Hugo and Shirley Jackson award-winning Peter Watts stands on the cutting edge of hard SF with his acclaimed novel, Blindsight

Two months since the stars fell...

Two months of silence, while a world held 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 with unknown and unknowable alien intellect that doesn't wish to be met?

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. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won't be needed. 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.

Pray they can be trusted with the fate of a world. They may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find.

Prepare for a different kind of singularity in Peter Watts' Echopraxia, the follow-up to the Hugo-nominated novel Blindsight.

It's the eve of the twenty-second century: a world where the dearly departed send postcards back from Heaven and evangelicals make scientific breakthroughs by speaking in tongues; where genetically engineered vampires solve problems intractable to baseline humans and soldiers come with zombie switches that shut off self-awareness during combat. And it's all under surveillance by an alien presence that refuses to show itself.

Daniel Bruks is a living fossil: a field biologist in a world where biology has turned computational, a cat's-paw used by terrorists to kill thousands. Taking refuge in the Oregon desert, he's turned his back on a humanity that shatters into strange new subspecies with every heartbeat. But he awakens one night to find himself at the center of a storm that will turn all of history inside-out.

Now he's trapped on a ship bound for the center of the solar system. To his left is a grief-stricken soldier, obsessed by whispered messages from a dead son. To his right is a pilot who hasn't yet found the man she's sworn to kill on sight. A vampire and its entourage of zombie bodyguards lurk in the shadows behind. And dead ahead, a handful of rapture-stricken monks takes them all to a meeting with something they will only call The Angels of the Asteroids.

Their pilgrimage brings Dan Bruks, the fossil man, face-to-face with the biggest evolutionary breakpoint since the origin of thought itself.

Skillfully combining complex science with finely executed prose, these edgy, award-winning tales explore the always-shifting border between the known and the alien.

The beauty and peril of technology and the passion and penalties of conviction merge in stories that are by turns dark, satiric, bold, and introspective. A seemingly humanized monster from John Carpenter's The Thing 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 that 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. 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.

Civilization rests on the backs of its outcasts.

So when civilization needs someone to run generating stations three kilometers below the surface of the Pacific, it seeks out a special sort of person for its Rifters program. It recruits those whose histories have preadapted them to dangerous environments, people so used to broken bodies and chronic stress that life on the edge of an undersea volcano would actually be a step up. Nobody worries too much about job satisfaction; if you haven't spent a lifetime learning the futility of fighting back, you wouldn't be a rifter in the first place. It's a small price to keep the lights going, back on shore.

But there are things among the cliffs and trenches of the Juan de Fuca Ridge that no one expected to find, and enough pressure can forge the most obedient career-victim into something made of iron. At first, not even the rifters know what they have in them--and by the time anyone else finds out, the outcast and the downtrodden have their hands on a kill switch for the whole damn planet...

Promotion at major trade and genre conventions, including BEA, ALA, Readercon, the International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts, and the World Science Fiction convention.

Features, interviews, and reviews targeting literary and genre venues, including the Washington Post, NPR, the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the San Francisco Chronicle

Author appearance tour dates TBD

Planned galley distribution and book giveaways to include NetGalley, Goodreads, Edelweiss, Tor.com, and additional online outlets

Advertising and promotion in national print, online outlets, and social media

MANHATTAN IS UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT.
THEY'RE NOT FROM AROUND HERE.

Welcome to the Big Apple, son. Welcome to the city that never sleeps: invaded by monstrous fusions of meat and machinery, defended by a private army that makes Blackwater look like the Red Cross, ravaged by a disfiguring plague that gifts its victims with religious rapture while it eats them alive. You've been thrown into this meat grinder without warning, without preparation, without a clue.

Your whole squad was mowed down the moment they stepped onto the battlefield. And the chorus of voices whispering in your head keeps saying that all of this is on you: that you and you alone might be able to turn the whole thing around if you only knew what the hell was going on.

You'd like to help. Really you would. But it's not just the aliens that are gunning for you. Your own kind hunts you as a traitor, and your job might be a bit easier if you didn't have the sneaking suspicion they could be right. . . .

A brilliant bastard. --Cory Doctorow
Comfort, of course, is the last thing that Watts wants to give. --New York Review of Science Fiction

Which of the following is true?

Peter Watts is banned from the U.S.

Watts almost died from flesh-eating bacteria.

A schizophrenic man living in Watts's backyard almost set his house on fire.

Watts was raised by Baptists who really sucked at giving presents.

Peter Watts said to read this book. Or else.

Watts, undoubtedly, is a genius. ?Medium

In more than fifty unpredictable essays and revenge fantasies, Peter Watts -- Hugo Award-winning author, former marine biologist, and angry sentient tumor -- is the savage dystopian optimist whom you can't look away from. Even when you probably should.

Julio Mario Santo Domingo (1957-2009) was a collector and visionary who filled his homes and warehouses with the world's greatest private collection related to the subjects of drugs, sex, magic, and rock and roll. A library of more than 50,000 items, it contained everything from rare manuscripts and photos to posters, bottles, letters, opium pipes, and pinball machines. Exploring the innumerable influences of mind-enhancing drugs on art, science, and politics over the centuries, Santo Domingo's collection contained work by diverse figures including Andy Warhol, Timothy Leary, Sigmund Freud, the Marquis de Sade, Charles Baudelaire, Allen Ginsberg, the Rolling Stones, Aleister Crowley, and many more.