The Cassandra Virus

To stave off summertime boredom, Jordan creates a computer program named Cassandra, but he and his friend Helen run into trouble when a spy agency wants Cassandra for themselves.

Climate change, global warming, rising sea levels, lack of fresh water, diminishing energy resources, economic collapse, famine, disease, natural disasters and nuclear war are what await us over the next fifteen years. In the book I describe why our days are numbered and the terrible calamity that will explode upon the face of the Earth sooner that anyone expects. No-one will escape and mankind will be overwhelmed by the speed with which events exceed even our own worst nightmares. Global warming and climate change now represent, according to the majority of scientists, a far, far greater threat to the population of the planet than any terrorist attack. As the ice caps melt, water levels over the next ten years will rise to such an extent that the world's great coastal cities, many islands and some countries will simply disappear. As parts of the world situated around the equator reach temperatures that render huge areas of the planet uninhabitable, their will be migration on a massive scale never before seen, with perhaps three billion people seeking to move to more hospitable parts of the planet. If you wish to know a little more about your future, read this book.

Anne Cortez and her son Mark were on a cruise of Scandinavia and Russia, when they witnessed a shooting. Untoward violence seemed to occur around a fellow passenger, Dr. Fawzi Senawi, an Iranian nuclear physicist. Anne and Mark tried to avoid Senawi; but could they turn their back on a dying mans plea that they save his kidnapped son? Acting on a clue, Anne surmised that this was connected to the release of the Stuxnet cyberworm by the USA. This malware was supposed to deter the Iranian nuclear program. Anne and Mark sought the help of the past counter-terrorism czar and other would be patriots, but they are drawn into a deepening web of international intrigue. Could they avert the repercussions of a cyberwar that would disrupt our financial, electrical, and defense systems; and would make possible the prediction that the Dow Jones Industrial Average would fall to triple digits in 2016?

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th Pacific Asia Workshop on Intelligence and Security Informatics, PAISI 2016, held in Auckland, New Zealand, in April 2016 in conjunction with PAKDD 2016, the 20th Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. The 7 revised full papers presented together with 7 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 23 submissions. The papers cover network-based data analytics, data and text mining, and cyber security and infrastructure protection.

This is a science fiction novel of enormous scope, filled with wonders. Set earlier in the same "future history" as Inherit the Earth, Architects of Emortality, and The Fountains of Youth, The Cassandra Complex is the independent story of events crucial to the creation of the universe in which the others take place. It is the twenty-first century, a world of rapid change and biotech threats and promises. World War Three, the biotech war, is on the horizon and the world as we know it is going to end. The fateful question is, who is going to choose the kind of future that will follow, and who gets to live in this new world to come? Lisa Frieman, a forensic researcher working for the police, is attacked in her apartment. Jordan Miller, a distinguished scientist with whom Lisa once worked, has disappeared with a secret discovery. But what has he discovered that everyone wants? And why do the thieves, and their remote masters, think that Lisa has any knowledge of the secret Miller guards? Profound scientific extrapolation combined with riveting suspense make this at once a futuristic thriller and a cutting-edge SF novel. The Cassandra Complex expands the scope of Brian Stableford's growing future history and adds another major accomplishment to his long list of triumphant creations. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Some periods of history contain so many compounded disasters they seem to be inspired by disaster movies. In the early 2020s, the Covid-19 pandemic upended the world and thrust populations into a state of uncertainty and fear--as seen in movies like Outbreak, The Towering Inferno or Armageddon. Birthed from the author's original research on disaster movies, this book argues that the life cycle of Covid closely parallels various apocalyptic films, from the personas of the main players to the strike of the cataclysm itself. To view the Covid pandemic through the language of disaster movies, the book identifies those that mirror (predict!) each stage of the Covid pandemic, analyzing the similarities between the films and real-life events. A filmography of the featured disaster movies concludes the book.

This book examines the recent trend in global cinema to feature infectious disease. As the global crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic materialised the anxieties and discourses of world risk that had long been portrayed in popular media, the book provides a novel definition of the epidemic film genre and offers a systematic look into the narrative and stylistic conventions that characterise it. Epidemic Cinema traces the evolution of the genre from its early cinematic origins to establish the founding principles of a genre standing at the crossroads between science-fiction and horror. It draws on close textual analysis to show how the pandemic reified one of the central predicaments of epidemic narratives: the constant tension existing between free-floating phenomena and the impulse to control and resist such phenomena, ultimately epitomised by the trope of the border. Showing how infectious diseases offer a rich allegorical frame which cinema uses to articulate timely anxieties of growingly invisible and deterritorialised risks, the author presents the prevalence of contagion in popular culture as a symptom of this growingly viral and virus-ridden context, both in its most literal and metaphorical sense. This insightful study will interest students and scholars of film studies, global cinema, science-fiction, horror, popular culture and genre theory.