Synopsis:
"In Dark Forest, Earth is reeling from the revelation of a
coming alien invasion-in just four centuries' time. The aliens' human
collaborators may have been defeated, but the presence of the sophons,
the subatomic particles that allow Trisolaris instant access to all
human information, means that Earth's defense plans are totally exposed
to the enemy. Only the human mind remains a secret. This is the
motivation for the Wallfacer Project, a daring plan that grants four men
enormous resources to design secret strategies, hidden through deceit
and misdirection from Earth and Trisolaris alike. Three of the
Wallfacers are influential statesmen and scientists, but the fourth is a
total unknown. Luo Ji, an unambitious Chinese astronomer and
sociologist, is baffled by his new status. All he knows is that he's the
one Wallfacer that Trisolaris wants dead."
Synopsis:
"It’s a fable-like story of a house in the small German town of
Weissenfels—a house that was the home of 19th-century German Romantic
poet Novalis. Solidly built on a pleasant street, by the mid-19th
century it is a boarding house run by the efficient Madame Helena.
Gorodischer inhabits the minds of various residents—the general
refighting past wars, the tea salon manager dreaming of travel, a
retired opera singer and her sullen daughter, a man obsessed with
miniature figures, and the cook and maids—around the time a Japanese
pearl seller moves in. Although short, the book reads slowly: long,
complicated sentences unfurl, mixing prosaic detail about meals (heavy
and delicious sounding) with dreams and dread. Despite the house’s many
comforts, hauntings penetrate its quotidian world—not witches or ghosts,
exactly, but the past, the imagined future, and a kind of unease that
stems from being alive, fearful, guilty, human."
Synopsis:
"Humans expanded into space...only to find a universe populated with
multiple alien species bent on their destruction. Thus was the Colonial
Union formed, to help protect us from a hostile universe. The Colonial
Union used the Earth and its excess population for colonists and
soldiers. It was a good arrangement...for the Colonial Union. Then the
Earth said: no more.
Now the Colonial Union is living on borrowed
time-a couple of decades at most, before the ranks of the Colonial
Defense Forces are depleted and the struggling human colonies are
vulnerable to the alien species who have been waiting for the first sign
of weakness, to drive humanity to ruin. And there's another problem: A
group, lurking in the darkness of space, playing human and alien against
each other-and against their own kind -for their own unknown reasons.
In
this collapsing universe, CDF Lieutenant Harry Wilson and the Colonial
Union diplomats he works with race against the clock to discover who is
behind attacks on the Union and on alien races, to seek peace with a
suspicious, angry Earth, and keep humanity's union intact...or else risk
oblivion, and extinction-and the end of all things."
Synopsis:
"In the distant future, Surplus arrives in China dressed as a
Mongolian shaman, leading a yak which carries the corpse of his friend,
Darger. The old high-tech world has long since collapsed, and the
artificial intelligences that ran it are outlawed and destroyed. Or so
it seems.
Darger and Surplus, a human and a genetically
engineered dog with human intelligence who walks upright, are a pair of
con men and the heroes of a series of prior Swanwick stories. They
travel to what was once China and invent a scam to become rich and
powerful. Pretending to have limited super-powers, they aid an ambitious
local warlord who dreams of conquest and once again reuniting China
under one ruler. And, against all odds, it begins to work, but it seems
as if there are other forces at work behind the scenes"
