Blindsight

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. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Ever notice that all watch ads show 10:10 as the time? Or that all fast-food restaurants use red or yellow in their logos? Or that certain stores are always having a sale? You may not be aware of these details, yet they've been influencing you all along. Every time you purchase, swipe, or click, marketers are able to more accurately predict your behavior. These days, brands know more about you than you know about yourself. Blindsight is here to change that. With eye-opening science, engaging stories, and fascinating real-world examples, neuroscientist Matt Johnson and marketer Prince Ghuman dive deep into the surprising relationship between brains and brands. In Blindsight, they showcase how marketing taps every aspect of our mental lives, covering the neuroscience of pain and pleasure, emotion and logic, fear and safety, attention and addiction, and much more. We like to think of ourselves as independent actors in control of our decisions, but the truth is far more complicated. Blindsight will give you the ability to see the unseeable when it comes to marketing, so that you can consume on your own terms. On the surface, you will learn how the brain works and how brands design for it. But peel back a layer, and you'll find a sharper image of your psychology, reflected in your consumer behavior. This book will change the way you view not just branding, but yourself, too.

Firefall is the omnibus edition of the novels Blindsight and Echopraxia. February 13, 2082, First Contact. Sixty-two thousand objects of unknown origin plunge into Earth's atmosphere - a perfect grid of falling stars screaming across the radio spectrum as they burn. Not even ashes reach the ground. Three hundred and sixty degrees of global surveillance: something just took a snapshot. And then... nothing. But from deep space, whispers. Something out there talks - but not to us. Two ships, Theseus and the Crown of Thorns, are launched to discover the origin of Earth's visitation, one bound for the outer dark of the Kuiper Belt, the other for the heart of the Solar System. Their crews can barely be called human, what they will face certainly can't. 'A tour de force, redefining the First Contact story for good' Charles Stross. 'If you only read one science fiction novel this year, make it this one!... It puts the whole of the rest of the genre in the shade... It deserves to walk away with the Clarke, the Hugo, the Nebula, the BSFA, and pretty much any other genre award for which it's eligible. It's off the scale... F**king awesome!' Richard Morgan. 'State-of-the-art science fiction: smart, dark and it grabs you by the throat from page one' Neal Ascher.

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. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

“This—THIS—is the cutting edge of science fiction.” —Richard K. Morgan, author of Altered Carbon How do you stage a mutiny when you're only awake one day in a million? How do you conspire when your tiny handful of potential allies changes with each job shift? How do you engage an enemy that never sleeps, that sees through your eyes and hears through your ears, and relentlessly, honestly, only wants what's best for you? Trapped aboard the starship Eriophora, Sunday Ahzmundin is about to discover the components of any successful revolution: conspiracy, code—and unavoidable casualties. Note from the publisher: The red letters in the print edition (highlighted letters in the e-book) indicate special bonus content.

Seventeen-year-old Luke Prescott has been brought up in a bohemian matriarchy, surrounded by his divorced New Age mother, his religious grandmother, and two precocious half-sisters. He is writing his college applications when his father—a famous television star— invites him to Los Angeles for the summer. Luke accepts and is plunged into a world of location shooting, celebrity interviews, glamorous parties, and premieres. But as he begins to know the difference between his father’s public persona and his private one, Luke finds himself questioning the new history he has created for himself.

A huge international corporation has developed a facility along the Juan de Fuca Ridge at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean to exploit geothermal power. They send a bio-engineered crew--people who have been altered to withstand the pressure and breathe the seawater--down to live and work in this weird, fertile undersea darkness. Unfortunately the only people suitable for long-term employment in these experimental power stations are crazy, some of them in unpleasant ways. How many of them can survive, or will be allowed to survive, while worldwide disaster approaches from below? Starfish, the first installment in Peter Watts' Rifters Trilogy At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

With a theme reminiscent of Coma, here is Robin Cook at his disturbing, electrifying best. Set in Manhattan, Blindsight tells of city forensic pathologist Dr. Laurie Montgomery's battle to foil a plot of unimaginable evil. When a series of unrelated yuppie deaths by cocaine overdose are reported to the medical examiner's office, Dr. Montgomery's curiosity is piqued. As the friends and families of the deceased uniformly swear that their loved ones weren't involved with drugs, that curiosity intensifies. But her feelings turn to anger and frustration when she attempts to autopsy the bodies and investigate the deaths, only to find herself at odds with her superiors, the police department, and the relatives themselves. The reason for the opposition range from political expediency to religious belief, but Laurie senses that something far more menacing links the so-called random deaths. Jeopardizing her professional future, Laurie Montgomery sets out to uncover the truth—which leads her to a distinguished New York hospital and, beyond that, to nightmare. Robin Cook's Blindsight creates a chilling, haunting aura of terror and suspense, where fact and fiction imperceptibly merge.