When Rab was a baby, his mother made a decision which would change his life. She feared he would be sent to work in the hellish mines of Mercury, to eke out his life until he was worn out, all in the name of maintaning the defense of the Solar Sytem. But when her desperate attempt to flee with her 2 year old failed, she took a desperate step to save him. She cut off his hand.

Decades later, Rab has been spared the physical hardships he can no longer endure, and is now based on the Mask, the all-encompassing structure which hides the Solar Sytem from alien eyes. And it is during his watch that a spaceship arrives, one which has travelled for a hundred years from a long-forgotten colony planet.

If they pierce the Mask, everything humanity has created will be left open to the alien threat. But this strange ship, bearing an offshoot of the species, may bring something else with them. Hope.

Audiences around the world have been enchanted by James Cameron's visionary Avatar, with its glimpse of the Na'vi on the marvelous world of Pandora. But the movie is not entirely a fantasy; there is a scientific rationale for much of what we saw on the screen, from the possibility of travel to other worlds, to the life forms seen on screen and the ecological and cybernetic concepts that underpin the 'neural networks' in which the Na'vi and their sacred trees are joined, as well as to the mind-linking to the avatars themselves.

From popular science journalist and acclaimed science fiction author Stephen Baxter, The Science of Avatar is a guide to the rigorous fact behind the fiction. It will enhance the readers' enjoyment of the movie experience by drawing them further into its imagined world.

What would happen to the world if the sun went out?

New epic sci-fi from Stephen Baxter, the award-winning author whose credits include co-authorship of the Long Earth series with Terry Pratchett.

By the middle of the 21st century, humanity has managed to overcome a series of catastrophic events and maintain some sense of stability. Space exploration has begun again. Science has led the way.

But then one day, the sun goes out. Solar panels are useless, and the world begins to freeze

Earth begins to fall out of its orbit.

The end is nigh.

Someone has sent us a sign.

How would first contact--on earth, in space, on another planet--transform our understandings of technology, philosophy, and what it means to be human? What kind of cognitive dissonance would society experience, if we discovered a previously unrecognized sentience on Earth?

What would life be like if it originated in a frigid ocean beneath an impenetrable shell of ice? Or on a world whose haze obscures any view of the universe beyond? Or on an unfathomable scale in the depths of space? Or . . .

Life--beyond us.

Dive in as the European Astrobiology Institute presents fifty-four original SF Stories and Science Essays on life, from microbial to macro, from automatic to sagacious. Each speculative story is followed by a professional essay illuminating the scientific underpinnings of the story and providing a new window into the cutting-edge knowledge about exploration for life in the universe.

SF STORIES BY: Eugen Bacon, Gregory Benford, Renan Bernardo, Jana Bianchi, Tobias S. Buckell, Eric Choi, Julie E. Czerneda, Tessa Fisher, Simone Heller, Valentin D. Ivanov, Mary Robinette Kowal, Lisa Jenny Krieg (translated by Simone Heller), Geoffrey A. Landis, Rich Larson, Liu Yang (translated by Ladon Gao), Lucie Lukačovičová, Premee Mohamed, G. David Nordley, Malka Older, Deji Bryce Olukotun, Tomás Petrásek, Brian Rappatta, Arula Ratnakar, D.A. Xiaolin Spires, Bogi Takács, Peter Watts, and B. Zelkovich.

SCIENCE ESSAYS BY: Jacques Arnould, William Bains, José A. Caballero, Dimitra Demertzi, Martina Dimoska, Tessa Fisher, Dennis Höning, Valentin D. Ivanov, Fabian Klenner, Nina Kopacz, Geoffrey A. Landis, Natuschka Lee, Ania Losiak, Stephen Francis Mann, Connor Martini, Tony Milligan, Philippe Nauny, Julie Nováková, Erik Persson, Tomás Petrásek, Joanna Piotrowska, Giovanni Poggiali, Amedeo Romagnolo, Stefano Sandrelli, Floris van der Tak, Jan Toman, Sheri Wells-Jensen, and Raymond M. Wheeler

INTRODUCTION BY: Stephen Baxter

FOREWORD BY: Julie Nováková

AFTERWORDS BY: Wolf D. Geppert; Lucas K. Law & Susan Forest

EDITED BY: Julie Nováková, Lucas K. Law & Susan Forest

Previous anthologies by Laksa Media (Strangers Among Us, The Sum of Us, Where the Stars Rise, Shades Within Us, Seasons Between Us) have been recommended by Publishers Weekly, Booklist (American Library Association), Kirkus Reviews, Library Journal, School Library Journal, Locus, Foreword Reviews, and Quill & Quire.

And everywhere the Humans went, they found life ...

This dazzling future history, winner of the 2000 Philip K. Dick Award, is the most ambitious and exciting since Asimov's classic Foundation saga. It tells the story of Humankind -- all the way to the end of the Universe itself.

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

Stephen Baxter is the most acclaimed and accomplished of a brilliant new generation of authors who are expanding the vision of science fiction and taking itto a new golden age.

Reading Manifold: Time is like sending your mind to the gym for a brisk workout. If you don't feel both exhausted and exhilirated when you're done, you haven't been working hard enough.--The New York Times Book Review

The year is 2010. More than a century of ecological damage, industrial and technological expansion, and unchecked population growth has left the Earth on the brink of devastation. As the world's governments turn inward, one man dares to envision a bolder, brighter future. That man, Reid Malenfant, has a very different solution to the problems plaguing the planet: the exploration and colonization of space. Now Malenfant gambles the very existence of time on a single desperate throw of the dice. Battling national sabotage and international outcry, as apocalyptic riots sweep the globe, he builds a spacecraft and launches it into deep space. The odds are a trillion to one against him. Or are they?

A staggering novel If you ever thought you understood time, you'll be quickly disillusioned when you read Manifold: Time.--Sir Arthur C. Clarke

The Wheel. A ring of ice and metal turning around a moon of Saturn, home to a mining colony supplying a resource-hungry Earth--a colony plagued by problems. Equipment failures and thefts are on the rise. Children tell stories of mysterious creatures glimpsed aboard the Wheel. And some of the younger workers refuse to go down into the warren-like mines.

And then one of them, surfing Saturn's rings, saves an enigmatic blue box from destruction.

Once on the Wheel, the Doctor and his companions, Jamie and Zoe, face a critical situation when they become suspected by some as the source of the ongoing sabotage. They soon find themselves caught in a mystery that reaches back to the creation of the solar system. A mystery that could destroy the Wheel--and kill them all...

There is a secret passage through time

...and it leads all the way to the end of Eternity. But the journey has a terrible cost. It alters not only the future but he present in which we live.

A century after the publication of H. G. Wells' immortal The Time Machine, Stephen Baxter, today's most acclaimed new hard SF author, and the acknowledged Clarke, returns to the distant conflict between the Eloi and the Morlocks in a story that is at once an exciting expansion, and a radical departure based on the astonishing new understandings of quantum physics.

Stephen Baxter's imaginative and] bold (Daily Mail, UK) Stone Spring drew readers into an alternate prehistoric scenario. Now, thousands of years have passed, and a wall that was built to hold back the sea must now hold back the advancing armies of a reviving Troy....

Created by the building of the Wall, Northland has become a society of prosperous, literate, and self-sufficient people. Inhabited from end to end, the Wall is a linear city stretching for hundreds of miles, and a wonder of the world.

For millennia, the Wall has also kept the growing empires of the Bronze Age at bay. But a new and turbulent age is dawning. For any wall, no matter how strong, can be breached--particularly from within....

One of the best SF writers in the business . . . Manifold: Origin is] filled with marvelous scientific speculations, strange events, novel concepts, and an awe-inspiring sense of the wonders of the universe.--Science Fiction Chronicle

In the year 2015, astronaut Reid Malenfant is flying over the African continent, intent on examining a mysterious glowing construct in Earth's orbit. But when the very fabric of the sky tears open, spilling living creatures to the ground and pulling others inside (including his wife, Emma), Malenfant's quest to uncover the unknown becomes personal. While desperately searching to discover what happened to the woman he loves, Malenfant embarks upon an adventure to the very fount of human development . . . on earth and beyond.

Four hostages are rescued from a group of religious extremists in Barcelona. After five years of being held captive together, they make a vow to always watch out for one another. But they never expected this. The world they have returned to has been transformed-by water. And the water is rising.

In 2145AD John Hackett's adventure is just beginning.

In Year 30, Mela's story is coming to a close.

Hackett, in his trusty ship the Perseus, is not just a space traveller - beginning his travels with an expedition to Neptune and back - but, thanks to the time-dilation effect, a time traveller as well. His new mission will take him to Andromeda, to get a close-up look at the constellation which will eventually crash into the Milky Way, and give humanity a heads-up about the challenges which are coming.

A mission which will take him five million years to complete.

Not only is Hackett exploring unknown space, but he will return to a vastly different time.

Mela's world is coming to an end. Erosion is eating away at the edges of every landmass - first at a rate of ten metres a year, but fast accelerating, displacing people and animals as the rising Tide destroys everything in its path. Putting more and more pressure on the people - and resources - which remain.

She and her people have always known that this long-predicted end to their home, one of the Thousand Earths, is coming - but that makes their fight to survive, to protect each other, no less desperate . . . and no less doomed.

A beautiful, page-turning story which interweaves the tale of these two characters, separated by both space and time, in a hopeful exploration of humanities' future, this is Stephen Baxter at his best.

Lean, taut storytelling . . . breakneck stuff . . . Arguably his most accessible book to date--Baxter is] resplendent.--SFX magazine

When his father dies suddenly, George Poole stumbles onto a family secret: He has a twin sister he never knew existed, who was raised by an enigmatic cult called the Order. The Order is a hive--a human hive with a dominant queen--that has prospered below the streets of Rome for almost two millennia. After Poole enters the Order's vast underground city and meets the disturbing inhabitants, he uncovers evidence that they have embarked on a divergent evolutionary path. These genetically superior humans are equipped with the tools necessary to render modern Homo sapiens as extinct as the Neanderthals. And now they are preparing to leave their underground realm.

Excels] at both action-packed storytelling and philosophical speculation.--Library Journal

Utterly fascinating . . . constantly surprising . . . Coalescent reveals a new side to Baxter's vast talent.--Locus

Hailed as one of the most inventive writers that science fiction has ever produced (SF Site), Stephen Baxter builds on the massive success of Proxima with a career-defining novel of big ideas....

On the planet of Per Ardua, alien artifacts were discovered--hatches that allowed humans to step across light-years of space as if they were stepping into another room. But this newfound freedom has consequences....

As humanity discovers the real nature of the universe, a terrifying truth comes to light. We all have countless pasts converging in this present--and our future is terrifyingly finite. There are minds in the universe that are billions of years old and now we are vulnerable to their plans for us....

It's time to fight back and take control.

In the year 2570, a sleeper will wake . . .

In the mid-21st century, the Kernel, a strange object on a five-hundred-year-orbit, is detected coming from high above the plane of the solar system. Could it be an alien artefact? In the middle of climate-change crises, there is no mood for space-exploration stunts - but Reid Malenfant, elderly, once a shuttle pilot and frustrated would-be asteroid miner, decides to go take a look anyway. Nothing more is heard of him. But his ex-wife, Emma Stoney, sets up a trust fund to search for him the next time the Kernel returns . . .

By 2570 Earth is transformed. A mere billion people are supported by advanced technology on a world that is almost indistinguishable from the natural, with recovered forests, oceans, ice caps. It is not an age for expansion; there are only small science bases beyond the Earth. But this is a world you would want to live in: a Star Trek without the stars.

After 500 years the Kernel returns, and a descendant of Stoney, who Malenfant will call Emma II, mounts a mission to see what became of Malenfant. She finds him still alive, cryo-preserved . . . His culture-shock encounter with a conservative future is entertaining . . . But the Kernel itself turns out to be attached to a kind of wormhole, through which Malenfant and Emma II, exploring further, plummet back in time, across five billion years . . .

Michael Poole finds himself in a very strange landscape . . .
This is the centre of the Galaxy. And in a history without war with the humans, the Xeelee have had time to built an immense structure here. The Xeelee Belt has a radius ten thousand times Earth's orbital distance. It is a light year in circumference. If it was set in the solar system it would be out in the Oort Cloud, among the comets - but circling the sun. If it was at rest it would have a surface area equivalent to about thirty billion Earths. But it is not at rest: it rotates at near lightspeed. And because of relativistic effects, distances are compressed for inhabitants of the Belt, and time drastically slowed.

The purpose of the Belt is to preserve a community of Xeelee into the very far future, when they will be able to tap dark energy, a universe-spanning antigravity field, for their own purposes. But with time the Belt has attracted populations of lesser species, here for the immense surface area, the unending energy flows. Poole, Miriam and their party, having followed the Ghosts, must explore the artefact and survive encounters with its strange inhabitants - before Poole, at last, finds the Xeelee who led the destruction of Earth...

Half a million years in the future, on a dead, war-ravaged world at the centre of the Galaxy, there is a mile-high statue of Michael Poole.

Poole, born on Earth in the fourth millennium, was one of mankind's most influential heroes. He was not a warrior, not an emperor. He was an engineer, a builder of wormhole transit systems. But Poole's work would ultimately lead to a vast and destructive conflict, a million-year war between humanity and the enigmatic, powerful aliens known as the Xeelee.

The Xeelee won, but at a huge cost. And, defeated in a greater war, the Xeelee eventually fled the universe. Most of them.

A handful were left behind, equipped with time travel capabilities, their task to tidy up: to reorder history more to the Xeelee's liking. That million-year war with humankind was one blemish. It had to be erased. And in order to do that, a lone Xeelee was sent back in time to remove Michael Poole from history . . .

Third in a series of counter-factual historical thrillers from Stephen Baxter, in which someone in the future is desperate to rewrite the discovery of America.

This collection highlights 20 stellar space operas published over the past 20 years by top-notch authors of the science fiction genre. A soldier fights for survival behind enemy lines, on an alien vessel, thousands of light-years from Earth in On the Orion Line, by Stephen Baxter. A man aboard a ship in deep space wakes up from biostasis at the wrong time in The Days Between, by Allen M. Steele. An astronaut in a damaged balloon struggles to survive 800 meters above the surface of a sea on Titan in Slow Life by Michael Swanwick. Two rival space-faring cultures vie for influence over the people of a forgotten human world in The Third Party, by David Moles. One thousand people, aboard five generation starships, leave the Sol system to flee an enemy that threatens to destroy their way of life in Mayflower II, by Stephen Baxter. Modified combat troops must deal with recalcitrant settlers on a planet being attacked by hostile aliens in Bright Red Star, by Bud Sparhawk. Programmed military doppelg ngers continue to carry out their missions long after the Quiet War's end in Dead Men Walking, by Paul McAuley. Mathematicians seek to learn more from a civilization, on another planet, that spent three million years doing math in Glory, by Greg Egan. Human diplomats must deal their own cultural biases while dealing with two representatives from warring factions on a newly discovered planet in Saving Tiamaat, by Gwyneth Jones. Space pirates haul in booty aboard a living spaceship that doesn't quite smell right in Boojum, by Elizabeth Bear & Sarah Monette. The constable in a settlement on a planet full of the tombs of a long-vanished alien race befriends a woman who researches dangerous hive rats in City of the Dead, by Paul McAuley. A dying young man on a treasure hunt tries to save a world that's devoid of gravity and lit by artificial suns in The Hero, by Karl Schroeder. An eternal, aboard a slower than light ship, is woken to investigate an unexplained signal emanating from the area of the ship's next stargate construction site in The Island, by Peter Watts. An alienated teenager, in a domed iron city on a planet where a fundamentalist revolt is brewing, seeks to uncover her enigmatic tutor's long-held secret in The Ice Owl, by Carolyn Ives Gilman. A woman recalls a childhood train journey, on a planet with a permanent dayside and a nightside of eternal darkness, to see a captured specimen of the Nightmare race in Weep for Day, by Indrapramit Das. Peculiar mating rituals and divergent evolution have developed on a lost colony that has been out of contact with the rest of humanity in Someday, by James Patrick Kelly. An aristocrat's trip to Venus, in search of her disgraced brother, is memorialized by papercuts of flora native to the planet in Botanica Veneris: Thirteen Papercuts by Ida Countess Rathagan, by Ian McDonald. An enemy of the revolution, on a colonized planet, uploads a digital copy of himself into the body of a braindead boy in an attempt to escape off-world in Jonas and the Fox by Rich Larson. Set in the author's Machineries of Empire universe, an undercover agent infiltrates a space station to recover the crew of a lost ship in Extracurricular Activities, by Yoon Ha Lee. And finally, the captain of a dustship musters her crew to escape from a trap set by Hunter-Killers in a game of cat and mouse amid the rings of a giant planet in By the Warmth of Their Calculus, by Tobias S. Buckell.

Trapped on an alternate Earth, the combined crews of a crashed Russian spaceship, a British expeditionary force and a group of strays from the future must work together to survive, escape, and discover what led them to this point. All are from parallel universes where small changes in history led to different realities, and the tensions between the groups are rising.

But some changes were not small. The solar system has been altered, changed, shaped in the various realities, and the World Engineers - unspeakably powerful, completely unknown - are still active. Why have they populated this planet with humanity's ancestors and dinosaurs? What is on the moon of Saturn that gives off such an odd light? And even if they can be found, can they be stopped - and should they be?

Malenfant, Deidra and the rest of their party must find a way off the planet, back into space, and into the many dimensions seeking the answer...