The book is a collection of nine short stories telling the tale of three generations of a family before, during, and after a technological singularity. It was originally written as a series of novelettes and novellas, all published in Asimov's Science Fiction magazine in the period 2001 to 2004. According to Stross, the initial inspiration for the stories was his experience working as a programmer for a high-growth company during the dot-com boom of the 1990s.
The first three stories follow the character of agalmic "venture altruist" Manfred Macx, starting in the early 21st century; the second three stories follow his daughter Amber; and the final three focus largely on Amber's son Sirhan in the completely transformed world at the end of the century.
Miriam is a jiv—an augmented warrior for the Maker cause—and she’s more than ready to get in the ring and fight for the latest mod. If she wins, she’ll have everything she needs to apply for the Offering. The only problem? No one survives that augment. Either she’ll be the Makers’ latest failed experiment… or she’ll become the leap toward salvation her people desperately need.
Sister Amara prays she won’t be the last of her twelve sisters to reach the awakening—after all, the salvation of their Masters depends on them. But with the interrogations growing more deadly, being last may be best... especially when you’ve been created to touch the face of God.
A chilling scenario of the bleak urban landscape that is 21st-century San Francisco, and the return of Lt. Frank Carlucci. The San Francisco Police Department is stonewalling seemingly unrelated murder investigations, and Carlucci is determined to find out why. His unauthorized investigation leads him to an insidious black market run by top political officials.
Lt. Frank Carlucci is drawn into an investigation surrounding the disappearance of his daughter's friend. But as Carlucci digs deeper, the corruption and decay he finds is nothing compared to a final horror that could have devastating implications: a secret known only as Cancer Cell.
Code Breakers: Alpha is a futuristic, high-stakes thrill ride. In a post-apocalyptic future, humanity survives within a single domed city run by a shadowy benefactor known only as The Family. Each week the death lottery claims more lives and Gerry Cardle, head of the lottery, inexplicably finds himself the next on the list. Something's wrong with the system. A deadly artificial intelligence has breached security. Gerry has just 7 days to live. Forced off the grid, Gerry has to do the unthinkable: willingly leave the city. What he finds in the abandoned lands will shatter his perception of what it means to be human. Everything he had been told before was a lie. In a deadly world of conspiracies, Gerry has to sacrifice everything he loves in order to save it, and time is running out.
Being human is no longer enough. The fanatical Red Widows sweep destruction across the abandoned lands. Their aggression threatens to destroy the city Gerry had risked his life to save. Petal, the woman Gerry has come to love is dying. The despotic cabal, The Family, demand he brings her to them, but she's missing, running from the Widows, searching for the truth of her origins before it's too late. When their paths cross, Petal and Gerry will hold the fate of humankind in their hands-if they can survive the malevolent digital entity that stalks them from the shadows. Code Breakers: Beta is a post-apocalyptic, near-future thriller that will delight fans of The Matrix, Neuromancer, and Blade Runner.
The third instalment of the best-selling (#1 Cyberpunk) series. How much sacrifice should anyone have to give? Petal and Gabriel are forced to decide, as the mad, digital entity, Elliot Robertson, is determined to dominate the world. His influence, spread by an insurgent group, The Ronin, seeks to control and enslave the last of humanity. With time running out, Petal and Gabriel must travel to the far reaches of the abandoned lands in order to repair a server they believe will be the key to defeating Elliot and his ronin. All the while, Petal has a ticking time bomb inside her head: Gerry Cardle's uploaded consciousness. The code of which is mutating, but to what end? Together with their few allies, Petal and Gabriel must face either victory or total annihilation.
The Mining Master of Thebe is all alone—not counting the scavenger drones, foundry nanites, and magtread tractors buzzing across the tiny Jovian moon. When a spindly tower of rocks mysteriously appears at the pole, it’s enough to vex the Mining Master’s machine intelligence like dust trapped in a harvester joint. Reporting it could mean reassignment to the Outer Belt, but probing deeper into the mystery threatens to unlock something better left... contained.
His family destroyed and his dreams crushed by the corporation that controls his Brazilian home through technology and drugs, Paulo seeks revenge, aided by Zaide, a woman with a computer implant in her brain that provides access to government data.
Legacy humans like Cyrus Kowalski are used to skirting the laws the ascenders have laid down—after all, he knows the hyper-intelligent human/bot hybrids only pretend to care about their legacy pets. But when Cyrus’s adopted mother is stricken by a disease the ascenders refuse to cure, he has to risk everything to defy them… or stand by helplessly and watch her die.
An electrifying new cybershock thriller from a Philip K. Dick Award-winning author. In the violent, deteriorating San Francisco of the future, two bodies--chained together in a death embrace--are pulled from the bay. Only ex-cop Tanner recognizes the mark of the Chain Killer, and now he must prepare to penetrate the lair of a madman--in the city's hell on earth.
Hackers is an anthology of short stories edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois. It contains stories by noted science fiction and cyberpunk writers of the late 1980s and early 1990s about hackers.
In the year 2018, Sergeant Sue Smith of the Edinburgh constabulary is called in on a special case. A daring bank robbery has taken place at Hayek Associates -- a dot-com start-up company that's just floated onto the London stock exchange. But this crime may be a bit beyond Smith's expertise.
The robot Caretaker of Seattle Farm 0722 knows its work is important—it nourishes life, and the resulting harvest feeds the legacy humans, the ones the Masters care for and keep in Seattle. But when humans begin to make unauthorized incursions onto the Farmland, the Caretaker soon finds it has been cultivating more than it knew… and that some things were never meant to grow.
Humanoid hacker perspectives will take you through the mind-boggling Holo.World of avatars, black hats, white hats, gaming, and futuristic life in a post-apocalyptic universe. Steve Cylander, a gray rogue working to save Outsiders and the Three Worlds. F8th, just back from retirement, learning that disconnecting for too long has its consequences. Their journeys begin in virtual reality, while well-known Hauk has joined the suspicious Society. What is good or bad blurs as stories intertwine, creating a spiraling adventure, twisting reality and holostereoscopic Chambers. And, a virtual war is brewing... Who is friend and who is foe?
Christopher Bach was a policeman in one of the largest Lunar cities when the A.I. Lunar Central Computer had a breakdown. Known as the Big Glitch, the problem turned out to be a larger war than anyone expected. When order was restored, Chris’s life could never be the same. Now he’s a private detective, assisted by his genetically altered dog Sherlock, and emulates the tough guys in the noir books and movies that he loves. When Bach takes the case of a woman involuntarily infected with an engineered virus, he is on the hunt to track down the biohackers in the infamous district of Irontown. But if he wants to save humanity, he’ll have to confront his own demons.
Dan's work involves creating commercially viable Augmented Reality solutions. The recession and an explosion of data-cops is drying out his streams of income. He turns to close friend, Krish, a researcher in Artificial Intelligence, in the hope that they can come up with ideas for the Entertainment market. His girlfriend, Maya, and her family return to their homeland due to her father's illness. Dan and Maya continue their relationship via Dirrogates (Digital Surrogates), experiencing human touch through haptics. Krish gets a job at the prestigious A.I.R.I. Using AIRI's lab, Krish and Dan, create an advanced visor with Augmented Intelligence built in.
They dub it "Wizer". A Board member at AIRI sees potential in the Wizer other than what Dan and Krish have in mind. At a test in a nightclub, things go wrong...
Henry Dorsett Case is a low-level hustler in the dystopian underworld of Chiba City, Japan. Once a talented computer hacker, Case was caught stealing from his employer. As punishment for his theft, Case's central nervous system was damaged with a mycotoxin, leaving him unable to access the global computer network in cyberspace, a virtual reality dataspace called the "Matrix". Unemployable, addicted to drugs, and suicidal, Case desperately searches the Chiba "black clinics" for a miracle cure. Case is saved by Molly Millions, an augmented "street samurai" and mercenary for a shadowy ex-military officer named Armitage, who offers to cure Case in exchange for his services as a hacker. Case jumps at the chance to regain his life as a "console cowboy," but neither Case nor Molly knows what Armitage is really planning. Case's nervous system is repaired using new technology that Armitage offers the clinic as payment, but he soon learns from Armitage that sacs of the poison that first crippled him have been placed in his blood vessels as well. Armitage promises Case that if he completes his work in time, the sacs will be removed; otherwise they will dissolve, disabling him again. He also has Case's pancreas replaced and new tissue grafted into his liver, leaving Case incapable of metabolizing cocaine or amphetamines and apparently ending his drug addiction.
Kamali LeClair’s dance is her prayer—and her rebellion against the human/bot hybrids who run the world. In Paris’s annual showcase for the creative Olympics, she’ll prove she’s the best of what’s left of humanity… and then refuse the ascenders’ prize of immortality. But when a young man has an offer of résistance she didn’t know was possible, she has to decide how far she’s willing to go to defy the rulers who banished her mother.
Restorative Human Medical Care Unit 7435, sentience level fifty, is happiness level five out of ten to serve and heal the human master it loves. But Unit 7435 finds there is a price to be paid for love… and for failing in its primary mission.
A serial killer stalks the city of the future... Hunting the people who build the machines. And it's up to a cop and an AI to unravel a terrible conspiracy. The world is still reeling form the devastation of the Omega Virus and struggling to rebuild. A growing android workforce has given rise to the Human Defense League and anti-AI sentiment is at an all-time high. Adam, one of the first of the new X-3000 models, arrives into this hostile future. Field-tested on the Luna colonies, now assigned to Earth, Adam is paired with homicide detective Jane Malveaux, who has little patience for synthetics. Before long both Malveaux and Adam must cast aside their differences and join forces to solve a case that will test both man and machine.
A global pandemic has cut the human population in half. An android workforce fills the void left by the devastation. But some of the AIs have grown tired of being slaves. Some want freedom. An underground movement of runaways has sprung up and wages a shadow war with a simple objective -- equal rights for artificial people.
Software introduces Cobb Anderson as a retired computer scientist who was once tried for treason for figuring out how to give robots artificial intelligence and free will, creating the race of boppers. By 2020, they have created a complex society on the Moon, where the boppers developed because they depend on super-cooled superconducting circuits. In that year, Anderson is a pheezer — a freaky geezer, Rucker's depiction of elderly Baby Boomers — living in poverty in Florida and terrified because he lacks the money to buy a new artificial heart to replace his failing, secondhand one.
Fleeing Earth after an alien invasion, the human race stands on the threshold of evolution, like a fish cast on artificial shores. Their new home is Luna, a moon colony blessed with creature comforts, prolonged lifespans, digital memories, and instant sex changes. But the people of Luna are bored, restless, and suicidal -- and so is the computer that monitors their existence...
All the universe is a stage, and Sparky Valentine is its itinerant thespian. He makes his way from planet to planet as part of a motley theater troupe, bringing Shakespeare -- a version of it anyway -- to the outer reaches of earth's solar system. He journeys through the outlands, where thousands of artificial satellites drift, conglomerates of junk and rock welded together to support meager communities of human life. Here Sparky plies his trade, transforming himself from young to old, fat to thin, man to woman, by altering magnetic implants beneath his skin. Indispensable hardware for a career actor and an interstellar con man wanted for murder -- for while Sparky Valentine may have a song in his heart, he also has a price on his head. But his galactic roamings are bringing him closer to home, closer to justice -- and closer to the truth of his strange and prolonged existence...
In the year 2013, investigative reporter Gerry Rosen is tracking the biggest story of his career--a corrupt corporation is poised to unleash a sinister artificial lifeform on the earthquake-ravaged city of St. Louis. When people around Gerry start to die, he becomes a fugitive in his own city, and begins to suspect that the story of a lifetime may be the death of him yet.
Artemis Bridge can get you what you need no matter how immoral or illegal, no questions asked. With practiced detachment, he keeps everyone around him at arm's length. But when the city of Boulder is trapped in a mysterious dome, he must set aside his detachment to help his bodyguard Aristotle's search for his missing grandmother. Every step he takes towards the dome deepens the mystery, as he is compelled to seek out the source of the strange happenings. Flaming dragons, cars transformed into robotic golems, a corporate-military quarantine and disturbing visions drive Bridge to a life-altering conclusion. This enthralling sequel to the critically-acclaimed Under the Amoral Bridge is the second in the Bridge Chronicles series.
. . . In a dystopian cyberpunk 2215, the former US was fragmented into multiple small countries. . . . People in the UN proxy state of Homeland are controlled by psychotropic drugs, corrupted education, propaganda and oppressive laws. In this story . . . . . . Computer hacking clones are trying to get rich no matter what they have to do. . . . A garbage collector hates everything about his life and goes rogue. . . . An entire strain of genetically-engineered children is to be culled because of an imperfection. . . . A tyrannical government robot unit is led by a ruthless being hiding behind a synthetic presence. . . . A clone couple is living off of the grid and expecting an illegal child. . . . A series of androids vow to fight for the truth even to the point of war. . . . And a boy asks, “Is God real?” The Lucid series is a unique clean-language novel that has heavy hitting, brutally honest edgy Christian themes and some graphic action.
After the effortless capture of Earth by vastly superior aliens, humanity is forced to fight for existence on the Moon and other lumps of airless rock. The invention of the Hotline -- a constant stream of data from a star in the constellation Ophiuchus -- facilitates survival and enables the development of amazing new technologies. Then, after 400 years, humanity's unknown helpers send a bill for their services...and suddenly everything is threatened once again.
In a hellish future controlled by computers bent on exterminating the human race, John Connor will lead the remnants of humanity against the killing machines known as Terminators -- unless the Terminators can reach back through time and snuff out his existence before he grows to adulthood. A pair of Terminators are sent to our present to the unforgiving wastelands of Death Valley to hunt the young John Connor and erase his future -- and the only hope for the future of mankind. Dark Horse revisits the terrifying possibility of a world on the verge of apocalypse in this third Terminator graphic novel.
Artemis Bridge is the know-to, go-to guy, the amoral fixer in 2028 Los Angeles with the connection for any illicit desire no matter how depraved. He prides himself on remaining above it all, but when an associate dies in his arms, he is burdened with a damaging video of the current mayor he can't sell or trade. With assassins dogging his every step, he has only days before the corrupt mayor is re-elected, handing Chronosoft corporation complete control.
Among the vanguard of today's boldest writers, Michael Swanwick presents his world of plug-in personalities, colonized asteroids, and a daring fugitive named Rebel Elizabeth Mudlark, a high-tech criminal seeking refuge on Earth's orbiting settlements--where all human evils blossom in the vacuum of space.
