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HarperCollins Dead Lines
Pages: 304, Hardcover, HarperCollins
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Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours
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£11.87
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Orbit Heads
Since his 1986 Hugo win for <I>Blood Music</I> Greg Bear has been notorious for massive and ambitious novels of hard science fiction. The unusually slim <I>Heads</I> is part of a loose future history sequence beginning with Bear's <I>Queen of Angels</I>. It's set on the colonised 22nd-century Moon where scientist Pierce hopes to outwit the third law of thermodynamics and bag the Nobel Prize by reaching absolute zero temperature. His AI assistant, an advanced Quantum Logic thinker, predicts that matter itself may enter unknown states at true zero. Meanwhile Pierce's refrigerated lab, the Ice Pit, seems just the place for his family company to store 410 frozen human heads (including family members) left over from the abandoned dream of cryonic immortality. There's even a chance that new scanning techniques could read these brains' frozen memories. Bad news: one head belongs to the sinister founder of a cult--clearly modelled on L Ron Hubbard--and the powerful Logology movement will stop at nothing to keep those particular thoughts secret. Much tense politics follows. A sabotage attempt triggers the eerie climax as matter, bodies, souls and strange new quantum states flow together in the flux of absolute zero and the Ice Pit becomes a Fortean mystery. Bear blends scientific and mystical unknowns very neatly in this short but effective novel. --<I>David Langford</I>
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£4.79
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ibooks Sleepside
Pages: 304, Paperback, ibooks
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£6.11
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Gollancz Eon (S.F.Masterworks S.)
Pages: 512, Paperback, Gollancz
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£6.39
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HarperCollins Vitals
Pages: 400, Paperback, HarperCollins
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Availability: Usually dispatched within 4 to 7 days
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£5.59
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HarperCollins Dead Lines
Pages: 304, Paperback, HarperCollins
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Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours
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£5.59
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HarperCollins Quantico
Pages: 448, Hardcover, HarperCollins
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£11.87
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HarperCollins Darwin's Radio
Greg Bear notoriously reworks traditional SF themes in his own special way. His first success, <I>Blood Music</I> (1985), features an intelligent plague which seems destructive but eventually recreates humanity in new, transcendent form--echoing Arthur C. Clarke's rough-hewn 1953 classic <I>Childhood's End</I>. <I>Darwin's Radio</I> revisits this territory but foregrounds scientific, medical and political reactions to disaster; it's reminiscent of a Michael Crichton technothriller. The menace is a new virus, SHEVA, which is in fact very old--embedded in a ancient human DNA sequences and now emerging as Herod's 'Flu, which in pregnant women always forces miscarriage. Chillingly, US health aauthorities first see this threat as something to boost funding, while conservative scientists suppress research into the bizarre reality of what's happening. Evidence from Neanderthal remains and Stalin's mass graves hints that SHEVA is no disease but evolution in action. Human genomes everywhere, linked by the subtle network of Darwin's radio, are activating Plan B: the creation of a new species. Then, with the world racked by panic, riots, death cults and martial law, SHEVA begins to mutate ... Tense stuff, though some biological info-dumps are tough going, and it's awkwardly paced towards the end when nine months are needed for the biologist heroine's own pregnancy, leading to... but that would be telling. This is a fearfully plausible scientific thriller. --<I>David L Langford</I>
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Availability: Usually dispatched within 4 to 6 weeks
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£5.59
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HarperCollins Quantico
Pages: 400, Paperback, HarperCollins
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Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours
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£5.59
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Arrow Star Wars: Rogue Planet (Star Wars S.)
It's an unexpected combination: Greg Bear, author of so many ambitiously complex SF novels, writing about the colourful simplicities of the <I>Star Wars</I> universe. He carries it off well enough, with a mix of action-adventure and thoughtful world-building that entertains while keeping to the spirit of Lucas's saga.<p> A few years after the events of <I>The Phantom Menace</I>, young Anakin Skywalker is getting restless--sneaking away from Jedi Temple training to gamble his life in a flying game that's much more bizarre and dangerous than the movie's podracing (even before an alien Blood Carver assassin intervenes). Anakin's character is taking shape now: <blockquote>But above all, he loved <I>winning</I>.< ;/blockquote> To turn his frustrated energy to useful ends, the Jedi Council has Obi-Wan Kenobi take Anakin to investigate the remote, enigmatic world Zonama Sekot, whose organic technologies produce magnificent spacecraft and where a Jedi apprentice has vanished without trace. Secretly pursuing them is a battle squadron captained by the weapons designer who has already blueprinted the Death Star and is being double-crossed by his employer Commander Tarkin. <p><I>Rogue Planet</I>'s action climaxes as the Jedis learn to grow their own spaceship: the Blood Carver strikes and two heavily armed fleets converge on helpless-seeming Zonama Sekot. Every faction has secret cards up its sleeve--and Anakin's is a very dangerous wild card indeed. There's final victory and heartbreak but also loose ends (including even stranger, deadlier aliens) that suggest sequels to follow. Bear does a solidly workman-like job. --<I>David Langford</I>
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£5.59
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Orbit Foundation and Chaos (Second Foundation Trilogy S.)
This is book number two in the new Second Foundation Trilogy being written by hard science-fiction authors Gregory Benford, Greg Bear and David Brin, otherwise known as the Killer B's. In this book, Bear continues where Benford's <I>Foundation's Fear</I> left off, as the trial of legendary psychohistorian Hari Seldon is about to begin. Bear writes with a style uncannily similar to Foundation creator Isaac Asimov's, and he even manages to incorporate some of Asimov's own writing in the novel. Aside from the trial, Bear also focuses on the nearly immortal robots that serve the Foundation, including R. Daneel Olivaw, who is set to guide one of the Foundation's first great undertakings. But Olivaw runs into trouble from an unexpected quarter, his best operative, Lodovik Trema, whose positronic brain has been irrevocably altered in a strange accident that has given him freedom from the supposedly immutable laws of robotics. --<I>Craig Engler, Amazon.com</I>
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Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours
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£5.59
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Gollancz Blood Music (S.F.Masterworks S.)
Pages: 272, Paperback, Gollancz
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Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours
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£5.59
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HarperCollins Darwin's Children
Pages: 400, Hardcover, HarperCollins
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Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours
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£17.09
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HarperCollins Darwin's Children
Pages: 480, Paperback, HarperCollins
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£5.59
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Random House Audiobooks Star Wars: Rogue Planet
Audio Cassette, Random House Audiobooks
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Availability: Usually dispatched within 4 to 6 weeks
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£8.57
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E-Rights/E-Reads Ltd The Venging
Pages: 200, Paperback, E-Rights/E-Reads Ltd
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Availability: Usually dispatched within 7 to 11 days
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£8.95
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Warner Books Queen of Angels
Pages: 432, Hardcover, Warner Books
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Availability: Usually dispatched within 9 to 12 days
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£17.31
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Orbit Foundation and Chaos (Second Foundation Trilogy S.)
This is book number two in the new Second Foundation Trilogy being written by hard science fiction authors Gregory Benford, Greg Bear, and David Brin, otherwise known as the Killer B's. In this book, Bear continues where Benford's <I>Foundation's Fear</I> left off, as the trial of legendary psychohistorian Hari Seldon is about to begin. Bear writes with a style uncannily similar to Foundation creator Isaac Asimov's, and he even manages to incorporate some of Asimov's own writing in the novel. Aside from the trial, Bear also focuses on the nearly immortal robots that serve the Foundation, including R. Daneel Olivaw, who is set to guide one of the Foundation's first great undertakings. But Olivaw runs into trouble from an unexpected quarter, his best operative, Lodovik Trema, whose positronic brain has been irrevocably altered in a strange accident that has given him freedom from the supposedly immutable laws of robotics. --<I>Craig Engler</I>
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Availability: Usually dispatched within 4 to 6 weeks
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£11.21
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Orbit Slant
Pages: 560, Paperback, Orbit
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Availability: Usually dispatched within 4 to 6 weeks
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£5.59
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Orbit Anvil of Stars
Paperback, Orbit
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Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours
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£5.59
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Orbit Legacy
Paperback, Orbit
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Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours
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£5.59
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Gollancz Tangents
Pages: 290, Paperback, Gollancz
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£5.59
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