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In this far-future reimagination of Moby-Dick, a desperate addict on a bleak and arid planet joins the crew of a whaling vessel to hunt the source of the drug he craves The powerful narcotic syncophine, commonly known as Flare, comes from only one source: the oil of the gargantuan whale-like beasts that swim the dust sea of Nullaqua. It was John Newhouse's addiction to the substance that made him a dealer and forced him to move to this airless, inhospitable planet But when the all-powerful galactic Confederacy declares Flare illegal, the needs of Newhouse and his clientele leave the desperate off-worlder no choice but to sign on as an able seaman aboard a dustwhaler and hunt the giant creatures himself. Joining a crew of junkies and misfits, including a mad captain with his own dark and secret agenda and a bewitching, batlike alien woman who is pained by human touch, Newhouse sets out across the silica ocean at the bottom of a seventy-mile-deep crater in search of release and redemption ... and sails toward a fateful confrontation between man and beast that could lead to catastrophe. Bruce Sterling's debut novel is a remarkable feat of world building--imaginative, provocative, and smart, featuring an unforgettable cast of colorful characters. If Herman Melville's Moby-Dick unfolded on Frank Herbert's Dune, the result might be something akin to Sterling's extraordinary Involution Ocean.
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The entire population of that colonized planet was crowded into one all-enclosed self-functioning city construction. For the majority the situation was like living forever in the steerage of an immigrant freighter. For a few there were some privileges, and for the Highs, power and luxury had been secured by a change of language and the destruction of the old books. Which was where the man Ryne came in. For he was the last who could read the original language - and if they could ever locate the machine that could build new cities, he'd be the only one to read the instructions. The story of the search for the City Machines, the linguistics and logistics problems presented, and the fight for Ryne's very life is a science fiction novel of edge-of-the-seat excitement.
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In the year 2000, a young man discovers ice-nine, which can set off a chain reaction more deadly than a nuclear bomb, and discovers a new prophet whose teachings sweep the world.
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A family of four living alone on a tiny planet in the outer galaxy receive images to remind them about Earth. The machinery begins to show flaws revealing the truth.
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Suspended in the jade depths of an ancient Earth sea. Chrono-hurled to a steep winter planet swept by an eerie future war. Middle-aged (at 26), tiger-tough (at 4'9"), walking a wild Universe on Time-long legs. This is the story of a woman named Alyx.
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Genly Ai, a human ambassador, is sent to the planet Gethen to invite the rival nations living there to join the Terran confederation. Encountering an unusual civilization where sexuality is fluid, Ai has great difficulty understanding the political and interpersonal interactions of beings with no set gender. This ground-breaking novel won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, and influenced the development of serious, thematic science fiction.
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The wind came from nowhere...a super hurricane that blasted round the globe at hundreds of miles per hour burying whole communities beneath piles of rubble, destroying all organized life and driving those it did not kill to seek safety in tunnels and sewers-where they turned against each other in their desperate struggle to survive.
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Through a 'leaking' of time, the West African jungle starts to crystallize. Trees are metamorphosed into enormous jewels. Crocodiles encased in second glittering skins lurch down the river. Pythons with huge blind gemstone eyes rear in heraldic poses. Fearing this transformation as a herald of the apocalypse, most flee the area in terror, afraid to face a catastrophe they cannot understand. But some, dazzled and strangely entranced, remain to drift through this dreamworld forest. Travelling through this gilded land, a doctor tries to resist its strange allure in pursuit of his ex-mistress, while a tribe of lepers search for Paradise.
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When astronaut Morgan Harvey returns to earth after a two-hundred year voyage that seems like only a few months to him, he finds the world changed beyond recognition.
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Short stories.
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Industrial waste released into the ocean has caused a drought by preventing evaporation and destroying the precipitation cycle. Later released in Great Britain as The drought.
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Biological metamorphosis
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It fell to two people to face the news that mankind was about to follow the dinosaurs off the Earth's stage. One was Angus, veteran of a defeated Western army in a world devastated by atomic warfare. The other was Liu, woman officer of a conquering army she already knew was destined for destruction.
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A science fiction fantasy about a machine that measures the intensity of female emotions, with a strongly satirical glance at Madison Avenue.
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Set in the distant future amidst a feudal interstellar society in which various noble houses control planetary fiefs, Dune tells the story of young Paul Atreides, whose family accepts the stewardship of the planet Arrakis. While the planet is an inhospitable and sparsely populated desert wasteland, it is the only source of melange, or "the spice", a drug that extends life and enhances mental abilities. As melange can only be produced on Arrakis, control of the planet is a coveted and dangerous undertaking. The story explores the multi-layered interactions of politics, religion, ecology, technology, and human emotion, as the factions of the empire confront each other in a struggle for the control of Arrakis and its spice.
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Early in March, 1971, the Western Block exploded their newest Cold War weapon in the atmosphere-a deadly contraterrene bomb capable of destroying a continent. Two weeks later, the Eastern Bloc realized the news that they had duplicated the explosion-on the same day, at the same time. By July, the black ash from the two explosions filled the sky, blotting out the sun. The darkness grew and the temperature fell. Suddenly mankind was facing a new and terrible Ice Age.
Every resource of science was put to work to halt the deadly process. But as experiment after experiment failed, cries of terror rose into the frigid air. As panic seized the minds of the world's population, the dense, snowy night closed in, entombing the Earth beneath a blanket of incredible and suffocating cold-threatening extinction for the whole human race.
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Kerans could not remember how it had been before the violent solar storms shattered the ionosphere and turned the earth into a vast tropical heat zone, a seething world of jungle, swamp and fetid water...In the drowned, lost cities, there was the eerie beauty of the lagoons, the towering sixty-foot-high plants, the once-proud buildings smothered in silt...Above all, there was the colossal fireball in the sky, the giant solar disk that seemed to blind him with its rays, lulling him into a strange hypnotic state, seeming to lure him back to the dawn of the preconscious, to another age when Man was yet unborn and reptiles ruled the earth...
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Denis Grafton, along with a handful of others, are all that remain of the human race. They alone survive when an untested thorium bomb explosion becomes a cosmic catastrophe.The group reaches the planet Vulcan and are suddenly taken captive. But just as suddenly they are returned to Earth. All life has been obliterated. Desperately they begin to rebuild civilization on Earth. Denis and his friends must struggle for every minute of their existence. But they are stalked and menaced by a cruel, unfathomable enemy capable of destroying Earth again in one terrifying second!
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A Hollywood star, a housewife, a nurse... A doctor, a G-man, an engineer... They were among the pitiful handful of survivors who faced starvation, disease, and something infinitely worse - the terror that roamed the ruins! The horde of monsters had once been men and women, but now were transformed into something never before seen on Earth!
