Queen ​of Angels

Karl Schroeder - Sun ​of Suns
It ​is the distant future. The world known as Virga is a fullerene balloon three thousand kilometers in diameter, filled with air, water, and aimlessly floating chunks of rock. The humans who live in this vast environment must build their own fusion suns and "towns" that are in the shape of enormous wood and rope wheels that are spun for gravity. Young, fit, bitter, and friendless, Hayden Griffin is a very dangerous man. He's come to the city of Rush in the nation of Slipstream with one thing in mind: to take murderous revenge for the deaths of his parents six years ago. His target is Admiral Chaison Fanning, head of the fleet of Slipstream, which conquered Hayden's nation of Aerie years ago. And the fact that Hayden's spent his adolescence living with pirates doesn't bode well for Fanning's chances . . .

Poul Anderson - Tau ​Zero
Fifty ​men and women set out in the twenty-third century from Earth aboard an interstellar craft to travel to a planet some thirty light-years away. The ship will approach the speed of light and so (as Einstein predicted) subjective time on board will slow and so the journey of several decades will be of much shorter duration for the crew. But the ship's deceleration system is irreparably damaged when it hits a cloud of interstellar dust and acceleration continues toward light speed, tau zero. Soon the ship is speeding through galaxies and eons are passing on board the ship in the blink of an eye...

Greg Egan - Diaspora
A ​dramatic insight into the future of Man in the 30th century and beyond where life is divided into three; fleshers - true homo-sapines; Gleisner robots - human minds within machines; and polises - supercomputers teeming with intellgent software containing copies of human personalities.

Neal Stephenson - Anathem
Erasmas ​- Raz - is a young avout living in the Concent, a sanctuary for mathematicians, scientists and philosophers, protected from the corrupting influences of the outside world by ancient stone, honoured traditions and complex rituals. Three times during history's darkest epochs, the cloistered community has been devastated by violence. Yet the avout have always managed to adapt in the wake of catastrophe. Now, in celebration of the week-long, once-in-a-decade rite, the avout prepare to open the concent's gates. Before the week is out, both worlds - the inner and the outer - will stand poised on the brink of cataclysmic change. Suddenly Erasmas finds himself a major player in a drama that will determine the future of his world - as he sets out on an extraordinary odyssey that will carry him to the most dangerous, inhospitable corners of the planet... and beyond.

Peter Watts - Blindsight
Two ​months since the stars fell... Two months since sixty-five thousand alien objects clenched around the Earth like a luminous fist, screaming to the heavens as the atmosphere burned them to ash. Two months since that moment of brief, bright surveillance by agents unknown. Two months of silence, while a world holds its breath. Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune's orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Whatever's out there isn't talking to us. It's talking to some distant star, perhaps. Or perhaps to something closer, something en route. So who do you send to force introductions on an intelligence with motives unknown, maybe unknowable? Who do you send to meet the alien when the alien doesn't want to meet? You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees x-rays and tastes ultrasound, so compromised by grafts and splices he no longer feels his own flesh. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won't be needed, and the fainter one she'll do any good if she is. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called vampire, recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. And you send a synthesistan informational topologist with half his mind gone - as an interface between here and there, a conduit through which the Dead Center might hope to understand the Bleeding Edge. You send them all to the edge of interstellar space, praying you can trust such freaks and retrofits with the fate of a world. You fear they may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find. But you'd give anything for that to be true, if you only knew what was waiting for them...

Greg Bear - Darwin's ​Radio
Ancient ​diseases encoded in the DNA of humans wait like sleeping dragons to wake and infect again--or so molecular biologist Kaye Lang believes. And now it looks as if her controversial theory is in fact chilling reality. For Christopher Dicken, a "virus hunter" at the Epidemic Intelligence Service, has pursued an elusive flu-like disease that strikes down expectant mothers and their offspring. Then a major discovery high in the Alps--the preserved bodies of a prehistoric family--reveals a shocking link: Something that has slept in our genes for millions of years is waking up. Now, as the outbreak of this terrifying disease threatens to become a deadly epidemic, Dicken and Lang must race against time to assemble the pieces of a puzzle only they are equipped to solve--an evolutionary puzzle that will determine the future of the human race ... if a future exists at all.

Kurt Vonnegut - Galápagos ​(angol)
Galápagos ​takes the reader back one million years, to A.D. 1986. A simple vacation cruise suddenly becomes an evolutionary journey. Thanks to an apocalypse, a small group of survivors stranded on the Galápagos Islands are about to become the progenitors of a brave, new, and totally different human race. In this inimitable novel, America’s master satirist looks at our world and shows us all that is sadly, madly awry–and all that is worth saving.

John Varley - The ​Ophiuchi Hotline
THE ​BRILLIANT NOVEL THAT LAUNCHED THE VARLEY PHENOMENON The invaders came in 2050…They did not kill anyone outright. hey said they came on behalf of the intelligent species of Earth—dolphins and whales. The Invaders quietly destroyed every evidence of technology, then peacefully departed, leaving behind plowed ground and sprouting seeds. In the next two years, ten billion humans starved to death. The remnants of humanity that survived relocated to the moon and other planets. But they are not alone in their struggle—someone or something, somewhere in deep space, is sending them advanced scientific data via the Ophiuchi Hotline. And by the twenty-fifth century, the technological gifts from the Hotline—especially its biological and medical solutions—have created a world unlike any ever known or imagined…

Philip K. Dick - Ubik ​(angol)
Glen ​Runciter is dead. Or is he? Someone died in the explosion orchestrated by his business rivals, but even as his funeral is scheduled, his mourning employees are receiving bewildering messages from their boss. And the world around them is warping and regressing in ways which suggest that their own time is running out. If it hasn't already.

Brian W. Aldiss - Helliconia
Imagine ​a world in a system of twin suns, where Winter is 600 ice-locked years and every Spring is the first remembered. Imagine a People finding ruined cities beneath the melting snows. Never dreaming they had built them. And would again... Imagine Helliconia. And begin the most magnificent epic since "Dune".

Bob Shaw - Orbitsville
Fleeing ​Elizabeth Lindstrom's anger at the death of her son, Vance Garamond, a flickerwing commander, leaves the solar system far behind. Pursued by Earth's space fleet, Garamond finds a vast, alien-built spherical structure which might just change the destiny of the human race.

China Miéville - Kraken ​(angol)
British ​fantasist Miéville mashes up cop drama, cults, popular culture, magic, and gods in a Lovecraftian New Weird caper sure to delight fans of Perdido Street Station and The City & the City. When a nine-meter-long dead squid is stolen, tank and all, from a London museum, curator Billy Harrow finds himself swept up in a world he didn't know existed: one of worshippers of the giant squid, animated golems, talking tattoos, and animal familiars on strike. Forced on the lam with a renegade kraken cultist and stalked by cops and crazies, Billy finds his quest to recover the squid sidelined by questions as to what force may now be unleashed on an unsuspecting world. Even Miéville's eloquent prose can't conceal the meandering, bewildering plot, but his fans will happily swap linearity for this dizzying whirl of outrageous details and fantastic characters.

Andy Weir - The ​Martian
_Apollo ​13 meets Castaway in this grippingly detailed, brilliantly ingenious man-vs-nature survival thriller-set on the surface of Mars._ Six days ago, astronaut Mark Watney became one of the first men to walk on the surface of Mars. Now, he's sure he'll be the first man to die there. It started with the dust storm that holed his suit and nearly killed him-and that forced his crew to leave him behind, sure he was already dead. Now he's stranded millions of miles from the nearest human being, with no way to even signal Earth that he's alive-and even if he could get word out, his food would be gone years before a rescue mission could arrive. Chances are, though, he won't have time to starve to death. The damaged machinery, unforgiving environment, or plain-old "human error" are much more likely to get him first. But Mark isn't ready to give up yet. Drawing on his ingenuity, his engineering skills-and a relentless, dogged refusal to quit-he steadfastly confronts one seemingly insurmountable obstacle after the next. But will his resourcefulness be enough to overcome the impossible odds against him?

Arkadi and Boris Strugatsky - Boris Strugatsky - Far ​Rainbow
Book: ​Far Rainbow "We all know what Rainbow is," began Lamondois. "Rainbow is a planet colonized by science and designed for physical experiments." "The Far Rainbow was written at one breath, it is full of dynamics and genuine dramatism." - Literary Gazette "Science-fiction stories by the Strugatsky brothers are philosophical pieces. They are full of action but each action is clearly imbued with speculation."- Neva Magazine "Take the Far Rainbow, for instance. 'Authentic' is the word, and this is rather unusual where science fiction is concerned." - The Young Guard Magazine The brothers Boris and Arkady Strugatsky have chosen different careers. Arkady is a linguist and Boris an astronomer. Perhaps it is this divergence of interest which has helped them to describe the world of the far future so vividly. The brothers Strugatsky are among the most prominent Soviet science-fiction writers. They have written a number of works in the genre.

Claire North - The ​First Fifteen Lives of Harry August
Harry ​August is on his deathbed. Again. Every time Harry dies, he is reborn in exactly the same time and place, a child with all the knowledge of a life he has already lived a dozen times before. No matter what he does or the decisions he makes, when death comes, Harry always returns to where he began, and nothing ever changes. He only knows that there are others like him, living with but apart from the rest of us. As Harry nears the end of his eleventh life, a little girl appears at his bedside. 'I nearly missed you, Doctor August,' she says. 'I need to send a message. It has come down from child to adult, child to adult, passed back through generations from a thousand years forward in time. The message is that the world is ending, and we cannot prevent it. So now it's up to you.' This is the story of what Harry August does next - and what he did before - and how he tries to save a past he cannot change and a future he cannot allow.

Bruce Sterling - Schismatrix ​Plus
Schismatrix ​Plus, is Bruce Sterling's new trade paperback. For the first time in one volume: every word Bruce Sterling has ever written on the Shapers-Mechanists Universe. In the last decade, Sterling has emerged a pioneer of crucial, cutting-edge science fiction. Now Ace Books is proud to offer Sterling's stunning world of the Schismatrix--where Shaper revolutionaries struggle against aristocratic Mechanists for ultimate control of man's destiny. This volume includes the classic full-length novel, Schismatrix, plus thousands of words of mind-bending short fiction.

Richard Morgan - Black ​Man
Carl ​Marsalis is a traitor, a bringer of death, a genetic freak and an unwelcome reminder of all that is dark in the human psyche – he in every sense of the word a Black Man. And right at the moment he’s beyond the UN’s juristiction, banged up in a Florida jail for financing an illegal abortion. So when the US police call, Carl cuts a deal. The 13s are genetically engineered alpha males, designed to fight the century’s last conflicts. But men bred and designed to fight are dangerous to have aroundin peacetime. Many of them have left for Mars, but one has returned. Somehow he survived the journey to Earth, and now a series of brutal slayings has erupted across America. Only Carl can stop him. And so begins a frenetic man hunt and a battle for survival. And a search for the truth about what was really done with the world’s last soldiers.

Stephen Baxter - Vacuum ​Diagrams
"And ​everywhere the Humans went, they found life ..." This dazzling future history, winner of the 2000 Philip K. Dick Award, is the most ambitious and exciting since Asimov's classic Foundation saga. It tells the story of Humankind -- all the way to the end of the Universe itself. Here, in luminous and vivid narratives spanning five million years, are the first Poole wormholes spanning the solar system; the conquest of Human planets by Squeem; GUTships that outrace light; the back-time invasion of the Qax: the mystery and legacy of the Xeelee, and their artifacts as large as small galaxies; photino birds and Dark Matter; and the Ring, where Ghost, Human, and Xeelee contemplate the awesome end of Time. Stephen Baxter is the most acclaimed and accomplished of a brilliant new generation of authors who are expanding the vision of science fiction and taking itto a new golden age.

Ken MacLeod - Fractions
In ​a balkanized future of dizzying possibilities, mercenaries contend with guns as smart as they are, nuclear deterrence is a commodity traded on the open market, teenagers deal in "theologically correct" software for fundamentalists, and anarchists have colonized a planet circling another star. Against this background, men and women struggle for a better future against the betrayals that went before. Death is sometimes the end, and sometimes something altogether different… This volume comprises _The Star Fraction_ and _The Stone Canal_.

Ken MacLeod - The ​Cassini Division
Ellen ​May Ngewthu is a soldier and leader of the Cassini Division, the elite defense force of the utopian Solar Union. Here in the twenty-fourth century, the forts of the Division, in orbit around Jupiter, are the front line in humanity's long standoff with the unknowable post-humans godlike beings descended from the men and women who transformed themselves with high technology centuries ago. The post-humans' capacities are unknown... but we know they disintegrated Ganymede, we know they punched a wormhole into Jovian space, and we know that the very surface of the solar system's largest planet has been altered by them. Worse, we know that they have been bombarding the inner solar system with powerful data viruses for generations. Now Ellen has a plan to rid humanity of this threat once and for all. But she needs to convince others to mistrust the post-humans as much as she does. In the process, much will be revealed - about history, about power, and about what it is to be human.