Yang Qian had a good saying in her previous life that was called 'bland life'. In fact, he was simply unable to achieve anything in this life! It was not easy to be born rich in this life, It was a pity that this was an illegitimate daughter that Xiao San had not been able to succeed in rising up. Alright, this isn't a problem. It's fine as long as I'm rich. She had to accept a man she didn't want? The rich and powerful life they spoke of had gone bankrupt for the Mao Corporation? Dear, don't play the apocalypse this kind of thing isn't fun at all! Fortunately, both his Discipline and space were in his hands. What? Other people also have their own space, and you can sell things that you grow? As a result, the apocalypse had arrived ...
Forces from several Space Marine Chapters mobilise to defend the cardinal world of Almace from an invasion by the twisted traitors of the Word Bearers. But unbeknownst to the forces of the Imperium, conquest is not the enemy’s sole aim… Book 5 in the Space Marine Conquest Series Following the cataclysmic Great Rift, forces from the Imperial Fists, White Scars and Raven Guard mobilise to defend the cardinal world of Almace from an invasion by the twisted traitors of the Word Bearers.... Lieutenant Heyd Calder is a Primaris Marine whose mastery of warfare is matched only by his diplomatic prowess. Under the orders of Roboute Guilliman, he is deployed to Almace, a minor seat of the Ecclesiarchy, to protect the world at whatever cost. Yet even as diabolical forces leer from the system's edge, Calder discovers that the capital's Cardinal-Governor, a sharp, inscrutable figure of spiritual and material authority, is hiding something. When it becomes clear that conquest is not the enemy’s sole aim, Calder resolves to uncover the secret of Almace. As the system is set ablaze, clashes of faith, strategy and politics ensue in the capital, and it becomes clear that the forces of the Ecclesiarchy and the Adeptus Astartes must fight together if they are to have any hope of victory.
From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Anathem, Reamde, and Cryptonomicon comes an exciting and thought-provoking science fiction epic—a grand story of annihilation and survival spanning five thousand years. What would happen if the world were ending? A catastrophic event renders the earth a ticking time bomb. In a feverish race against the inevitable, nations around the globe band together to devise an ambitious plan to ensure the survival of humanity far beyond our atmosphere, in outer space. But the complexities and unpredictability of human nature coupled with unforeseen challenges and dangers threaten the intrepid pioneers, until only a handful of survivors remain . . . Five thousand years later, their progeny—seven distinct races now three billion strong—embark on yet another audacious journey into the unknown . . . to an alien world utterly transformed by cataclysm and time: Earth. A writer of dazzling genius and imaginative vision, Neal Stephenson combines science, philosophy, technology, psychology, and literature in a magnificent work of speculative fiction that offers a portrait of a future that is both extraordinary and eerily recognizable. As he did in Anathem, Cryptonomicon, the Baroque Cycle, and Reamde, Stephenson explores some of our biggest ideas and perplexing challenges in a breathtaking saga that is daring, engrossing, and altogether brilliant.
"Like smoke off a collision between Dennis Cooper's George Miles Cycle and Beyond The Black Rainbow, absorbing the energy of mind control, reincarnation, parallel universes, altered states, school shootings, obsession, suicidal ideation, and so much else, B.R. Yeager's multi-valent voicing of drugged up, occult youth reveals fresh tunnels into the gray space between the body and the spirit, the living and the dead, providing a well-aimed shot in the arm for the world of conceptual contemporary horror." -Blake Butler, author of Three Hundred Million "Ever wonder where teenage children go at night? Perhaps it's best not knowing the answer. There's something amiss in Kinsfield, a drab, boring city much like your own, except for the teenage suicide epidemic, stagnant, ineffectual parents, cultish behavior that borders on psychosis, and strings, strings everywhere. B.R. Yeager's Negative Space is a hypnotic collage of message boards, memes, and ruined bodies twisting at the end of a rope. Most modern novels have lost all concept of magic. B.R. Yeager's Negative Space is a stunning refutation of the quotidian." -James Nulick, author of Haunted Girlfriend & Valencia
A Recommended Summer Read from The Verge and io9 A Recommended June Read from Hello Giggles and Tor.com When the world ends, where will you go? In a breathtakingly vivid and emotionally gripping debut novel, one woman must confront the emptiness in the universe—and in her own heart—when a devastating virus reduces most of humanity to dust and memories. All Jamie Allenby ever wanted was space. Even though she wasn’t forced to emigrate from Earth, she willingly left the overpopulated, claustrophobic planet. And when a long relationship devolved into silence and suffocating sadness, she found work on a frontier world on the edges of civilization. Then the virus hit... Now Jamie finds herself dreadfully alone, with all that’s left of the dead. Until a garbled message from Earth gives her hope that someone from her past might still be alive. Soon Jamie finds other survivors, and their ragtag group will travel through the vast reaches of space, drawn to the promise of a new beginning on Earth. But their dream will pit them against those desperately clinging to the old ways. And Jamie’s own journey home will help her close the distance between who she has become and who she is meant to be...
A quietly powerful graphic novel of hope, separation, and perseverance in the journey to reunite with those you love. "Set in a near future of apocalyptic threat and space colonization, Fiona Ostby's debut graphic novel, Space Story, is a queer love story full of wistful longing. . . Refreshingly, most characters are women or nonbinary and are matter-of-factly represented as queer. Many particularly touching spreads create parallels: a left-hand panel in red, opposite one in blue, show Leah and Hannah in separate beds, facing each other across an impossible divide. The simple layouts and focus on relationships turn a cosmic dystopia into something universal." —Shelf Awareness, featured as one of the Best Books of the Week "This is a story filled with bitter-sweet moments (but with a happy ending), and I am in love with it." —BookRiot "Economical and poignantly told, Ostby’s debut graphic novel sets a queer family’s separation drama against an apocalyptic backdrop. . . This is a touching love story for hard times." —Publishers Weekly Two women fall in love and start a family on a dying Earth. Only one escapes to space. Her family is still on the planet. They won't give up until they find each other again. From debut author Fiona Ostby, Space Story weaves an interstellar tale of discovering love and finding strength, courage, and hope—even in the darkest moments.
In the last surviving human city, an ex-spy gets sucked into a dangerous quest that will take him beyond the city walls when a winged man turns up dead in his morgue in this innovative and original dystopian space adventure. Spearpoint, the last human city, is an enormous atmosphere-piercing spire. Clinging to its skin are the zones, a series of semi-autonomous city-states, each of which enjoys a different—and rigidly enforced—level of technology. Following an infiltration mission that went tragically wrong, Quillon has been living incognito, working as a pathologist in the district morgue. But when a near-dead angel drops onto his dissecting table, Quillon's world is wrenched apart one more time, for the angel is a winged posthuman from Spearpoint's Celestial Levels—and with the dying body comes bad news. If Quillon is to save his life, he must leave his home and journey into the cold and hostile lands beyond Spearpoint's base, starting an exile that will take him further than he could ever imagine. But there is far more at stake than just Quillon's own survival, for the limiting technologies of the zones are determined not by governments or police, but by the very nature of reality—and reality itself is showing worrying signs of instability . . .
Can social theories forge new paths into an uncertain future? The future has become increasingly difficult to imagine. We might be able to predict a few events, but imagining how looming disasters will coincide is simultaneously necessary and impossible. Drawing on speculative fiction and social theory, Theory for the World to Come is the beginning of a conversation about theories that move beyond nihilistic conceptions of the capitalism-caused Anthropocene and toward generative bodies of thought that provoke creative ways of thinking about the world ahead. Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer draws on such authors as Kim Stanley Robinson and Octavia Butler, and engages with afrofuturism, indigenous speculative fiction, and films from the 1970s and ’80s to help think differently about the future and its possibilities. Forerunners: Ideas First Short books of thought-in-process scholarship, where intense analysis, questioning, and speculation take the lead
A new approach to the vast nuclear infrastructure and the apocalypses it produces, focusing on Black, queer, Indigenous, and Asian American literatures Since 1945, America has spent more resources on nuclear technology than any other national project. Although it requires a massive infrastructure that touches society on myriad levels, nuclear technology has typically been discussed in a limited, top-down fashion that clusters around powerful men. In Infrastructures of Apocalypse, Jessica Hurley turns this conventional wisdom on its head, offering a new approach that focuses on neglected authors and Black, queer, Indigenous, and Asian American perspectives. Exchanging the usual white, male “nuclear canon” for authors that include James Baldwin, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Ruth Ozeki, Infrastructures of Apocalypse delivers a fresh literary history of post-1945 America that focuses on apocalypse from below. Here Hurley critiques the racialized urban spaces of civil defense and reads nuclear waste as a colonial weapon. Uniting these diverse lines of inquiry is Hurley’s belief that apocalyptic thinking is not the opposite of engagement but rather a productive way of imagining radically new forms of engagement. Infrastructures of Apocalypse offers futurelessness as a place from which we can construct a livable world. It fills a blind spot in scholarship on American literature of the nuclear age, while also offering provocative, surprising new readings of such well-known works as Atlas Shrugged, Infinite Jest, and Angels in America. Infrastructures of Apocalypse is a revelation for readers interested in nuclear issues, decolonial literature, speculative fiction, and American studies.
There he was in his sailboat in the middle of the Atlantic, all alone and loving it. Well, there was a US Navy carrier group on his southern horizon, but he was a Navy guy himself, so he didn't mind. Then came the UFOs, hurtling in from the Outer Black to overfly the carriers at Mach 17. Their impossible aerobatics were bad enough¾but then they started shooting at each other. And at the Navy. With nukes. Little ones at first, but winding up with a 500 megatonner at 90 miles that fried every piece of electronics within line-of-sight. Richard Ashton thought he was just a ringside observer to these now over-the-horizon events. Until the crippled alien lifeboat came drifting down and homed in on his sailboat; suddenly he has his hands full of an unconscious, critically wounded and impossibly human alien warrior who also happens to be a gorgeous female. That's when things got interesting. At the publisher's request, this title is sold without DRM (Digital Rights Management). "... a particular delight, offering nonstop action that's both well executed and emotionally satisfying." ¾Publishers Weekly "It's a rollicking fun tale that's impossible to put down." ¾Philadelphia Weekly Press "... the best work (Weber] has done ... the rewards are ample ... recommended...." ¾Starlog
