Ciencia ficción y fantasía

The fourth consort : a novel

Ashton, Edward (escritor de ciencia ficción), autor.

Dalton Greaves is a hero. He's one of humankind's first representatives to Unity, a pan-species confederation working to bring all sentient life into a single benevolent brotherhood. That's what they told him, anyway. The only actual members of Unity that he's ever met are Boreau, a giant snail who seems more interested in plunder than spreading love and harmony, and Boreau's human sidekick, Neera, who Dalton strongly suspects roped him into this gig so that she wouldn't become the next one of Boreau's crew to get eaten by locals while prospecting. Funny thing, though--turns out there actually is a benevolent confederation out there, working for the good of all life. They call themselves the Assembly, and they really don't like Unity. More to the point, they really, really don't like Unity's new human minions. When an encounter between Boreau's scout ship and an Assembly cruiser over a newly discovered world ends badly for both parties, Dalton finds himself marooned, caught between a stickman, one of the Assembly's nightmarish shock troops, the planet's natives, who aren't winning any congeniality prizes themselves, and Neera, who might actually be the most dangerous of the three. To survive, he'll need to navigate palace intrigue, alien morality, and a proposal that he literally cannot refuse, all while making sure Neera doesn't come to the conclusion that he's worth more to her dead than alive. Part first contact story, part dark comedy, and part bizarre love triangle, The Fourth Consort asks an important question: how far would you go to survive? And more importantly, how many drinks would you need to go there?....

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How to steal a galaxy

Revis, Beth, author.

Ada had no intention whatsoever to continue working for the rebel group that hired her to retrieve the government's plans for a nanobot climate cleaner if they weren't willing to pay her for it, but then they offer a different perk: an undercover mission to a charity gala where Rian will be in attendance. Rian, meanwhile, has volunteered his services for the gala believing that the rare items up for auction will attract Ada's eye. Hoping to catch her in the act and pin her with a punishable crime, Rian has no idea Ada's really after. In a high-stakes game of theft and deception, Ada plays to win...and Rian will do anything to stop her.....

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I'm starting to worry about this black box of doom

Pargin, Jason, 1975- author.

Outside Los Angeles, a driver pulls up to find a young woman sitting on a large black box. She offers him $200,000 cash to transport her and that box across the country, to Washington, DC. But there are rules: He cannot look inside the box. He cannot ask questions. He cannot tell anyone. They must leave immediately. He must leave all trackable devices behind. As these eccentric misfits hit the road, rumors spread on social media that the box is part of a carefully orchestrated terror attack intended to plunge the USA into civil war. The truth promises to be even stranger, and may change how you see the world.....

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Carl's doomsday scenario

Dinniman, Matt, author.

The aliens have come, and they've transformed Earth into a multilevel, video game-like dungeon. It's the newest season of the galaxy's most watched game show, Dungeon Crawler World. Now on the third floor, Carl and Donut have to fight harder than ever. They've already proven that a Coast Guard vet and once-and-forever feline royalty are an almost unstoppable team. Their ratings are off the charts. Viewers can't get enough. But the dungeon gets more dangerous each day, and now there's a whole new problem to deal with: Quests. They call it the Over City. A sprawling, once-thriving metropolis devastated by a mysterious calamity. But these streets are far from abandoned. An undead circus trawls the ruins. Murdered women rain from the sky. An ancient spell is finally ready to reveal its dark purpose. And Carl still has no pants.....

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The gate of the feral gods

Dinniman, Matt, author.

New Achievement! Total, Utter Failure. You failed a quest less than five minutes after you received it. Now that's talent. Surviving in a multilevel dungeon that also happens to be the set of the galaxy's most watched game show has taught Coast Guard vet Carl and his ex-girlfriend's cat, Princess Donut, that there's only one thing they can count on apart from each other: they never know what's coming next. And this floor is no exception. A floating fortress occupied by warrior gnomes. A castle made of sand. A derelict submarine guarded by malfunctioning machines. A haunted crypt surrounded by lethal traps. It was supposed to be easy. One bubble. Four castles. Fifteen days. Capture each one, and the stairwell is unlocked. Here's the thing. It's never easy. Going it alone is not an option this time, so Carl and his team must rely on the help of the low-level, I-can't-believe-these-idiots-are-still-alive crawlers trapped in the bubble with them. But can they be trusted? Welcome, Crawlers. Welcome to the fifth floor of the dungeon.....

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Thrum

Smitherman, Meg, author.

Ami awakes from years in stasis to find she's at the edges of deep space, and the only surviving member of her crew. Utterly alone and unable to contact Earth, she sends out a distress beacon, not expecting a response. When she gets one from a being who calls himself Dorian, she's welcomed onto his ship as he offers his assistance in any way he can. But nothing on Dorian's ship is as it seems. And as Ami tries to navigate the maze of hallways and first contact with this alien being, a deep hum begins to resonate, haunting her, as if the ship itself is whispering to her.....

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Cold eternity

Barnes, SA, autor.

"Halley is on the run from an interplanetary political scandal that has put a huge target on her back. She heads for what seems like the perfect place to lay low: a gigantic space barge storing the cryogenically frozen bodies of Earth's most fortunate citizens from more than a century ago... The cryo program, created by trillionaire tech genius Zale Winfeld, is long defunct, and the AI hologram "hosts," ghoulishly created in the likeness of Winfeld's three adult children, are glitchy. The ship feels like a crypt, and the isolation getsto Halley almost immediately. She starts to see figures crawling inthe hallways, and there's a constant scraping, slithering, and rattling echoing in the vents. It's not long before Halley realizes she may have gotten herself trapped in an even more dangerous situation than the one she was running from..."--Provided by publisher.....

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The downloaded

Sawyer, Robert J., author.

In 2059 two very different groups have their minds uploaded into a quantum computer in Waterloo, Ontario. One group consists of astronauts preparing for Earth's first interstellar voyage. The other? Convicted murderers, serving their sentences in a virtual-reality prison. But when disaster strikes, the astronauts and the prisoners must download back into physical reality and find a way to work together to save Earth from destruction.....

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The third rule of time travel

Fracassi, Philip, 1970- author.

Scientist Beth Darlow has discovered the unimaginable. She's built a machine that allows human consciousness to travel through time-to any point in the traveler's lifetime-and relive moments of their life. An impossible breakthrough, but it's not perfect: the traveler has no way to interact with the past. They can only observe. After Beth's husband, Colson, the co-creator of the machine, dies in a tragic car accident, Beth is left to raise Isabella-their only daughter-and continue the work they started. Mired in grief and threatened by her ruthless CEO, Beth pushes herself to the limit to prove the value of her technology. Then the impossible happens. Simply viewing personal history should not alter the present, but with each new observation she makes, her own timeline begins to warp. As her reality constantly shifts, Beth must solve the puzzles of her past, even if it means forsaking her future.....

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Rose/House

Martine, Arkady, author.

Rose/House is a breathtaking and taut sci-fi gothic thriller from Arkady Martine, Hugo Award-winning author of A Memory Called Empire. "I'm a piece of architecture, Detective. How should I know how humans are like to die?" All of Basit Deniau's houses were haunted. Rose House, his final architectural triumph built in the remote Mojave desert, was perhaps the most. A house embedded with an artificial intelligence is a common thing. But a house that is an artificial intelligence, infused in every crevice and corner with a thinking creature that is not human? That is something else altogether. That is Rose House. When Detective Maritza Smith gets a call from Rose House, she's shocked to learn that there is a dead body behind its sealed-up door. Everybody in town knows it's haunted. But Basit died more than a year ago, and everybody also knows that only his former protege, Dr. Selene Gisil, is permitted inside. But Selene wasn't in the country when Rose House called in the death. Who is the dead body? How did they get in? And who--or what--killed them? The answers lie within the labyrinthine halls of Rose House. But even if Martiza can get inside, there is no guarantee she will ever be able to leave .......

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Hammajang luck : a novel

Yamamoto, Makana, author.

Edie is done with crime. Eight years behind bars changes a person - costs them too much time with too many of the people who need them most. And it's all Angel's fault. She sold Edie out in what should have been the greatest moment of their lives. Instead, Edie was shipped off to the icy prison planet spinning far below the soaring skybridges and neon catacombs of Kepler space station - of home - to spend the best part of a decade alone. But then a chance for early parole appears out of nowhere and Edie steps into the pallid sunlight to find none other than Angel waiting - and she has an offer. One last job. One last deal. One last target. The trillionaire tech god they failed to bring down last time. There's just one thing Edie needs to do-trust Angel again-which also happens to be the last thing Edie wants to do. But Edie's lost too much time with their family. A heavily pregnant sister, a seriously ill niece, and a nephew who wasn't born before they went to prison. There's not a question. Edie's going straight. Or trying to - but Atlas has had them blacklisted from every employer on the station. Edie really doesn't want to work with Angel. It's far too complicated, they're far too angry, and Angel is bringing up a lot of confusing feelings. But they don't have any other choice... And if they pull it off, the 1.25 billion payout might just soothe some old wounds. What could possibly go all hammajang about this plan?....

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On the calculation of volume. 2

Balle, Solvej, 1962- author.

The first year of November eighteenth is coming to a close, and Tara Selter has returned to her hotel room in Paris, the place where it all began. As if perched at the edge of a precipice, she readies herself to leap into November nineteenth. Book II of Solvej Balle's astounding seven-part series On the Calculation of Volume beautifully expands on the speculative premise of Book I, drawing us further into the maze of time, where space yawns open, as if suddenly gaining a new dimension, extending into ever more fined-grained textures. Within this new reality, our senses and the tactility of things grows heightened: sounds, smells, sights, objects come suddenly alive, as if the world had begun whispering to us in a new language. And yet as the world announces itself anew, Tara's own sense of self is eroding, making her wonder just which bits of her are really left intact? "It is the Tara Selter with hopes and dreams who has fallen out of the picture, been thrown off the world, run over the edge, been poured out, carried off down the stream of eighteenths of November, lost, evaporated, swept out to sea." She begins to think of herself as a relic of the past, as something or someone leftover, similar to the little Roman coin she carries around in her pocket, without a purpose or a place. Desperate to recover a sense of herself within time, Tara decides to head north by train in search of winter, but soon she turns south in pursuit of spring, as she tries to grasp on to durational time through seasonal variations. Amazingly, On the Calculation of Volume Book II is all movement and motion-taking us through the European countries of the North and the South, through seasons, and languages-a beautiful travelogue that is also a love letter to our vanishing world. To be continued.....

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