Hard Reality

In AD 2600, the human race is finally beginning to realize its full potential. Hundreds of colonized planets scattered across the galaxy host a multitude of prosperous and wildly diverse cultures. Genetic engineering has pushed evolution far beyond nature's boundaries, defeating disease and producing extraordinary spaceborn creatures. Huge fleets of sentient trader starships thrive on the wealth created by the industrialization of entire star systems, and throughout inhabited space the Confederation Navy keeps the peace.

If we live long enough, life will knock us around. Relationships will fail. Loved ones will die. Injury, illness and disease will all take their toll. Our suffering might seem unbearable at these times, but there is hope. The Reality Slap is a compassionate, wise and extremely practical guide to handling the anxiety, grief and suffering that inevitably follow such major life blows.

Stephen "Steve-O" Glover—social media icon, comedy-touring stalwart, and star of Jackass—delivers a hilarious and practical guide to recovery, relationships, career, and how to keep thriving long after you should be dead. “I read this book all in one sitting. I am first of all blown away...

The most famous problem in philosophy of mind has been built on a picture of matter that physics abandoned a hundred years ago. Once you remove that picture, the problem turns inside out. For thirty years, philosophers have wrestled with the hard problem of consciousness: how does physical matter give rise to subjective experience? The question feels urgent, even unanswerable. But The Hard Problem of Matter argues that the question has been holding the equation upside down. Atoms are not things. The world is not built out of stuff. This isn't mysticism. It's what the founders of quantum ...

This is not your typical Zen book. Brad Warner, a young punk who grew up to be a Zen master, spares no one. This bold new approach to the "Why?" of Zen Buddhism is as strongly grounded in the tradition of Zen as it is utterly revolutionary. Warner's voice is hilarious, and he calls on the wisdom of everyone from punk and pop culture icons to the Buddha himself to make sure his points come through loud and clear.

Biohacker Olivia Park is obsessed with an emerging mystery within Oz, the online portal created by alien technology. What she finds is a primitive xenobot, Eno, who takes her on a mind-bending trip through time that begins as the Berlin Wall is falling, and takes her back to the origins of the modern internet and the fall of a digital Atlantis created by her father, Wesley Park, and entrepreneur William Ackerson.

Neal Stephenson is a blazing new force on the sci-fi scene. With the groundbreaking cyberpunk novel Snow Crash, he has "vaulted onto the literary stage." It weaves virtual reality, Sumerian myth, and just about everything in between with a cool, hip cybersensibility - in short, it is the gigathriller of the information age.

A gravitational anomaly beyond Neptune. No radiation. No propulsion signature. No reason to exist. When deep-space instruments detect an object that defies every law of physics, Commander Elena Markovic and theoretical physicist Dr. Kaito Suresh are dispatched aboard the vessel Aegis to intercept it before it reaches Earth orbit. What they find is not an invasion force. It’s something far stranger. The object doesn’t travel through space. It rewrites space, altering the fundamental constants of physics around itself, converting vacuum energy as a mode of transportation. As the Aegis ...

Neal Stephenson, "the hottest science fiction writer in America", takes science fiction to dazzling new levels. The Diamond Age is a stunning tale; set in 21st-century Shanghai, it is the story of what happens what a state-of-the-art interactive device falls into the hands of a street urchin named Nell. Her life, and the entire future of humanity, is about to be decoded and reprogrammed.

Hard Reset is a fast-paced, unpredictable, and clever take on the LitRPG genre, blending beloved sci-fi and apocalyptic themes to create an intricate new reality. In this world, life begins in a coffin, cars float, a good ray gun is your best friend, and computer displays are activated with a...

ANYONE CAN GO THERE... COMING BACK IS ANOTHER STORY. The first in a four-audiobook series, Otherland: City of Golden Shadow is a complex suspense novel of the near future, where virtual reality has expanded to encompass all aspects of society -- and national, physical, and mental boundaries are...

The first in the Night's Dawn trilogy, The Reality Dysfunction is a sweeping, intergalactic adventure from the master of space opera, Peter F. Hamilton. For fans of Iain M. Banks and Alastair Reynolds. An extinct race named this phenomenon 'the Reality Dysfunction'. It is a nightmare that has...

Break Free from the Confidence Illusion You’ve tried affirmations, power poses, and “fake it till you make it”—but instead of real confidence, you end up exhausted, anxious, and doubting yourself more than ever. Welcome to The Confidence Trap—the hidden cycle that keeps millions stuck in endless self-improvement without ever finding authentic self-assurance. In this groundbreaking book, John K. Bell reveals why traditional confidence advice so often backfires and introduces a radically different approach based on the principles of Reality Transurfing. Instead of forcing yourself ...

The New York Times bestseller from “one of the most astute and entertaining commentators on our astonishing, chaotic present.”( Washington Post Book World) Hollis Henry is a journalist on investigative assignment for a magazine called Node, which doesn’t exist yet. Bobby Chombo is a...

They watched their universe die. Betrayed by one of their own, Addison, Emerie, Landon, and Kylan escape annihilation to find themselves trapped in a newborn universe—alone, cut off from everything they once knew, and hunted by enemies who believe they should already be dead. Their only lead lies within four neural chips, salvaged from the alternate versions of themselves. Buried inside the memories of their doppelgängers are be the answers they need: who orchestrated the betrayal, why their universe was destroyed, and how to survive the unstable reality surrounding them. But every ...

Observer, by Robert Lanza and Nancy Kress is a slick modern, hard sf, standalone, medical thriller combining classic Robin Cook with the hard edge of Black Mirror and Altered Carbon. After neurosurgeon Caro Soames-Watkins’ career has gone down in flames, she receives a strange job offer from...

The constants were supposed to settle back to normal. Instead, they start drifting again. At laboratories across Earth, ultra-precise instruments detect the impossible: the laws of physics are no longer behaving like fixed laws. What began as a fading scar left behind near Neptune is now spreading into the inner solar system. New anomaly sites appear in the asteroid belt and beyond, and the numbers are moving in lockstep. Metrologist Idris Bello trusts measurements more than theories. Physicist Kaito Suresh built the framework that said the residual field should decay. Information theorist ...

What is the universe made of — matter, energy, or something deeper? In The Architecture of Reality, Clayton Louis Turnage explores one of the most profound questions in human thought: Is reality fundamentally physical, or is it structured in a way that points beyond material explanation? Drawing from geometry, thermodynamics, cosmology, information theory, and contemporary philosophy of mind, this book traces a bold but disciplined inquiry into: The emergence of structure from undifferentiated unity The geometric foundations of space and symmetry Entropy and the arrow of time The ...

What happens when reality stops behaving like reality? Across radically different worlds, ordinary lives begin to fracture in the same unsettling ways. Memories are missing. Familiar objects refuse to behave as they should. Brief distortions reveal ruined versions of places that moments before seemed completely intact. At first, each event can be dismissed as error, coincidence, or faulty perception. But the pattern keeps returning. As the disturbances grow more precise, the question changes from what is happening? to something far more difficult: Who is experiencing it? Slices: An ...

Unborn won a bronze medal at the Independent Publisher Book Awards. Unborn is the first book in the science fiction/dark fantasy multigenerational, grounded-in-reality family saga that tells a story of what it means to belong and make sacrifices no others can. A childless couple discovers an unusual baby in the Siberian Forest and flees to the US to protect her from the Russian government. The girl, Olesya, grows up to become a brilliant scientist, unraveling the secrets of enigmatic dark matter. However, soon after, a powerful foe with seemingly noble intentions kidnaps her boss and ...