Cosmonaut Keep

Ranging from a gritty near-future Earth to a distant alien world, Ken MacLeod's Cosmonaut Keep is contemporary science fiction at its highest level.A visionary epic filled with daring individuals seeking a place for themselves in a vast, complex, and enigmatic universe. Matt Cairns is a 21st-century outlaw Programmer who takes on the shady jobs no one else will touch. Against his better judgment, he accepts an assignment to crack the Marshall Titov, a top-secret orbital station operated by the European Space Agency. But what Matt will discover there will propel him on an extraordinary and quite unexpected journey. Gregor Cairns is an exobiology student and descendant of one of Terra Nova's first families. Hopelessly infatuated with a lovely young trader's daughter, he is unaware that his research partner, Elizabeth, has fallen in love with him. Together, Gregor and Elizabeth confront the great work his family began three centuries earlier-to rediscover the secret of interstellar travel. Cosmonaut Keep is a 2002 Hugo Award Nominee for Best Novel. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Come back to the Ringworld . . . the most astonishing feat of engineering ever encountered. A place of untold technological wonders, home to a myriad humanoid races, and world of some of the most beloved science fiction stories ever written! The human, Louis Wu; the puppeteer known as the Hindmost; Acolyte, son of the Kzin called Chmeee . . . legendary beings brought together once again in the defense of the Ringworld. Something is going on with the Protectors. Incoming spacecraft are being destroyed before they can reach the Ringworld. Vampires are massing. And the Ghouls have their own agenda—if anyone dares approach them to learn. Each race on the Ringworld has always had its own Protector. Now it looks as if the Ringworld itself needs a Protector. But who will sit on the Ringworld Throne? “Niven’s work has been an intriguing and consistent universe, and this book is the keystone of the arch. . . . [His] technique is wonderfully polished, his characters and their situations are nicely drawn . . . wraps up (maybe) a corner of a very interesting universe.”—San Diego Union-Tribune

This book addresses the poetics of space and place in Scottish literature. Focusing chiefly on twentieth- and twenty-first century texts, with acknowledgement of historical and philosophical contexts, the essays address representation, narrative form, the work of the poetic, perception and experience. Major genres and forms are discussed, and authors as diverse as George Mackay Brown, Kathleen Jamie, Ken McLeod and Kei Miller are presented through theoretically informed, historically contextualized close readings. Additionally considering the role of dialect and region in the poetry and fiction of modern Scotland, the volume argues for an appreciation of the cultural diversity of Scottish writers while highlighting the overarching presence of a connection between self and world, subject and place within Scottish literature.

One of the few points critics and readers can agree upon when discussing the fiction popularly known as New Space Opera – a recent subgenre movement of science fiction – is its canny engagement with contemporary cultural politics in the age of globalisation. This book avers that the complex political allegories of New Space Opera respond to the recent cultural phenomenon known as neoliberalism, which entails the championing of the deregulation and privatisation of social services and programmes in the service of global free-market expansion. Providing close readings of the evolving New Space Opera canon and cultural histories and theoretical contexts of neoliberalism as a regnant ideology of our times, this book conceptualises a means to appreciate this thriving movement of popular literature.

Out of the mainstream but ahead of the tide, that is Scottish Science Fiction. Science Fiction emphasizes "progress" through technology, advanced mental states, or future times. How does Scotland, often considered a land of the past, lead in Science Fiction? "Left behind" by international politics, Scots have cultivated alternate places and different times as sites of identity so that Scotland can seem a futuristic fiction itself. This book explores the tensions between science and a particular society that produce an innovative science fiction. Essays consider Scottish thermodynamics, Celtic myth, the rigors of religious "conversion," Scotland's fractured politics yet civil society, its languages of alterity (Scots, Gaelic, allegory, poetry), and the lure of the future. From Peter Pan and Dr. Jekyll to the poetry of Edwin Morgan and the worlds of Muriel Spark, Ken Macleod, or Iain M. Banks, Scotland's creative complex yields a literature that models the future for Science Fiction.

Ken MacLeod is one of the brightest and most progressive of Britain’s “Hard SF” stars who navigate exciting new futures to the delight of legions of fans around the world. His works combine cutting-edge scientific speculation, socialist and anarchist themes, and a deeply humanistic vision. Described by fans and adversaries alike as a “techno-utopian socialist,” MacLeod thrusts his characters into uncanny encounters that have included AI singularities, divergent human evolution, and posthuman cyborg-resurrection. In his novella The Human Front, a young Scottish guerrilla fighter is drawn into low-intensity sectarian war in a high-intensity dystopian future, and the arrival of an alien intruder (complete with saucer!) calls for new tactics and strange alliances. Its companion piece, “Other Deviations,” first published in this edition, reveals the complex origins of MacLeod’s alternate history. Plus: “The Future Will Happen Here, Too,” in which a Hebridean writer celebrates the landscapes that shaped his work, measures Scotland’s past against humanity’s future, and peers into the eyes of an eel. And Featuring: our irreverent Outspoken Interview, a candid and often cantankerous conversation that showcases our author’s deep erudition and mordant wit.

Science fiction-roman.

From the award-winning author called "science fiction's freshest new writer" by "Salon.com" comes the concluding volume of The Engines of Light series.

"There's something intriguing to be learned on practically every page... [How to Astronaut] captures the details of an extraordinary job and turns even the mundane aspects of space travel into something fascinating."––Publishers Weekly Ride shotgun on a trip to space with astronaut Terry Virts. A born storyteller with a gift for the surprising turn of phrase and eye for the perfect you-are-there details, he captures all the highs, lows, humor, and wonder of an experience few will ever know firsthand. Featuring stories covering survival training, space shuttle emergencies, bad bosses, the art of putting on a spacesuit, time travel, and much more!

The Concluding Volume of the Engines of Light With Cosmonaut Keep and Dark Light, both finalists for science fiction's Hugo Award, Ken MacLeod launched a new interstellar epic with all the engaging characters and ingenious SF inventiveness of his earlier Fall Revolution novels. Now MacLeod delivers the culmination of his epic of a human future crammed with innumerable varieties of intelligent alien life, and in which humans find themselves involved in the politics of aliens as powerful and inscrutable as gods...and entangled in their wars. For ten thousand years, Nova Babylonia has been the greatest city of the Second Sphere, an interstellar civilization of human and other beings who have been secretly removed, throughout history, from Earth. Now humans from the far reaches of the Sphere have come to offer immortality—and to urge them to build defenses against the alien invasion they know is coming. As humans and aliens compete and conspire, the wheels of history will lathe all the players into shapes new and surprising. The alien invasion will reach New Babylon at last—led by the most alien figure of all. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.