author : Peter Watts

How do you conspire when your tiny handful of potential allies changes with each 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?

Sunday Ahzmundin is about to find out.

• Peter Watts is banned from the US.
• Watts almost died from flesh-eating bacteria.
• A schizophrenic man living in Watts’s backyard almost set his house on fire.
• Watts was raised by Baptists who really sucked at giving presents.
• Peter Watts said to read this book. Or else.

In more than fifty unpredictable essays and revenge fantasies, Hugo Award-winning author, former marine biologist, and angry sentient tumor Peter Watts is the savage dystopian optimist whom you can’t look away from. Even when you probably should.

Humanity splinters into strange new forms with every heartbeat: hive-minds coalesce, rapture-stricken, speaking in tongues; soldiers forgo consciousness for combat efficiency; a nightmare human subspecies has been genetically resurrected; half the population has retreated into the ersatz security of a virtual environment called Heaven.

And it s all under surveillance by an alien presence that refuses to reveal itself.

Daniel Brüks has turned his back on it all, taking refuge in the Oregon desert. As an unaugmented, baseline human he’s an irrelevance, a living fossil for whom extinction beckons. But he’s about to find himself an unwilling pilgrim on a voyage to the heart of the solar system that will bring the fractured remnants of mankind to the biggest evolutionary breakpoint since the origin of thought.

But she has learned something in the meantime: she destroyed the world for a fallacy.

Now, cowering at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, rifters and the technoindustrial “corpses” who created them hide from a world in its death throes. But they cannot hide forever: something is tracking them, down among the lightless cliffs and trenches of the Midatlantic Ridge. The consequences of past acts reach inexorably toward the very bottom of the world, and Lenie Clarke must finally confront the mess she made.

Redemption doesn’t come easy with the blood of a world on your hands. But even after five years in purgatory, Lenie Clarke is still Lenie Clarke. There will be consequences for anyone who gets in her way—and worse ones, perhaps, if she succeeds.

For five years, she and her rifter brethren have hidden in the mountains of the deep Atlantic. The facility they commandeered was more than a secret station on the ocean floor. Atlantis was an exit strategy for the corporate elite, a place where the world’s movers and shakers had hidden from the doomsday microbe βehemoth—and from the hordes of the moved and the shaken left behind. For five years, “rifters” and “corpses” have lived in a state of uneasy truce, united by fear of the outside world.

But now that world is closing in. An unknown enemy hunts them through the crushing darkness of the Mid Atlantic Ridge. βehemoth—twisted, mutated, more virulent than ever—has found them already. The fragile armistice between the rifters and their onetime masters has exploded into all-out war, and not even the legendary Lenie Clarke can take back the body count.

Billions have died since she loosed βehemoth the world. Billions more are bound to. The whole biosphere came apart at the seams while Lenie Clarke hid at the bottom of the sea and did nothing. But now there is no place left to hide. The consequences of her past actions reach inexorably to the very floor of the world, and Lenie Clarke must return to confront the mess she made. Redemption doesn’t come easy with the blood of a world on your hands. But even after five years in pitch-black purgatory, Lenie Clarke is still Lenie Clarke. There will be consequences for anyone who gets in her way—and worse ones, perhaps, if she succeeds…