One hundred years after the first man walked on the Moon, climate change and overpopulation make civilization on Earth increasingly difficult, and the planets and moons in our solar system provide inadequate havens. The technological genius, Alastair McCleod, proposes a Prometheus-like solution. He wants to give humankind a new kind of fire, the stars, and as the richest man in the solar system, he devotes his influence, prestige, and wealth to implementing his solution. His Proposal is as controversial as it is simple: "We don't have the technology to take ourselves to the stars, and so instead, we will send the dead and the unborn." The Prometheus Proposal is the saga of the McLeod family quest to reach the stars.
Prometheus Deception Robert Ludlum is the acknowledged master of suspense and international intrigue. For over thirty years, in over twenty international bestsellers, he has a set a standard that has never been equaled. Now, with the Prometheus Deception, he proves that he is at the very pinnacle of his craft. Nicholas Bryson spent years as a deep cover operative for the American secret intelligence group, the Directorate. After critical undercover mission went horribly wrong, Bryson was retired to a new identity. Years later, his closely held cover is cracked and Bryson learns that the Directorate was not what it claimed - that he was a pawn in a complex scheme against his own country's interests. Now, it has become increasingly clear that the shadowy Directorate is headed for some dangerous endgame - but no one knows precisely who they are and what they are planning. With Bryson their only possible asset, the director of the CIA recruits Bryson to find, reinfiltrate, and stop the Directorate. But after years on the sidelines, Bryson's field skills are rusty, his contacts unreliable, and his instincts suspect. With everything he thought he knew about his own life in question, Bryson is all alone in a wilderness of mirrors - unsure what is and isn't true and who, if anyone, he can trust - with the future of millions in the balance. Sigma Protocol Ben Hartman is vacationing in Zurich, Switzerland when he chances upon his old friend Jimmy Cavanaugh—a madman who's armed and programmed to assassinate. In a matter of minutes, six innocent bystanders are dead. So is Cavanaugh. But when his body vanishes, and his weapon mysteriously appears in Hartman's luggage, Hartman is plunged into an unfathomable nightmare... Meanwhile, Anna Navarro, field agent for the Department of Justice, has been asked to investigate the sudden, random deaths of eleven men throughout the world. The only thing that connects them? A secret file, over a half-century old, that's linked to the CIA—and is marked with the same puzzling codename: Sigma. As Anna follows the connecting thread—and Hartman finds himself on the run—she ends up in the shadows of a relentless killer who is one step ahead of her...victim by victim. Now, she and Hartman together must uncover the diabolical secrets long held behind Sigma. It will threaten everything they think they know about themselves—and confirm their very worst fears...
If you love the mission of science fiction, the interchange between cultures, the hopeful and inexorable trajectory of technology and ideas, you'll love this anthology of new stories from Chinese and English-language writers. An impressive joint project, this outstanding new anthology brings the best of Chinese and English-language science fiction in a mediation on the theme of Exploration in Space. New, emerging, established and much-lauded writers from both cultures are brought together to demonstrate that technology and humanity when they work together bring challenges, joy and benefits to all of humankind. From Bao Shu comes 'A Trip to the End', from Allen Stroud 'The First', from He Xi 'Never Meet Again in Life', from Amdi Silvestri 'A Minuet of Corpses' and under the guiding eye of Patrick Parrinder (President of the H.G. Wells society) and Yao Haijun (celebrated editor of Science Fiction World in China) thirteen authors create a series of worlds which will enthral and entertain.
Prometheus and Gaia examines the ideological positions of Futurism and Eco-Pessimism. While these are rarely spoken about in mainstream discourse, they do have strong resonances in today’s popular politics and culture. In light of existential threats posed by climate change, disruptive technologies and economic crises, many have grown weary of the “small fixes” offered by mainstream policy-makers. Radical change thus appears necessary, as Futurism and Eco-Pessimism emerge as two fundamental challenges to the status quo. The Futurist claims that the current dynamism of technology is incompatible with human limitations, while the Eco-Pessimist sees the climate crisis as symptomatic of a broader human domination over nature. What these seemingly opposite currents have in common is a shared rejection of the human frame as grounding politics; each seeks to subordinate the human in favor of a wholly alien other, either in the form of an anarchic nature or a dynamic technology. To transcend this strange coincidence of opposites, Prometheus and Gaia makes the positive case for a humanism that is rationalist without being anthropocentric.
The two-volume set LNAI 8265 and LNAI 8266 constitutes the proceedings of the 12th Mexican International Conference on Artificial Intelligence, MICAI 2013, held in Mexico City, Mexico, in November 2013. The total of 85 papers presented in these proceedings were carefully reviewed and selected from 284 submissions. The first volume deals with advances in artificial intelligence and its applications and is structured in the following five sections: logic and reasoning; knowledge-based systems and multi-agent systems; natural language processing; machine translation; and bioinformatics and medical applications. The second volume deals with advances in soft computing and its applications and is structured in the following eight sections: evolutionary and nature-inspired metaheuristic algorithms; neural networks and hybrid intelligent systems; fuzzy systems; machine learning and pattern recognition; data mining; computer vision and image processing; robotics, planning and scheduling and emotion detection, sentiment analysis and opinion mining.
