Call Arkady a clone with a conscience. Or call him a traitor. A member of the space-faring Syndicates, Arkady has defected to Israel with a hot commodity: a genetic weapon powerful enough to wipe out humanity. But Israel?s not buying it. They?re selling it, and Arkady, to the highest bidder. As the auction heats up, the Artificial Life Emancipation Front sends in Major Catherine Li. Drummed out of the Peacekeepers for executing Syndicate prisoners, Li has now literally hooked up with an AI who has lived many lifetimes and shunted through many bodies. But while they have their own conflicting loyalties to contend with, together they?re just one player in a mysterious high-stakes game.

Nasir Deepra, an executive in the 23rd century, is an Agonist, a group of men and women who've outlived their usefulness and are bored with life. So they use their ample wealth to run into war zones-many of them in orbit around the now polluted Earth-and film their daring activities. They have a huge fan-base who watch them on the Net too, and the Agonists revel in all of the attention. Nasir is also in love with a beautiful physical therapist Sheeba who hangs out with him because of his "multiplexed soul" and battered body, Nasir is 248 years old, kept young by nanotechnology that permeates every cell in his body. However when a war surf goes awry and the Agonists lose their first place position amongst other surfers, something drastic has to be done. So they decide to go to Heaven, a class 10 difficulty war zone, in order to get back on top. Nasir is extremely hesitant to go, as he is on the board of directors that controls Heaven and knows why it's a class 10. But Sheeba helps talk him into going and it is here that everything falls apart. Nasir and Sheeba are captured by workers who control Heaven. Nasir has to come to terms with what he and his corporation have been doing to the men, women and children onboard this satellite.

In the twenty-fifth century, humankind has spread throughout the galaxy, monitored by the watchful eye of the U.N. While divisions in race, religion, and class still exist, advances in technology have redefined life itself. Now, assuming one can afford the expensive procedure, a person?s consciousness can be stored in a cortical stack at the base of the brain and easily downloaded into a new body (or ?sleeve?) making death nothing more than a minor blip on a screen. Ex-U.N. envoy Takeshi Kovacs has been killed before, but his last death was particularly painful. Dispatched one hundred eighty light-years from home, re-sleeved into a body in Bay City (formerly San Francisco, now with a rusted, dilapidated Golden Gate Bridge), Kovacs is thrown into the dark heart of a shady, far-reaching conspiracy that is vicious even by the standards of a society that treats ?existence? as something that can be bought and sold. For Kovacs, the shell that blew a hole in his chest was only the beginning.

Home to generations of humans, the starship Argonos has wandered aimlessly throughout the galaxy for hundreds of years, desperately searching for other signs of life. Now, a steady, unidentified transmission lures them toward a nearby planet, where the grisly remains of a former colony await the crew. Haunted by what they have seen, the crew has no choice but to follow when another signal beckons the Argonos into deep space and into the dark heart of an alien mystery...

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 artefacts as large as small galaxies; photino birds and Dark Matter; and the Ring, where Ghost, Human, and Xeelee contemplate the awesome end of Time.

Under the glare of three suns, three beings travel across an endless desert. They argue, whine, wheedle and needle each other. Sometimes they switch identities when the sandstorms roar in. As The Troika rolls on, we learn more about Alex, who started out as a man, then became cyborg, then jeep. About Naomi, a veteran soldier who woke up from her cryogenic storage tank to a new life, now a dinosaur. About Eva, who fled her native land to escape her fate as an organ-donor for the emperor. Fantasy? Surrealism? The desert landscape spins and alters as we look at the man behind the curtain: mad angel Dr. Mazer, testing a controversial therapy program at his isolated asylum. Science fiction after all?

What if the time machine from H.G. Wells' classic novel of the same name had fallen into government hands? That's the question that led Stephen Baxter to create this modern-day sequel, which combines a basic Wellsian premise with a Baxteresque universe-spanning epic. The Time Traveller, driven by his failure to save Weena from the Morlocks, sets off again for the future. But this time the future has changed, altered by the very tale of the Traveller's previous journey.

An archaeological team working in a remote area of Turkey on what was believed to be a rather unremarkable prehistoric site came across what looked like a bit of jade embedded in the soil. Remarkable in its own right, further digging revealed that what was assumed to be a small piece was actually part of a much larger item that was not actually jade but some strange substance with extremely unusual optical properties. Of great interest the item was also extremely radioactive, many of those who discovered it dying quickly of radiation sickness. Obviously an item not of this Earth, with Turkey's permission the United States government removed it under heavy protection to a new research facility built just to study it, one set up on an old and largely abandoned Indian reservation near the quiet town of Two Rivers, Michigan, where a mysterious explosion somehow transports the entire population of the town into an alternate dimension.

Case had been the sharpest data-thief in the business cruising the information superhighway, jacking his consciousness into cyberspace, soaring through tactile lattices of data and logic, rustling encoded secrets for anyone with the money to buy his skills. Then he double-crossed the wrong people, who caught up with him in a big way and burned the talent out of his brain, micron by micron. Banished from cyberspace, trapped in the meat of his physical body, Case courted death in the high-tech underworld. Until a shadowy conspiracy offered him a second chance, and a cure, for a price. With a dead man riding shotgun and Molly, mirror-eyed street-samurai, to watch his back, Case embarks on an adventure that ups the ante on an entire genre of fiction.

A short, whacky cyberpunk tale. It was Cobb Anderson who built the boppers, the first robots with real brains. Now, in 2020, Cobb is just another aged pheezer with a bad heart, drinking and grooving an the old tunes in Florida retirement hell. His bops have came a long way, though, rebelling against their subjugation to set up their own society an the moon. And now they're offering creator Cobb immortality but at a stiff price: his body his soul... and his world.