Synopses & Reviews
It is the year 2055 and the battle of the sexes has seven combatants rather than two. "The illusion of empathy" has been dispensed with, and a few idealistic souls try to create a Utopia with pirated technology.
But a wired journalist, Andrew Worth, doesn't want any part of the pop-'Frankenscience' regularly dished out to the masses. Burnt out after completing a documentary on controversial developments in biotechnology, he turns down a chance to report on a baffling new mental disorder known as Distress and instead takes an assignment covering the Einstein Centenary Conference on the artificial island of Stateless. There, a young South African physicist, Violet Mosala, is expected to unveil her candidate for a Theory of Everything.
But the assignment is not the tropical respite Worth was expecting. Unfortunately Academia's facade of civility is dangerously cracked with a seething maelstrom of plotting, assassination attempts, and rebellion and Worth is dragged down into the nightmare. The world's only hope for survival lies in Violet Mosasa's development of a final Theory of Everything, but whether it will lead to the total destruction of Life As We Know It or the complete re-making of the Universe may be a risk too dangerous to take.
Greg Egan's audacious voice and literary scope create a fragmented futuristic world where technology and bio-engineering threaten humanity's very existence.
Review
A conceptual tour de force” The New York Times
Synopsis
A quantum Brave New World from the boldest and most wildly speculative writer of his generation. "Greg Egan is perhaps the most important SF writer in the world."--Science Fiction Weekly "One of the very best "--Locus. "Science fiction with an emphasis on science."--New York Times Book Review Since the Introdus in the twenty-first century, humanity has reconfigured itself drastically. Most chose immortality, joining the polises to become conscious software. Others opted for gleisners: disposable, renewable robotic bodies that remain in contact with the physical world of force and friction. Many of these have left the solar system forever in fusion-drive starships.
And there are the holdouts: the fleshers left behind in the muck and jungle of Earth--some devolved into dream apes, others cavorting in the seas or the air--while the statics and bridgers try to shape out a roughly human destiny.
But the complacency of the citizens is shattered when an unforeseen disaster ravages the fleshers and reveals the possibility that the polises themselves might be at risk from bizarre astrophysical processes that seem to violate fundamental laws of nature. The orphan Yatima, a digital being grown from a mind seed, joins a group of citizens and flesher refugees in a search for the knowledge that will guarantee their safety--a search that puts them on the trail of the ancient and elusive Transmuters, who have the power to reshape subatomic particles, and to cross into the macrocosmos, where the universe we know is nothing but a speck in the higher-dimensional vacuum.
Skyhorse Publishing, under our Night Shade and Talos imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of titles for readers interested in science fiction (space opera, time travel, hard SF, alien invasion, near-future dystopia), fantasy (grimdark, sword and sorcery, contemporary urban fantasy, steampunk, alternative history), and horror (zombies, vampires, and the occult and supernatural), and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller, a national bestseller, or a Hugo or Nebula award-winner, we are committed to publishing quality books from a diverse group of authors.
Synopsis
A quantum Brave New World from the boldest and most wildly speculative writer of his generation.Since the Introdus in the twenty-first century, humanity has reconfigured itself drastically. Most chose immortality, joining the polises to become conscious software. Others opted for gleisners: disposable, renewable robotic bodies that remain in contact with the physical world of force and friction. Many of these have left the solar system forever in fusion-drive starships.
And there are the holdouts: the fleshers left behind in the muck and jungle of Earthsome devolved into dream apes, others cavorting in the seas or the airwhile the statics and bridgers try to shape out a roughly human destiny.
But the complacency of the citizens is shattered when an unforeseen disaster ravages the fleshers and reveals the possibility that the polises themselves might be at risk from bizarre astrophysical processes that seem to violate fundamental laws of nature. The orphan Yatima, a digital being grown from a mind seed, joins a group of citizens and flesher refugees in a search for the knowledge that will guarantee their safetya search that puts them on the trail of the ancient and elusive Transmuters, who have the power to reshape subatomic particles, and to cross into the macrocosmos, where the universe we know is nothing but a speck in the higher-dimensional vacuum.
About the Author
Greg Egan is a computer programmer, and the author of the acclaimed SF novels Permutation City, Teranesia, Teranesia, Quarantine, and the Orthogonal trilogy, all published by Night Shade Books. He has won the Hugo Award as well as the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. Egans short fiction has been published in a variety of places, including Interzone, Asimovs, and Nature.