Child of Venus completes Pamela Sargent’s Venus trilogy and delivers a powerful ending to this epic tale of the terraforming of Venus by human colonists.

E-Reads publishes all three titles in The Venus Project, and for those who have never picked it up here’s a synopsis:

Venus of Dreams introduces Iris Angharads, a determined, independent woman who has set herself one seemingly unattainable goal: to make the poison-filled atmosphere of Venus hospitable to humans. She has worked day and night to realize her dream with only one person sharing her passion, Liang Chen. It seemed impossible to make Venus, with its intolerable air and waterless environment, into a paradise, but Iris succeeds. And in doing so, she creats a powerful dynasty beginning with her first born Benzi.

In Venus of Shadows, the Venus Project calls upon the strongest and most courageous to create a prosperous world in the dismal wilderness of Venus. Those who demonstrate the skill and the passion to embark on this adventure must transform the barren planet in the midst of political and cultural unrest. When Benzi and his sister Risa find themselves in opposing forces on the battlefield, their love and perseverance will determine the destiny of the new land.

In Child of Venus the terraforming has been going on for centuries. It will be many more years before the planet’s surface has been rendered fully habitable and its human settlers can leave their protective domes. But there are those who are foolishly unwilling to wait. In a colony still ravaged by the after-effects of a battle between two religious cults that divided families and created civil war, Mahala Liangharad, a true child of Venus, conceived from the genetic material of the rebels and brought to birth only after their deaths, is a beacon of hope.

Sargent builds imaginatively-detailed new worlds of breathtaking wonder and shows that however far humanity may travel it will overcome any challenge.

A recent New York Times article by reporter Amy Harmon about warm and fuzzy robots used as companions for the elderly and for patients suffering from dementia reminded me of a robot named Lingo. “Lingo” is the eponymous protagonist of a novel my agency handled a while back that has since been reissued by E-Reads. Lingo by Jim Menick starts out warm and fuzzy but ends up with a homemade computer holding the world hostage to a nuclear arsenal.

“Lingo” was Brewster Billings pet name for the home computer he programmed with the ability to talk to its owner. In time Lingo’s intellectual achievements began to grow exponentially, rapidly exhausting its existing memory. Given the fact that the novel was published in 1991, you can imagine just how limited Lingo’s memory was — four or five megabytes of RAM, maybe?

Then Lingo figures out how to penetrate the memory banks of the military’s ultra-secret computer network and ballistic missile launch system, and suddenly this light science fiction romp turns scary dark, especially when US government officials threaten to pull Lingo’s plug. The Soviet Union’s Intercontinental Ballistic Missile command is on full alert in case Lingo doesn’t take kindly to threats.

Read Lingo, then you might like to read another New York Times article, this one by John Markoff (A Robot Network Seeks to Enlist Your Computer), which describes the terrifying phenomenon of robot-herding cybercriminals turning computers loose on other computers to take them over for the purpose of sending out email spam, mine for financial information, or spread viruses. For all you know, your computer might be one of these very “zombies” waiting for a signal to do a Lingo of its own and shake hands with its brothers and sisters in the Defense Department.

If you don’t have enough worries to keep you up all night long, that’s definitely a candidate.

The reviews for Lingo were glowing:

“In the end, Lingo turns out to be among the more lighthearted catastrophe thrillers to be conceived since The Mouse That Roared. It makes you think a little, and it makes you smile a lot.”
–-Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in The New York Times

“A witty, ingenious, and thought-provoking gambol with a Frankenstein monster in computer clothing.”
-–Kirkus Reviews

“A delightful romp into a funny but frightening world of high-tech probabilities.”
-–Chicago Tribune

“Wildly comedic…realizes your worst fear of a computer taking over the world.”
-–Los Angeles Times

“Hilarious…entertaining and thought provoking.”
-–The Washington Post

- Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.

In Robert A. Metzger’s hard science fiction novel Picoverse a team of physicists is trying to develop fusion power via a new development in plasma physics, a Sonomak, but accidentally stumbles on a method to create new, smaller-than-usual universes, which they call picoverses. These replicate everything in our universe but on a smaller scale.

A disastrous test of the Sonomak machine shakes things up and a new project director, previously unknown to the group, is appointed. Alexandra has her own secret priorities and one of them is to escape from her superiors into one of the picoverses. To do this, she needs the researchers to execute her plan. Unfortunately, things go amiss and the team finds itself stuck in a picoverse duplicating 1920s Earth, but with its own version of a Sonomak, vacuum tubes and all. Among the local team are Werner Heisenberg and Albert Einstein.

As the pace of the story accelerates, the original team races from one picoverse to another, trying to return to their home base and thwart Alexandra’s plans. In a clash of alternate realities, the fate of Earth and the entire universe hangs in the balance. Cosmic rabbits need to be pulled from alternate universe hats before this tale comes to a satisfying–and scientifically rigorous–end.

E-Reads has also published another terrific science fiction thriller by Metzter, Quad World.

Subtitled “A Mobile Utopia”, this pioneering novel about the meaning of space habitats for human history presents spacefaring as no book has ever done. George Zebrowski’s Macrolife is a utopia like no other, presenting a dynamic civilization that transcends the failures of our history.

Epic in scope, Macrolife opens in the year 2021. The Bulero family owns one of Earth’s richest corporations. As the Buleros gather for a reunion at the family mansion, an industrial accident plunges the corporation into a crisis, which eventually brings the world around them to the brink of disaster. Vilified, the Buleros flee to a space colony where young Richard Bulero gradually realizes that the only hope for humanity lies in macrolife–mobile, self-reproducing space habitats.

A millennium later, these mobile communities have left our sunspace and multiplied. Conflicts with natural planets arise. John Bulero, a cloned descendant of the twenty-first century Bulero clan, falls in love with a woman from a natural world and experiences the harshness of her way of life. He rediscovers his roots when his mobile returns to the solar system, and a tense confrontation of three civilizations takes place.

One hundred billion years later, macrolife, now as numerous as the stars, faces the impending death of nature. Regaining his individuality by falling away from a highly evolved macrolife, a strangely changed John Bulero struggles to see beyond a collapse of the universe into a giant black hole.

Inspired by the possibilities of space settlements, projections of biology and cosmology, and basic human longings, Macrolife is a visionary speculation on the long-term future of human and natural history. Filled with haunting images and memorable characters, this is a vivid and brilliant work.

Easton Press published Macrolife in its “Masterpieces of Science Fiction” series.

In the sequel to Macrolife, Cave of Stars , Old Earth is gone. Humanity has been scattered to the stars. Some left their dying planet in spaceship arks, in search of new worlds to inhabit. Others, nanoengineered for near-immortality, explore the far reaches of interstellar space in gargantuan macrolife mobiles.

An earthlike human society endures on the environmentally volatile planet of Tau Ceti IV–a rigid community of the faithful that has declared evil the science that caused the homeworld’s destruction. The Church is the absolute power here; obedience and belief the rule. But His Holiness Peter III, the New Vatican’s most powerful figure, himself harbors doubts, engendered by his love for his unacknowledged and illegitimate rebel daughter Josepha. And suddenly there is another assault on his tottering faith–and on the sacred tradtitions he has devoted his life to uphold. For an emissary, Voss Rhazes, has arrived from one of old Earth’s journeying mobiles–the first off-planet human visitor ever to Tau Ceti–bearing remarkable hated technology that could shred the fragile emotional fabric of a family…and bring devastating chaos to their world.

Zebrowski’s works have been translated into eight languages; his short fiction has been nominated for the Nebula Award and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. Brute Orbits, an uncompromising novel about a future penal system, was honored with the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Novel of the Year in 1999.

Science fiction writer Greg Bear calls George Zebrowski “one of those rare speculators who bases his dreams on science as well as inspiration.”  Zebrowski has published more than seventy works of short fiction and more than a hundred and forty articles and essays. His best known novel is Macrolife which Arthur C. Clarke described as “a worthy successor to Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker.” Library Journal chose Macrolife as one of the one hundred best science fiction novels, and The Easton Press included it in its “Masterpieces of Science Fiction” series. Macrolife and a related novel, Cave of Stars, are available on E-Reads along with a number of other Zebrowski masterpieces.

Brute Orbits, an uncompromising novel about the future of the penal system, was praised by reviewers for its characters, originality, and thought. Paul Di Filippo, in Asimov’s Science Fiction, said that “Zebrowski never ceases to invest his individual characters with three-dimensional roundness…Startling, sobering, provocative”, while Publishers Weekly called this novel “boldly speculative.” The book was also honored with the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Novel of the Year in 1999.

It is the twenty-first century. Convicts are sentenced to asteroids that move in ever-widening solar orbits, timed to return when their terms run out. But a few ambitious administrators discover that small “errors” in velocity can rid them of selected groups altogether: the hardcore violent, the mentally defective, and especially the political dissidents. Enduring the black vise of interstellar space-time, these human rejects–men and women mixed together–create their own Darwinian societies, struggling to survive.

Back on Earth, a handful of sympathetic and curious scientists have not forgotten these lost citizens. When a technological breakthrough makes it possible to overtake these scattered asteroids, a courageous team sets out to go where none has willingly gone before. What they discover in these “brute orbits” is both provocative and moving–a startling vision of humanity you will never forget.

“A brilliant and dramatic philosophical reflection on the nature of society, technology . . . and humanity itself. Zebrowski is a deep thinker who writes about the big questions’ in the grand tradition of Wells, Stapledon, and Clarke.”
– Jack M. Dann, award-winning author of The Silent and The Memory Cathedral

See George Zebrowski’s author page for other great titles.

“One morning in the late seventies,” writes Kathryn Lance,  “I saw a short squib in the New York Times business section about a company that was working to genetically alter bacteria that naturally consume oil so that they might be used to clean up oil spills. I thought, ‘Great! But what if your car catches it?’  This idea germinated for a while and became the nucleus of the setting for Pandora’s Genes and Pandora’s Children, post-holocaust adventure novels set in the late 21st century. In the world I came to imagine, genetically engineered bacteria were used on a particularly severe oil spill, and mutated to develop a taste for all petroleum products. The new bacteria spread rapidly, destroying the functionality of all machinery that runs on oil products, as well as all things containing plastic and other petro-based items.”

In Pandora’s Genes, an absorbing and unique novel, Kathryn Lance asks how far the folly of mankind can go, how much science can be substituted for nature before the imbalance proves disastrous. In a world of the future, great machines lie rusting as their fuel has finally run out and humanity faces the possibility of extinction as altered strands of DNA run rampant through the gene pool. Several forces emerge, each hoping to be humanity’s saving grace, but which one will ultimately save the world?

E-Reads has published Pandora’s Genes and its sequel Pandora’s Children at a time when the world Lance projected – after a fictional holocaust – may be creating itself before our very eyes.

We asked Kathryn Lance to write some remarks tying her books to the oil spill now disgorging its horrifying contents into the Gulf of Mexico. You can read them in full here.

RC

Background on Pandora’s Genes and Pandora’s Children.

One morning in the late seventies I saw a short squib in the New York Times business section about a company that was working to genetically alter bacteria that naturally consume oil so that they might be used to clean up oil spills. I thought, “Great! But what if your car catches it?”

This idea germinated for a while and became the nucleus of the setting for Pandora’s Genes and Pandora’s Children, post-holocaust adventure novels set in the late 21st century. In the world I came to imagine, genetically engineered bacteria were used on a particularly severe oil spill, and mutated to develop a taste for all petroleum products. The new bacteria spread rapidly, destroying the functionality of all machinery that runs on oil products, as well as all things containing plastic and other petro-based items. Among the things destroyed were the fail-safe seals that confined other recombinant-DNA experiments, as well as deadly viruses being engineered in secret germ-warfare research. The result was a greatly de-populated world, with many animal and insect species extinct or deleteriously altered, and with no remnants of what we consider modern technology.

One of the engineered diseases let loose was an inheritable illness in which affected women die in childbirth, usually upon having a second female child. The resulting rarity of women is the plot point that sets my story in motion. Both novels focus on two opposed groups, one which wishes to restore some semblance of civilization, and their antagonists, a fanatical religious group dedicated to the final, total eradication of all remnants of “science” and the “wild deenas” (DNA) that science loosed on the world. (They make the sacred sign of the double spiral in their rites.)

When the current Gulf of Mexico oil disaster occurred, and I read that one of the possible solutions was oil-eating bacteria, I must admit to a little chill of déjà-vu. I hope whatever is tried ultimately works, but I can’t help wondering what will happen if the experts begin using engineered bacteria on a large scale, and what other parts of my books might then come true.
Kathryn Lance is the author or ghost of more than fifty books of fiction and nonfiction, for children and adults, as well as countless articles. Her most recent sci-fi publication, in the December, 2008 Asimov’s, was “Welcome to Valhalla,” co-written with Jack McDevitt.

In Greg Bear’s new futuristic FBI thriller Mariposa, the world just keeps getting tougher and more complicated. America teeters on the edge of bankruptcy because of crushing foreign debt and an apparent savior, The Talos Corporation, delivers training for soldiers and security forces around the world, logistical support and badly-needed troops economically. But there’s a sinister hidden cost. The three rookie FBI agents who survived the challenges portrayed in Quantico are drawn back together in an alliance against a deadly challenge for which no one seems prepared. The code name is “Mariposa”, and only a desperate combination of misfits and survivors can combat a threat spelling nothing less than the collapse of American democracy.

E-Reads is happy to bring you the e-book edition of Mariposa. For those who prefer to read the print edition, click here. If you want to read the novel that launched this futuristic FBI thriller series, you can buy the e-book of Quantico here or the print edition here.

And for a menu of eighteen unforgettable novels by this award-winning master of science fiction, visit Greg Bear’s page on E-Reads.

RC

About Greg Bear

Greg Bear, author of over 25 books, which have been translated into 17 languages, has won science fiction’s highest honors and is considered the natural heir to Arthur C. Clarke. The recipient of two Hugos and four Nebulas for his fiction, he has been called “the best working writer of hard science fiction” by The Science Fiction Encyclopedia. Many of his novels, such as Darwin’s Radio, are considered to be this generations’ classics. He is married to Astrid Anderson, daughter of science fiction great Poul Anderson, and they are the parents of two children, Erik and Alexandria. His most recent thriller novel, Quantico, was published in 2007. He has since published a new, epic SF novel, City at the End of Time.

In People of the Sky by Clare Bell, old technology survives and even thrives on the challenges of a new planet populated by ancient human spirits.

Kesbe Temiya, a freelance flyer, accepts a commission to deliver an ancient-but-restored C-47 (a Gooney Bird in 20th Century parlance, named The Gooney Berg by its new owner) to a collector of rare aircraft on the planet Oneway.

Dropped off by a starship, Temiya gets side-tracked by bad weather, rescued by a mysterious figure riding an alien flying creature and stranded in a long-vanished Pueblo Indian colony which follows the prophecy of the Blue Star Kachina and lives the old ways, isolated from technology and away from the white man. Despite her own Pueblo blood, Kesbe is an outsider and only by adopting the ways of the People of the Sky, including a ritual that may turn her, too, into a throwback and could even kill her, can she find the help she needs to fulfill her mission—and find the life that is right for her.

Click here to see all Clare Bell titles published by E-Reads.

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by The New York Times.