The Beam Episode 1: A FREE Sci-Fi Cyberpunk Technothriller
The Beam Episode 1: A FREE Sci-Fi Cyberpunk Technothriller

Author: Johnny B. Truant

Publisher: Johnny B. Truant

Published: 2024-07-26

Total Pages: 131

ISBN-13:

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This first episode is a FREE series-starter for the sci-fi world of The Beam: a dystopian technothriller full of intrigue and conspiracies ... and the unseen perils of our hyperconnected world. This chilling, intricately-plotted cyberpunk series is set in a futuristic dystopia where politics and technology have widened the gap between haves and have-nots -- and where power means everything. All of humanity is connected ... to The Beam and to the lie. In the year 2097, the only stable nation is the North American Union: a cyberpunk world exploding with new technologies and ruled by two political parties. The NAU allows people to choose either the Enterprise Party (sink-or-swim; effort and luck determine whether members prosper or starve) or the Directorate, where members are guaranteed safety but can never rise above their station. And above it all is The Beam: an AI-built computer network that serves every whim and connects citizens through implants and biological add-ons. The Beam anticipates every need and has created a world within the world. It permeates everything. And is everywhere. But the NAU's power is shifting. New powers are making their moves while others hang in the balance. Behind it all, a shadowy group is pulling strings, and guiding the upcoming election exactly where they want it to go. The Beam is coming alive; immersion is as real as reality. If the NAU's power goes unchecked, the actions of a shadowy few will shape the fate of millions forever. ★★★★★ "This series is one of the best from these authors, which is saying a lot because Sean Platt/Johnny B. Truant/David Wright (any combination of the three) are by far my favorite authors. The Beam is an extremely complex world with complex characters." -- Matt Browner ★★★★★ "I'd have to say this series has them all beat because all the technologies (or magic, if you will) in this series are better developed, the characters are more involved, and the story lines are better woven. And I'm not talking about twists and turns in the plot that require suspending disbelief (yeah right), or leave you confused as to what happened. It's pretty amazing and thought-provoking." -- Burton Kent Sci-fi fans of William Gibson and Neal Stephenson will love the visionary cyberpunk world of The Beam ... where politics, plots, conspiracies, and backstabbing matter as much as future itself.

Spin State
Spin State

Author: Chris Moriarty

Publisher: Spectra

Published: 2004-11-23

Total Pages: 642

ISBN-13: 0553586246

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From a stunning new voice in hard science fiction comes the thrilling story of one woman’s quest to wrest truth from chaos, love from violence, and reality from illusion in a post-human universe of emergent AIs, genetic constructs, and illegal wetware. . . . UN Peacekeeper Major Catherine Li has made thirty-seven faster-than-light jumps in her lifetime—and has probably forgotten more than most people remember. But that’s what backup hard drives are for. And Li should know; she’s been hacking her memory for fifteen years in order to pass as human. But no memory upgrade can prepare Li for what she finds on Compson’s World: a mining colony she once called home and to which she is sent after a botched raid puts her on the bad side of the powers that be. A dead physicist who just happens to be her cloned twin. A missing dataset that could change the interstellar balance of power and turn a cold war hot. And a mining “accident” that is starting to look more and more like murder. . . . Suddenly Li is chasing a killer in an alien world miles underground where everyone has a secret. And one wrong turn in streamspace, one misstep in the dark alleys of blackmarket tech and interstellar espionage, one risky hookup with an AI could literally blow her mind.

Change Agent
Change Agent

Author: Daniel Suarez

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 418

ISBN-13: 110198466X

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2045. Kenneth Durand leads Interpol's most effective team against genetic crime, hunting down black market labs that perform illegal procedures, augmenting embryos and rapidly accelerating human evolution-- and preying on human-trafficking victims to experiment and advance their technology. One figure looms behind it all: Marcus Demang Wyckes, leader of a cartel known as the Huli jing. When Durand is forcibly dosed with a radical new change agent, he wakes from a coma weeks later to find he's been genetically transformed into Wyckes. Determined to restore his original DNA, Durand hasn't anticipated just how difficult locating his enemy will be.

Mindstar Rising
Mindstar Rising

Author: Peter F. Hamilton

Publisher: Pan Macmillan

Published: 2009-08-21

Total Pages: 526

ISBN-13: 0330467387

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In a ravaged near-future England, a private detective with psychic powers might be the last hope standing between mankind and total collapse. Mindstar Rising is the first cyberpunk thriller in Peter F. Hamilton's hugely popular Greg Mandel series. For fans of James S.A. Corey. It's the 21st century and global warming is here to stay, so forget the way your country used to look. And get used to the free market, too – the companies possess all the best hardware, and they're calling the shots now. In a world like this, a man open to any offers can do just fine. A man like Greg Mandel for instance, who's psi-boosted, wired into the latest sensory equipment and carrying state-of-the-art weaponry. He's also been part of the English Army's Mindstar Battalion. As the cartels battle for control of a revolutionary new power source, and corporate greed outstrips national security, tension is mounting to boiling point. And Greg Mandel is about to face the ultimate test. Mindstar Rising is followed by A Quantum Murder and The Nano Flower to complete the Greg Mandel trilogy.

The Age of Scorpio
The Age of Scorpio

Author: Gavin G. Smith

Publisher: Gollancz

Published: 2013-04-18

Total Pages: 602

ISBN-13: 0575094788

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Praised by Stephen Baxter and Adam Roberts, reviewed ecstatically by SFX magazine, Gavin Smith's first novel VETERAN announced an exciting new voice on the SF scene. WAR IN HEAVEN, set in the same universe, followed. Now comes a new standalone SF thriller. Of all the captains based out of Arclight only Eldon Sloper was desperate enough to agree to a salvage job in Red Space. And now he and his crew are living to regret his desperation. In Red Space the rules are different. Some things work, others don't. Best to stick close to the Church beacons. Don't get lost. Because there's something wrong about Red Space. Something beyond rational. Something vampyric... Long after The Loss, mankind is different. We touch the world via neunonics. We are machines, we are animals, we are hybrids. But some things never change. A Killer is paid to kill, a Thief will steal countless lives. A Clone will find insanity, an Innocent a new horror. The Church knows we have kept our sins. Gavin Smith's new SF novel is an epic slam-bang ride through a terrifyingly different future.

All Tomorrow's Parties
All Tomorrow's Parties

Author: William Gibson

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2003-02-04

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 1101146486

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“The ferociously talented Gibson delivers his signature mélange of technopop splendor and post-industrial squalor” (Time) in this New York Times bestseller that features his hero from Idoru... Colin Laney, sensitive to patterns of information like no one else on earth, currently resides in a cardboard box in Tokyo. His body shakes with fever dreams, but his mind roams free as always, and he knows something is about to happen. Not in Tokyo; he will not see this thing himself. Something is about to happen in San Francisco. The mists make it easy to hide, if hiding is what you want, and even at the best of times reality there seems to shift. A gray man moves elegantly through the mists, leaving bodies in his wake, so that a tide of absences alerts Laney to his presence. A boy named Silencio does not speak, but flies through webs of cyber-information in search of the one object that has seized his imagination. And Rei Toi, the Japanese Idoru, continues her study of all things human. She herself is not human, not quite, but she’s working on it. And in the mists of San Francisco, at this rare moment in history, who is to say what is or is not impossible...

Crashing Heaven
Crashing Heaven

Author: Al Robertson

Publisher: Gollancz

Published: 2015-06-18

Total Pages: 355

ISBN-13: 1473203422

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A diamond-hard, visionary new SF thriller. Nailed-down cyberpunk ala William Gibson for the 21st century meets the vivid dark futures of Al Reynolds in this extraordinary debut novel. With Earth abandoned, humanity resides on Station, an industrialised asteroid run by the sentient corporations of the Pantheon. Under their leadership a war has been raging against the Totality - ex-Pantheon AIs gone rogue. With the war over, Jack Forster and his sidekick Hugo Fist, a virtual ventriloquist's dummy tied to Jack's mind and created to destroy the Totality, have returned home. Labelled a traitor for surrendering to the Totality, all Jack wants is to clear his name but when he discovers two old friends have died under suspicious circumstances he also wants answers. Soon he and Fist are embroiled in a conspiracy that threatens not only their future but all of humanity's. But with Fist's software licence about to expire, taking Jack's life with it, can they bring down the real traitors before their time runs out?

Agency
Agency

Author: William Gibson

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2020-01-21

Total Pages: 418

ISBN-13: 1101986956

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AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “ONE OF THE MOST VISIONARY, ORIGINAL, AND QUIETLY INFLUENTIAL WRITERS CURRENTLY WORKING”* returns with a sharply imagined follow-up to the New York Times bestselling The Peripheral. William Gibson has trained his eye on the future for decades, ever since coining the term “cyberspace” and then popularizing it in his classic speculative novel Neuromancer in the early 1980s. Cory Doctorow raved that The Peripheral is “spectacular, a piece of trenchant, far-future speculation that features all the eyeball kicks of Neuromancer.” Now Gibson is back with Agency—a science fiction thriller heavily influenced by our most current events. Verity Jane, gifted app whisperer, takes a job as the beta tester for a new product: a digital assistant, accessed through a pair of ordinary-looking glasses. “Eunice,” the disarmingly human AI in the glasses, manifests a face, a fragmentary past, and a canny grasp of combat strategy. Realizing that her cryptic new employers don’t yet know how powerful and valuable Eunice is, Verity instinctively decides that it’s best they don’t. Meanwhile, a century ahead in London, in a different time line entirely, Wilf Netherton works amid plutocrats and plunderers, survivors of the slow and steady apocalypse known as the jackpot. His boss, the enigmatic Ainsley Lowbeer, can look into alternate pasts and nudge their ultimate directions. Verity and Eunice are her current project. Wilf can see what Verity and Eunice can’t: their own version of the jackpot, just around the corner, and the roles they both may play in it. *The Boston Globe

Science Fiction and Psychology
Science Fiction and Psychology

Author: Gavin Miller

Publisher:

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 1789620600

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This book offers an in-depth exploration of science fiction literature's varied use of psychological discourses, beginning at the birth of modern psychology in the late nineteenth century and condluding wtith the ascendance of neuroscience in the late twnetieth century.

Distrust That Particular Flavor
Distrust That Particular Flavor

Author: William Gibson

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2012-01-03

Total Pages: 203

ISBN-13: 1101559411

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A collection of New York Times bestselling author William Gibson’s articles and essays about contemporary culture—a privileged view into the mind of a writer whose thinking has shaped not only a generation of writers but our entire culture... Though best known for his fiction, William Gibson is as much in demand for his cutting-edge observations on the world we live in now. Originally printed in publications as varied as Wired, the New York Times, and the Observer, these articles and essays cover thirty years of thoughtful, observant life, and are reported in the wry, humane voice that lovers of Gibson have come to crave. “Gibson pulls off a dazzling trick. Instead of predicting the future, he finds the future all around him, mashed up with the past, and reveals our own domain to us.”—The New York Times Book Review