The Crystal Sphere The Neuro Book 1

Alex is one of us. An office rat during daytime, he spends sleepless nights playing his favorite MMO game: a familiar, predictable world which is about to collapse. A new virtual universe arrives to replace it, aggressively devouring all others: the Crystal Sphere. Alex gets involved in testing new technologies which promise to revolutionize gaming. Fitted out with a neuroimplant which provides a 100% authenticity of experience, he has to survive in the Crystal Sphere against all odds. What is he turning into? Will he become yet another expendable test subject - or the first player to transcend reality?

A Full Immersion Reading Experience a boutique literary agency specializing in the genres of fantasy and science fiction with the focus on space opera, cyberpunk and LitRPG (video game-based fantasy and science fiction). The concept of fantasy embraces a vast variety of genres with settings varying from ancient to medieval, modern to futuristic. The main difference of fantasy from science fiction lies in the fact that fantasy worlds don't necessarily need to comply with the laws of the physical world as we know them. The universe of fantasy is ruled by magic and the author's imagination which readily waives the boundaries of the known for the sake of a good story.

Reality Bendersis a new series by Michael Atamanov written in a rather rare genre blend of LitRPG, global MMORPG strategy and space adventure creating a seamless picture which unfolds simultaneously in four worlds. One is the Earth with all its political problems and confrontations; the second one a virtual projection of our planet divided into a series of “nodes”; the third one the vast expanse of deep space teeming with civilizations so unlike our own; and finally, a parallel Earth where magic is mundane. Unbeknown to the majority of the Earth’s inhabitants, humanity has been taking part in a game brought to our planet by a highly developed and powerful Geckho civilization. Participating in it can reap considerable rewards as the technologies learned can positively affect both science and everyday life, advancing them decades. Which is why the participant countries aren’t in a hurry to share their discoveries, preferring to act on their own. The game’s events affect the real world - which is why humanity’s potential defeat might have some disastrous consequences for our planet. Gnat is a twenty-year-old gamer and university dropout expelled for organizing online gambling tournaments. He is then offered the choice of either being prosecuted or joining a “research institute studying the effects of virtual reality” as part of a group of fellow gamer dropouts. That’s how Gnat finds himself in the Dome: a classified facility for the faction of players taking part in the reality-bending game. The story is told through Gnat’s eyes as he gradually explores the virtual world and its rules, learning more about players, NPCs and various space races. He’s about to embark on perilous travels through new uncharted lands, meeting our virtual neighbors and learning to find common ground with them; he’s soon to cross swords with space pirates and take part in epic battles which put humanity’s very existence at stake.

He is a cyber dweller. A gamer who's grown up in the web of virtual illusion woven from hundreds of phantom worlds. His biggest dream is to dump the real world for good. His desperate hunger of new experiences forces him to take a risk and become one of the first proud owners of a neuronet implant. The new gadget becomes part of him - but soon it's not enough. If only he could finally burn all his bridges and make a step beyond the real world! He soon gets this opportunity. A new universe, overflowing with mystery and unimaginable, mind-blowing authenticity, opens up before him. This is Phantom Server. The game of the future where your pursuit of an adrenaline rush soon turns into a battle for survival. But the most terrifying mystery lies ahead when you gradually start to realize: this is a road of no return. Your every decision may become your last. Your every step leads you further along the abyss between life and death.

In his most beloved and extraordinary book, Dr. Sacks recounts the case histories of patients inhabiting the compelling world of neurological disorders. Featuring a preface never before included. Oliver Sacks's The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat tells the stories of individuals afflicted with perceptual and intellectual disorders: patients who have lost their memories and with them the greater part of their pasts; who are no longer able to recognize people and common objects; whose limbs seem alien to them; who lack some skills yet are gifted with uncanny artistic or mathematical talents. In Dr. Sacks's splendid and sympathetic telling, his patients are deeply human, and his tales are studies of struggles against incredible adversity. A great healer, Sacks never loses sight of medicine's ultimate responsibility: "the suffering, afflicted, fighting human subject."

Winner of the 30th anniversary Arthur C. Clarke Award for Best Novel. Adrian Tchaikovksy's critically acclaimed novel Children of Time, is the epic story of humanity's battle for survival on a terraformed planet. Who will inherit this new Earth? The last remnants of the human race left a dying Earth, desperate to find a new home among the stars. Following in the footsteps of their ancestors, they discover the greatest treasure of the past age – a world terraformed and prepared for human life. But all is not right in this new Eden. In the long years since the planet was abandoned, the work of its architects has borne disastrous fruit. The planet is not waiting for them, pristine and unoccupied. New masters have turned it from a refuge into mankind's worst nightmare. Now two civilizations are on a collision course, both testing the boundaries of what they will do to survive. As the fate of humanity hangs in the balance, who are the true heirs of this new Earth? Continue the far-reaching space opera with Children of Ruin and Children of Memory. 'Children of Time is a joy from start to finish. Entertaining, smart, surprising and unexpectedly human.' - Patrick Ness, author of A Monster Calls.

Publisher Description

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.