Watts Peter Скачать все книги 8 Количество книг

Lacey Hillcrest of Pensacola, 50 years old and a devout Pentecostal, had been diagnosed with inoperable lymphatic cancer and given six months to live. Five years later she was still alive. She attributed her survival to a decorative silver-plated cross received from her sister, Gracey Balfour.

On the morning of 27 June, Mrs Hillcrest and her sister patronized the Museum of Quackery and Pseudoscience, owned and managed by one Linus C. Velikovsky, where she got to know about placebo. Within a month she was dead.

The charge against Mr Velikovsky was negligent homicide.

Combining complex science with skillfully executed prose, these edgy, award-winning tales explore the shifting border between the known and the alien.

The beauty and peril of technology and the passion and penalties of conviction merge in narratives that are by turns dark, satiric, and introspective. Among these bold storylines:

• A seemingly humanized monster from John Carpenter’s reveals the true villains in an Antarctic showdown;

• An artificial intelligence shields a biologically enhanced prodigy from her overwhelmed parents;

• A deep-sea diver discovers her true nature lies not within the confines of her mission but in the depths of her psyche;

• A court psychologist analyzes a psychotic graduate student who has learned to reprogram reality itself; and

• A father tries to hold his broken family together in the wake of an ongoing assault by sentient rainstorms.

Gorgeously saturnine and exceptionally powerful, these collected fictions are both intensely thought-provoking and impossible to forget.

„Ślepowidzenie” w genialny sposób na nowo definiuje historię o pierwszym kontakcie. U Petera Wattsa obcy nie są ani cudacznie przebranymi ludźmi, ani kompletnie niezrozumiałymi czarnymi monolitami — są czymś nowym, o wiele bardziej bulwersującym, zmuszającym nas do wyciągnięcia dość nieprzyjemnych wniosków co do natury świadomości. Gdy przestaniesz o tym myśleć, poczujesz ciarki na plecach!

A story of the not-too-distant future, and the exploitation of the geothermal resources of the deep Juan de Fuca Rift in the Pacific by multinational corporations. Unfortunately, all the volunteers who are surgically altered for employment at the bottom of the ocean are psychotic.

Lenie Clarke-amphibious cyborg, Meltdown Madonna, agent of the Apocalypse-has grown sick to death of her own cowardice.

For five years (since the events recounted in Maelstrom0, she and her bionic brethren (modified to work in the rift valleys of the ocean floor) have hidden in the mountains of the deep Atlantic. The facility they commandeered was more than a secret station on the ocean floor. Atlantis was an exit strategy for the corporate elite, a place where the world's Movers and Shakers had hidden from the doomsday microbe ßehemoth-and from the hordes of the moved and the shaken left behind. For five years "rifters" and "corpses" have lived in a state of uneasy truce, united by fear of the outside world.

But now that world closes in. An unknown enemy hunts them through the crushing darkness of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. ßehemoth- twisted, mutated, more virulent than ever-has found them already. The fragile armistice between the rifters and their one-time masters has exploded into all-out war, and not even the legendary Lenie Clarke can take back the body count.

Billions have died since she loosed ßehemoth upon the world. Billions more are bound to. The whole biosphere came apart at the seams while Lenie Clarke hid at the bottom of the sea and did nothing. But now there is no place left to hide. The consequences of past acts reach inexorably to the very floor of the world, and Lenie Clarke must return to confront the mess she made.

Redemption doesn't come easy with the blood of a world on your hands. But even after five years in pitch-black purgatory, Lenie Clarke is still Lenie Clarke. There will be consequences for anyone who gets in her way-and worse ones, perhaps, if she succeeds...

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 synthesist—an 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…

Nominated for Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2007.