The Ascent Of Isaac Steward

Literary surrealism at its most profound, The Ascent of Isaac Steward follows one man's journey into his own mind as he struggles to come to terms with the trauma that has reshaped his life. A year on from the car crash in which his wife Rebekah and son Esau were killed and his other son Jacob left in a coma, Isaac Steward has suppressed every memory of that fateful day. Yet fate seems determined to make him remember, driving Isaac deeper and deeper into himself. Slowly, dysfunction builds on delusion, as childhood memories compete with a persona he has fabricated to regress to an earlier, happier time. Violence, death and destruction result as Isaac gradually loses his grip on reality. His half-brother Ishmael tells him that he must return to the wood at his childhood home, to a tree he called The Dandelion Tree, if he is ever to be reunited with Rebekah. But as he descends further, he starts to question his own existence.

Not every ugly duckling becomes a swan... In the wake of the disastrous attack on the Golden City, Lady Light Spinner has become Grand Sorceress and Elaine, the Bookworm, has been settling into her positions as Head Librarian and Privy Councillor. But any hope of vanishing into her books is negated when a new magician of staggering power appears in the city, one whose abilities seem to defy the known laws of magic. Johan is a Powerless, a person born to a magical family yet lacking powers of his own. His dreams of a better life are curbed by his family, who see him as a cripple at best and a burden at worst. But when a political protest goes horrifically wrong, Johan discovers that his true powers have merely been buried, waiting for their chance to explode into the world. As he comes to grips with his newfound talents, he discovers that he finally has a chance to realise his ambitions ... ... But for the Golden City, reeling after the devastation of six months earlier, he may be the greatest threat the city has ever seen. Elaine must unlock the mystery behind his powers before the political factions can kill him ... or use him to unleash a nightmare. Returning to well-loved characters from Christopher G. Nuttall's bestselling Bookworm and introducing new ones, Bookworm II: The Very Ugly Duckling explores power – and the effect it has on the human mind.

A new way to combine art and prose in storytelling. Your world is manipulated by computer coding, search engines and social networks. It’s just a matter of time before everything you watch, read and listen to will be created by autonomous machines... An Android Awakes : The struggle for survival and the fate of a story teller. In the future some of us will become great writers, renowned artists, visionary filmmakers and talented photographers. Most of us though will just have more sex. Go forward a few more generations and none of us are creative save that of our procreation. Our culture is shaped by machines. The novel has become a mere 1000 words. Android Writer PD121928 is part of the Android Publishing Program. To replicate a writer’s life, his wife has been forcibly removed and he lives in solitude with an allowance for drugs and prostitutes. Having just had his novel The Eating of Citizen Kane rejected, he now has 14 more attempts to get a story accepted for the program or he will be deactivated. Can one of his characters and their story save him? Featuring Absolute Zero (the coolest spaceship ever built – literally), an ocean in the sky, sub-atomic particles, a Märchen zoo, android communion, naked angels and mockingbirds, An Android Awakes hurtles towards the shocking conclusion of Android Writer PD121928’s fate. Story by Mike French, Art by Karl Brown. “Cool & punchy” STEVE DILLON HELLBLAZER / PREACHER / X-MEN / WOLVERINE “Sex, violence, androids ... very much in the style of classic 2000AD” LEE SULLIVAN DOCTOR WHO / TRANSFORMERS / JUDGE DREDD / ROBOCOP “Reminiscent of the great Brett Ewins, keep your eyes on this promising young artist” BRYAN TALBOT WRITER & ARTIST OF THE GRANDVILLE GRAPHIC NOVEL SERIES / EISNER AWARD WINNER FOR THE TALE OF ONE BAD RAT “An evocative blend of Blade Runner aesthetics and Sin City style characters creating an atmosphere similar to Michael Valuta’s illustrated edition of Metropolis” RICHARD COLLINGRIDGE WE / MISSION TELEMARK / THE DESERTER

The Convergence Project is a covert military/governmental science project that uses prisoners on death row to explore what happens to people as they die. The experience of life flashing before your eyes just before death is a process called active retrieval where memories are being recalled and lived out again in the mind. As the amount of time before death decreases, the brain exponentially increases the speed of playback and starts looping: repeating over and over a lifetime’s worth of memories. Each playback makes the memories stronger and retains more detail. Eventually an infinite playback speed is reached forming a memory singularity called a Convergence Point, where the ‘moment’ lasts for ever and the person effectively enters an afterlife of their own making. Subjects are killed by lethal injection within an enhanced Magnetic Resonance Imaging Core, which brings on active retrieval and allows the brain activity to be imaged moments before the Convergence Point forms. The ‘near’ Convergence Points are downloaded into neutral clones who effectively decode the brain patterns back into memories. These Convergence Clones are subjected to psychoanalysis to try to gain an understanding of the death experience. The project has the added bonus of extracting information held deep in the subconscious of terrorists by using Convergence on them and then interrogating their Convergence Clone, which is recycled after use and reformed.

The Luton Writers' Group was born out of a question: Are there still writers out there or has Luton become a literary desert? Before the group started, a workshop was run last year at Luton library about getting published. One person turned up... A year on and we have a collection called Underground Rivers to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the opening of Luton Central Library. The name is a reference to the River Lea which runs under the library and it's an answer to our question – it may appear to be a desert, with the odd oasis - like Booker shortlisted Stephen Kelman - but underneath there is abundant life. This book is proof of that and is a mix of short stories, scripts and opening chapters of novels all of which have been forged this year from writers who gathered for the first time in February when the library started the group.

Our culture is generated by machines. It’s ten years after Android Writer PD121928 from An Android Awakes was fed into a sink grinder by its replacement PD121929. The human prostitute Sapphira, believing PD121929 to be PD121928 for all that time, has tried and failed to save PD121929 from being destroyed for selling less than a hundred copies of its novel. Sapphira herself has written the bestselling novel Humans (An Arrangement of Minor Defects) based on the stories PD121928 told her on the night they first met. It has been marketed by Altostratus as the first work of fiction by a human for over a hundred years. Unhappy, a handful of zealot androids massacre the senate and a new regime is formed fuelled with a passion to eradicate the evil of fiction from android society.

A new Emperor has arisen ... and the Empire is collapsing into chaos. Having escaped from the Golden City, Elaine, Johan and their friends – including some strange allies with goals of their own – race desperately towards Ida, hiding place of the ancient Witch-King. Behind them, the armies of the new Emperor – a man permanently poised on the verge of madness – give chase, unleashing monsters and spells from the long-buried past on everyone who stands in their way. Ahead of them, the Witch-King waits, biding his time as he prepares for his ascension. As they endure terrible dangers – and figures from the past – Elaine and Johan come to realise that Elaine’s knowledge of magic and the bond between them may be the only thing standing between the Witch-King and godhood. But if they cannot prepare a defence in time, the entire world will die when the Witch-King rises from his tomb ... The fourth and final instalment in the Bookworm series, Full Circle follows on from the events in The Best Laid Plans, with Elaine and her friends heading for Ida to confront the Witch-King.

For centuries, men have been dreaming of telepathy, the power to read and influence the minds of others. Now, all around the world, telepaths are finally starting to appear. Men and women are developing awesome powers with the potential to dramatically change society. Governments are soon starting to become aware of them, even recruiting them, while striving to keep knowledge of their abilities hidden from the general public. Academic researchers too are discovering telepaths and it isn’t long before awareness of their existence starts to spread. But non-telepaths, ordinary people, don’t want to have their minds read or controlled; the telepaths soon find themselves widely regarded with fear and hatred. Inevitably, some of them want to fight back.