In this haunting debut novel, Michael Smolij and his friends are unable to leave the blue-collar Detroit neighborhoods abandoned by their fathers. They stumble through their teens into their 20s until the restlessness of the fathers blooms in them, threatening to carry them away.
When his father disappears along with several other men from their blue-collar Detroit neighborhood, sixteen-year-old Michael Smolij witnesses the effects of large-scale abandonment on the community's wives and mothers and, in the years that follow, experiences along with his friends the same restlessness that carried away their fathers. A first novel. 25,000 first printing.
In a book with foldout pages, Monica's father fulfills her request for the moon by taking it down after it is small enough to carry, but it continues to change in size.
In this haunting debut novel, Michael Smolij and his friends are unable to leave the blue-collar Detroit neighborhoods abandoned by their fathers. They stumble through their teens into their 20s until the restlessness of the fathers blooms in them, threatening to carry them away.
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.
Supervillains do not merely play hooky. True, coming back to school after a month spent fighting—and defeating—adult superheroes is a bit of a comedown for The Inscrutable Machine. When offered the chance to skip school in the most dramatic way possible, Penelope Akk can't resist. With the help of a giant spider and mysterious red goo, she builds a spaceship and flies to Jupiter. Mutant goats. Secret human colonies. A war between three alien races with humanity as the prize. Robot overlords and evil plots. Penny and her friends find all this and more on Jupiter's moons, but what they don't find are any heroes to save the day. Fortunately, they have an angry eleven-year-old and a whole lot of mad science…