In ""Quill's Neon Legacy,"" readers are plunged into a mesmerizing world where memories are currency and the past is up for grabs. Zara, a gifted young archivist, navigates a neon-drenched underworld of memory traffickers and dream thieves, armed with her unique ability to absorb others' recollections without losing her own. As she pursues a lucrative offer from a mysterious client, Zara uncovers a conspiracy that threatens to rewrite history itself, forcing her to confront the ethical implications of her gift and the true value of personal identity. This genre-bending tale blends cyberpunk aesthetics with magical realism, creating a vivid landscape where digital implants coexist with ancestral spirits. Through a non-linear narrative that weaves past and present, readers experience the tangible sensations of borrowed memories, brought to life by crisp, poetic prose. As Zara grapples with the nature of truth and the impact of technology on human connection, the story explores themes of cultural heritage, privacy, and the universal desire to preserve our past in a rapidly changing world.
In ""Roots of Neon,"" the boundaries between nature and technology blur in the bioluminescent megalopolis of Neo-Gaia. Zara, a brilliant botanist-hacker with the unique ability to communicate with both plants and AI, finds herself at the center of a conspiracy that threatens the city's delicate symbiosis. As she navigates this vibrant urban landscape, where buildings pulse with glowing veins and sentient trees form vast networks, Zara must confront her own hybrid nature and the true meaning of consciousness. The story unfolds like a bio-digital tapestry, weaving together Zara's present-day adventures with flashbacks to Neo-Gaia's founding. Readers are immersed in a world where the scent of genetically modified flowers mingles with the buzz of pollinator drones, and data flows like sap through the city's living architecture. As Zara delves deeper into the city's glowing underbelly, she encounters a cast of fascinating characters, including a rogue AI collective and a charming eco-terrorist, each challenging her perceptions of progress and harmony.
K. C. Alexander follows up their high-energy, high-tech dystopian Necrotech with “brutal, unapologetic, sexy cyberpunk” (Scott Sigler) that hits the ground and tears it all to hell... Riko’s landed teeth-first in hell and ass-deep in a shredded reputation. Thanks to a run-in with two corporations, a nasty case of mixed-up memories and a worse case of betrayal stamped on her back, she’s got a trail of dead friends and bad choices behind her no credible merc wants to touch. She’s officially on the outs, and on-the-outs-mercs of her caliber are glorified stepping stones for every freak job, chumhead, and chromed-out wannabe who thinks they can take her on. If that wasn’t bad enough, her street doc’s left her, her old team doesn’t trust her, the cop in her pocket’s getting delusions of grandeur, and those corp suits keep sending in the jackboot clowns. All of it is getting in the way of what she wants most—to find who landed her in the lab where everything all started, who made her girlfriend into patient zero Necro Mary there, and what turned a four block radius into a playground for every saint’s worst nightmare. Plan’s simple: tear everything and everybody apart until somebody says something smart. That’s easy. It’s the execution that’s going to hurt. “Nanoshock crushes everything in its path... It is a steel-fisted punch in the mouth”— Scott Sigler, #1 bestselling author of the Generations trilogy K. C. Alexander doesn’t ‘write’ so much as she fires words into your cerebral cortex with an electromagnetic railgun.”— Chuck Wendig, New York Times bestselling author of Star Wars: Aftermath and Invasive “An intense, gleefully profane, fearlessly inventive, unapologetically grimy cyberpunk caper with an unforgettable protagonist.”— Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy Magazine
REX I know what it’s like to live on the dark side of that pretty line between black and white. Retirement from the assassin’s life doesn’t change that. These hands have seen too much violence to ever wash them clean. How ironic that I’m afraid of blood. All I want now is a normal life, and I’ve got plenty of cash to make it happen… But I have no clue what “normal” is supposed to look like, and I’m running out of time. The girl whose life I destroyed—the only girl I’ve ever cared for—is the one bright side to my life these days. Maybe that’s why I haven’t put a stop to her desperate campaign for revenge. Or maybe I just like watching my beautiful good-girl-with-a-vengeance try to play bad… MASON For the past ten years, my only goal has been to take down the man who stole my brother’s heart, in the most literal sense, but all my brilliant plans tend to turn out more like bad pranks. When I snag a job at my enemy’s world famous research facility, I’m sure this is the chance I’ve been waiting for. But nothing is as it seems in Rex’s strange world, and I quickly start to question everything I’ve spent the past decade believing. Now my conflicting feelings threaten to unravel everything. Will I finally get my revenge, or will my heart be the next one Rex steals—this time with a kiss? HEART THIEF is an enemies-to-lovers romantic suspense. It is the first book in a series about a team of ex-assassins and their hunt for a normal life while their old one still has them in its clutches. They will keep you at the edge of your seat and grip your emotions as they try to put their scarred past behind them. But they will also catch you laughing in the most inappropriate situations, as situations often are when they include people who know how to kill in a number of ways. Each book in the series will feature a new member of their band of ex-assassins and has a HEA. They can be read as standalones but I promise you won’t want to miss even a second!
Marianne Strauss has her work cut out for her. Not only is she the reincarnation of a brilliant Tibetan scientist, but the State Oracle has prophesied that she will liberate the Land of Snows from the Chinese. An ambitious fantasy novel set in 22nd-century Tibet.
Widely regarded as the one essential book for every science fiction fan, The Year's Best Science Fiction (Winner of the 2004 Locus Award for Best Anthology) continues to uphold its standard of excellence with more than two dozen stories representing the previous year's best SF writing.&The stories in this collection imaginatively take readers far across the universe, into the very core of their beings, to the realm of the Gods, and to the moment just after now. Included are the works of masters of the form and the bright new talents of tomorrow. This book is a valuable resource in addition to serving as the single best place in the universe to find stories that stir the imagination and the heart.
In a technologically suppressed future, information demands to be free in the debut novel from Hugo Award-winning author Charlie Stross. In the twenty-first century, life as we know it changed. Faster-than-light travel was perfected, and the Eschaton, a superhuman artificial intelligence, was born. Four hundred years later, the far-flung colonies that arose as a result of these events—scattered over three thousand years of time and a thousand parsecs of space—are beginning to rediscover their origins. The New Republic is one such colony. It has existed for centuries in self-imposed isolation, rejecting all but the most basic technology. Now, under attack by a devastating information plague, the colony must reach out to Earth for help. A battle fleet is dispatched, streaking across the stars to the rescue. But things are not what they seem—secret agendas and ulterior motives abound, both aboard the ship and on the ground. And watching over it all is the Eschaton, which has its own very definite ideas about the outcome...
Winner of the 1989 Nebula Award Award for Best Novel of 1988. “A brutal and beautiful book” that follows the surreal, fantastical journey of a Vietnam War nurse (Minneapolis Star-Tribune). A literary departure for acclaimed fantasy author Elizabeth Ann Scarborough, The Healer’s War draws on her personal experience as an army nurse in Da Nang to create a classic novel of the Vietnam War, enriched with a magical, mystical twist. Lt. Kitty McCulley, a young and inexperienced nurse tossed into a stressful and chaotic situation, is having a difficult time reconciling her duty to help and heal with the indifference and overt racism of some of her colleagues, and with the horrendously damaged soldiers and Vietnamese civilians she encounters during her service at the China Beach medical facilities. She is unexpectedly helped by the mysterious and inexplicable properties of an amulet, given to her by one of her patients, an elderly, dying Vietnamese holy man, which allows her to see other people’s “auras” and to understand more about them as a result. This eventually leads to a strange, almost surrealistic journey through the jungle, accompanied by a one-legged boy and a battle-seasoned but crazed soldier—as McCulley struggles to find herself and a way to survive through the madness and destruction.
Suzanne Roberts explores the link between death and desire and what it means to accept our own animal natures, the parts we most often hide, deny, or consider only with shame—our taboo desires and our grief.
The term "cyberpunk" entered the literary landscape in 1984 to describe William Gibson's pathbreaking novel Neuromancer. Cyberpunks are now among the shock troops of postmodernism, Larry McCaffery argues in Storming the Reality Studio, marshalling the resources of a fragmentary culture to create a startling new form. Artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, multinational machinations, frenetic bursts of prose, collisions of style, celebrations of texture: although emerging largely from science fiction, these features of cyberpunk writing are, as this volume makes clear, integrally related to the aims and innovations of the literary avant-garde. By bringing together original fiction by well-known contemporary writers (William Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Kathy Acker, J. G. Ballard, Samuel R. Delany), critical commentary by some of the major theorists of postmodern art and culture (Jacques Derrida, Fredric Jameson, Timothy Leary, Jean-François Lyotard), and work by major practitioners of cyberpunk (William Gibson, Rudy Rucker, John Shirley, Pat Cadigan, Bruce Sterling), Storming the Reality Studio reveals a fascinating ongoing dialog in contemporary culture. What emerges most strikingly from the colloquy is a shared preoccupation with the force of technology in shaping modern life. It is precisely this concern, according to McCaffery, that has put science fiction, typically the province of technological art, at the forefront of creative explorations of our unique age. A rich opporunity for reading across genres, this anthology offers a new perspective on the evolution of postmodern culture and ultimately shows how deeply technological developments have influenced our vision and our art. Selected Fiction contributors: Kathy Acker, J. G. Ballard, William S. Burroughs, Pat Cadigan, Samuel R. Delany, Don DeLillo, William Gibson, Harold Jaffe, Richard Kadrey, Marc Laidlaw, Mark Leyner, Joseph McElroy, Misha, Ted Mooney, Thomas Pynchon, Rudy Rucker, Lucius Shepard, Lewis Shiner, John Shirley, Bruce Sterling, William Vollman Selected Non-Fiction contributors: Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Joan Gordon, Veronica Hollinger, Fredric Jameson, Arthur Kroker and David Cook, Timothy Leary, Jean-François Lyotard, Larry McCaffery, Brian McHale, Dave Porush, Bruce Sterling, Darko Suvin, Takayuki Tatsumi
