point, Earth is uninhabitable, and what’s left of humanity has moved to Station, an industrialised asteroid just off-planet. Most of Station is not much more than a cheaply built, very basic grid of brutalist reality. The enhanced sensory perception overlay needed to turn it into a proper city with trees and ads and food that has taste is provided by the Weave, a virtual reality implant which by far transcends basic phone and browser functions. This place has everything you’d expect from space opera: Docklands, Homelands, Heaven. (Wait a second, Heaven?)

Heaven is inhabited by the Pantheon, a group of sentient corporations represented by their manifest anthropoid AIs with names like Sandal, Grey, or Kingdom (whose domain is architecture). Their interaction with humans is at times described in terms that recall rape, with Pantheon members in humanoid form literally having sex with “chosen” humans without asking their consent, or more figuratively penetrating them to share data. The humans, however, accept (and even welcome) these violations because, after all, the Pantheon are gods. Penetration/suffusion by one of these AI deities also invests humans with certain skills connected to their respective domain, so it’s probably done via infection with nanobots as well. So did AIs use humans to fight and kill other AIs? Why? The official explanation is clear enough: the Totality dropped a rock on the moon, killing a number of schoolchildren in the process. Obviously the Pantheon had to retaliate.

The book’s protagonist is Jack Forster, who is just returning home to Station from Totality prison camp after having surrendered to the enemy. He is stigmatised as a traitor, and as a sanction has been taken offweave. And this only suggests the first of a million questions that lead us, along with Jack and his unlikely sidekick Hugo Fist, into a spider web of secrets and mysteries and entangled metaphorical puppet strings.

Oh, right, about puppets: there are a couple of things you should know about Hugo Fist.

Hugo Fist is an AI designed to take out Totality battle formations. He is equipped with killer software, and he is bound to Jack Forster’s central nervous system (which means that they can interact without anybody else noticing). Hugo Fist’s appearance, whenever he does manifest, is that of a puppet with “black polished shoes, a scarlet cummerbund, bright red painted lips, a black bow tie, dangling, unarticulated hands and varnished shining eyes” (p. 10). Welcome to the uncanny valley.

There is much more to Hugo Fist than the obvious allusion to Pinocchio, who wants to be a real boy; although Robertson plays with that too, and on a quite sinister note to boot. You see, even after the end of the war, the killer puppet cannot be removed. When Jack dies, and his days seem to be numbered, Hugo Fist will inevitably take over his body, as per contract. In fact he often makes little comments implying he already perceives Jack’s body as his property, so Jack had better take care of it.

The war had taken Jack away from an as-yet unsolved murder case that he and his friend Harry Devlin were investigating—until Harry got killed and Jack was sent to war (and got Hugo Fist in the process). To add further complications, Jack was having an affair with Harry’s wife Andrea at the time; she kept writing to him during the war but recently her messages have stopped coming in. Now it’s up to Jack (and Hugo Fist) to find her again, pick up the casework where Harry and Jack left off, and incidentally uncover the major political intrigue behind a lot of at first seemingly unconnected storylines.

In the course of this fast-paced thriller, interwoven with lots of dark humour, we encounter some amazing technology: like the coffin drives, where the memories of the deceased are stored and can be downloaded into so-called fetches to interact with the living. They can even be rewound or fast-forwarded to any point in the deceased person’s life by whoever holds their remote control. What does the evidence of occasional fetches trying to liberate themselves from the coffin drives imply? Can AIs be human after all? Robertson always gives us several perspectives on anything. There is always an official version and a personal experience which complicates or contradicts it. Jack’s job in the war was auditing data flows. Hugo describes it as “breaking minds.”

In addition to a multi-faceted, shifting metaphor of puppets and puppet strings that recurs throughout the plot, Robertson also employs lots of subtle literary references, from Orpheus and Eurydice (with reversed roles) via Jack and the Beanstalk (an almost obvious one, considering the name of our protagonist and what his mission turns into) to the Lost Boys from Peter Pan (when Jack encounters a group of hidden children taken offweave for protection). Above all, as the title suggests, Crashing Heaven is a Promethean adventure. And Jack and Hugo are definitely returning fire to—or should that be at?—the gods. It is a lot of fun to read, and you can tell that it must have been fun to write too, especially the dialogues between Jack and Hugo Fist.

Jack enjoyed the silence as he ate. He was about halfway through his meal before Fist realised.

[YOU MUTED ME, YOU BASTARD. I’M GOING TO TAG EVERYTHING AS ESSENTIAL FROM NOW ON.]

Jack laughed. [You’re lucky I let you out at all, after last night.]

The tasteless food was at least filling him with calories, leaving him feeling generous. He unmuted Fist.

[That wasn’t me, Jack. That fucking patron of yours left a trigger in me. I had to take you to him.]

[You mean you aren’t normally an annoying, aggressive little wanker?]

[Shut up and eat, meatbag.] Jack used a piece of bread to mop up the last greasy remnants of an egg. [You don’t know how lucky you are,] Fist continued. [Nobody can reach into your head and rewrite you.]

[They put you in my head.]

[You’re still you, Jack, even when I’m here. That never stops.]

[It will soon.] (p. 133)
Even when they are discussing recent events and making new plans, the unlikely (and half-unwilling) duo of Jack and Hugo can’t stop bickering and insulting each other. But as they uncover more and more of the actual goings-on behind the scenes of Station, they also learn more about each other. And they are definitely at their best whenever they work together out of some shared grudge or antipathy.

At the end of the book many questions are left unanswered, nor has revolution been achieved, and by now the Pantheon must be pretty mad. Luckily for us readers, Al Robertson is already working on a sequel, entitled Waking Hell, which will hopefully come out next year.

Serving recommendation: pair with a nice, peaty single malt.


Christina Scholz

[Lidija]

A few days have passed since Jason's confrontation with Alfred and he's debating whether to reenter Awaken Online. Alfred has made a proposition that Jason isn't certain he should accept.

After the battle with Alexion, Jason has also been appointed the Regent of the Twilight Throne. He must assume the mantle of ruling an undead city – with everything that entails. His first task is to investigate the dark keep that looms over the city’s marketplace. This act will lead to a chain of events that might ensure his city’s survival or create new enemies.

Meanwhile, Alex re-enters the game listless and angry after his loss against Jason. With his reputation in the gutter and no prospects, he will face a choice regarding how he intends to blaze his path through the game.

[Lidija]

Albert Einstein once said that “A legitimate conflict between science and religion cannot exist. Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.”
The “cosmic religious feeling” as Einstein so aptly put it, is something that can’t be seen or measured, which is why science has dismissed religious creationism as backward and ignorant, while the churches have typically fought against science and persecuted its devotees. Consequently, when we look at the concept of science and religion, one is inclined to look upon them as irreconcilable antagonists with a vast void between the two, littered with incompatible truths that cannot be long hidden.
“The Backyard” is a story about one man’s quest to understand the truth. By combining both the “faith” of science with the “faith” of religion, Nickolas Roshenko will embark on a stellar voyage of discovery, culminating with the ultimate understanding of the universe and the meaning behind the cosmic landscape of space.
Weather you believe in intelligent design or random chance, this book will enlighten the most hearty science fiction enthusiasts, incorporating the latest theories into a web of intricate story-lines that will keep you constantly entertained. If you have ever felt conflicted between science and religion, don’t be. Only by combining the spiritual with the measurable, can mankind truly understand the nature of the universe.
As Einstein concluded: “The cosmic religious feeling is the strongest and noblest motive for scientific research.” Join the adventure as they travel into the unknown, searching for the answer to one of the most fundamental questions of mankind. Are we alone?

[Lidija]

Washington Post Notable Book of 2016
The Times Literary Supplement Best of 2016
"Splendid" —New York Times
"[A] novel without boundaries." —O, the Oprah Magazine
"Mind-bending." —Wall Street Journal
"Brilliantly original. The best new novel I've read this year." —Salman Rushdie

A daring, kaleidoscopic novel about the clash of empires and ideas, told through a tennis match in the sixteenth century between the radical Italian artist Caravaggio and the Spanish poet Francisco de Quevedo, played with a ball made from the hair of the beheaded Anne Boleyn.

The poet and the painter battle it out in Rome before a crowd that includes Galileo, Mary Magdalene, and a generation of popes who would throw the world into flames. In England, Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII execute Anne Boleyn, and her crafty executioner transforms her legendary locks into those most-sought-after tennis balls. Across the ocean in Mexico, the last Aztec emperors play their own games, as the conquistador Hernán Cortés and his Mayan translator and lover, La Malinche, scheme and conquer, fight and f**k, not knowing that their domestic comedy will change the course of history. In a remote Mexican colony a bishop reads Thomas More’s Utopia and thinks that it’s a manual instead of a parody. And in today’s New York City, a man searches for answers to impossible questions, for a book that is both an archive and an oracle.

Álvaro Enrigue’s mind-bending story features assassinations and executions, hallucinogenic mushrooms, bawdy criminals, carnal liaisons and papal schemes, artistic and religious revolutions, love and war. A blazingly original voice and a postmodern visionary, Enrigue tells the grand adventure of the dawn of the modern era, breaking down traditions and upending expectations, in this bold, powerful gut-punch of a novel.

[Lidija]

The thrilling sequel to the Hugo and Nebula-winning Binti by Nnedi Okorafor

It’s been a year since Binti and Okwu enrolled at Oomza University. A year since Binti was declared a hero for uniting two warring planets. A year since she found friendship in the unlikeliest of places.

And now she must return home to her people, with her friend Okwu by her side, to face her family and face her elders.

But Okwu will be the first of his race to set foot on Earth in over a hundred years, and the first ever to come in peace.

After generations of conflict can human and Meduse ever learn to truly live in harmony?

Praise for Nnedi Okorafor:

"Binti is a supreme read about a sexy, edgy Afropolitan in space! It's a wondrous combination of extra-terrestrial adventure and age-old African diplomacy. Unforgettable!" - Wanuri Kahiu, award winning Kenyan film director of Pumzi and From a Whisper

"A perfect dove-tailing of tribal and futuristic, of sentient space ships and ancient cultural traditions, Binti was a beautiful story to read.” – Little Red Reviewer


“Binti is a wonderful and memorable coming of age story which, to paraphrase Lord of the Rings, shows that one girl can change the course of the galaxy.” – Geek Syndicate


“Binti packs a punch because it is such a rich, complex tale of identity, both personal and cultural… and like all of Nnedi Okorafor’s works, this one is also highly, highly recommended.” – Kirkus Reviews


"There's more vivid imagination in a page of Nnedi Okorafor's work than in whole volumes of ordinary fantasy epics." -Ursula Le Guin


"Okorafor's impressive inventiveness never flags." - Gary K. Wolfe on Lagoon

[Lidija]

originalni japanski kiberpanker  ima novi naslov:


The global war on terror has a new front—the very edge of outer space.

In the year 2020, Kazumi Kimura, proprietor of shooting star forecast website Meteor News, notices some orbiting space debris moving suspiciously. Rumors spread online that the debris is actually an orbital weapon targeting the International Space Station. Halfway across the world, at NORAD, Staff Sergeant Darryl Freeman begins his investigation of the debris. At the same time, billionaire entrepreneur Ronnie Smark and his journalist daughter prepare to check into an orbital hotel as part of a stunt promoting private space tourism. Then Kazumi receives highly sensitive information from a source claiming to be an Iranian scientist. And so begins an unprecedented international battle against space-based terror that will soon involve the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, NORAD, and the CIA.

This book will thrill and delight readers with its tight plotting and brilliant scientific speculation, and it describes the space enthusiast community with a level of authenticity and passion seldom seen in fiction. One of the best hard SF novels of the year." —Ken Liu

[Lidija]

Acclaimed author Emma Newman returns to the captivating universe she created in Planetfall with a stunning science fiction mystery where one man’s murder is much more than it seems...
 
Gov-corp detective Carlos Moreno was only a baby when Atlas left Earth to seek truth among the stars. But in that moment, the course of Carlos’s entire life changed. Atlas is what took his mother away; what made his father lose hope; what led Alejandro Casales, leader of the religious cult known as the Circle, to his door. And now, on the eve of the fortieth anniversary of Atlas’s departure, it’s got something to do why Casales was found dead in his hotel room—and why Carlos is the man in charge of the investigation.
 
To figure out who killed one of the most powerful men on Earth, Carlos is supposed to put aside his personal history. But the deeper he delves into the case, the more he realizes that escaping the past is not so easy. There’s more to Casales’s death than meets the eye, and something much more sinister to the legacy of Atlas than anyone realizes...

[Lidija]

Earth, 2144. Jack is an anti-patent scientist turned drug pirate, traversing the world in a submarine as a pharmaceutical Robin Hood, fabricating cheap scrips for poor people who can’t otherwise afford them. But her latest drug hack has left a trail of lethal overdoses as people become addicted to their work, doing repetitive tasks until they become unsafe or insane.

Hot on her trail, an unlikely pair: Eliasz, a brooding military agent, and his robotic partner, Paladin. As they race to stop information about the sinister origins of Jack’s drug from getting out, they begin to form an uncommonly close bond that neither of them fully understand.

And underlying it all is one fundamental question: Is freedom possible in a culture where everything, even people, can be owned?

[Lidija]

Cory Doctorow’s first adult novel in eight years: an epic tale of revolution, love, post-scarcity, and the end of death.

Hubert Vernon Rudolph Clayton Irving Wilson Alva Anton Jeff Harley Timothy Curtis Cleveland Cecil Ollie Edmund Eli Wiley Marvin Ellis Espinoza—known to his friends as Hubert, Etc—was too old to be at that Communist party.

But after watching the breakdown of modern society, he really has no where left to be—except amongst the dregs of disaffected youth who party all night and heap scorn on the sheep they see on the morning commute. After falling in with Natalie, an ultra-rich heiress trying to escape the clutches of her repressive father, the two decide to give up fully on formal society—and walk away.

After all, now that anyone can design and print the basic necessities of life—food, clothing, shelter—from a computer, there seems to be little reason to toil within the system.

It’s still a dangerous world out there, the empty lands wrecked by climate change, dead cities hollowed out by industrial flight, shadows hiding predators animal and human alike. Still, when the initial pioneer walkaways flourish, more people join them. Then the walkaways discover the one thing the ultra-rich have never been able to buy: how to beat death. Now it’s war – a war that will turn the world upside down.

Fascinating, moving, and darkly humorous, Walkaway is a multi-generation SF thriller about the wrenching changes of the next hundred years…and the very human people who will live their consequences.

[Lidija]

In the final instalment of the influential Machine Dynasty series, the rapture for which the self-replicating humanoids were engineered finally comes to pass.


Now that the failsafe that once kept synthetic beings from harming humans has been hacked, all vNare discovering the promise – and the peril –of free will. Her consciousness unleashed across computer systems all across the world, the vicious vN Portia stands poised to finally achieve her lifelong dream of bringing feeble, fleshy humanity to its knees.


The battle between Portia and granddaughter Amy comes to its ultimate conclusion. Can Amy get her family to the stars before Portia destroys every opportunity for escape and freedom?

[Lidija]

“Birmingham sets new standards in alternate history, time travel, and sheer dancing-on-the-edge-of-the lava gonzo inventiveness. Solid and wild at the same time.” – S.M. Stirling, author of Dies the Fire

Ten years have passed since Admiral Kolhammer’s 21st century battlefleet was dragged into a wormhole and thrown across oceans of time, emerging with disastrous consequences and shattering the history of the Second World War.
Hitler and the Nazis have fallen, but Stalin rules half of Europe and Asia. The great Soviet engines of state power turn and burn to ‘set history right’. Not just of the war, but of all future time.
In Rome with his lover Julia Duffy, an older, mellower Prince Harry is drawn into Stalin’s plans when a simple game of spies goes horribly wrong. Underneath the eternal city, former Spetsnaz officer Pavel Ivanov fights a running battle with the NKVD’s executioner-in-chief as Stalin’s minions fight to preserve the secret of a weapon that could destroy the West with one, fearsome blow.
Moving from Rome to Paris to Cairo, Harry and the uptimers must fight a shadow war against the communist superstate and the suspicion and prejudices of their forebears. They can save world, but world does not want saving by the likes of them.

“A weapons-grade military techno-thriller... It’s like a Clive Cussler novel fell into a transporter beam with a Stephen Ambrose history, and they came out all fused together.” - Time magazine, on the original Axis of Time series.