Peter Watts - Böcker

Hugo and Shirley Jackson award-winning Peter Watts stands on the cutting edge of hard SF with his acclaimed novel, BlindsightTwo 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.

Firefall is the omnibus edition of the novels Blindsight and Echopraxia. February 13, 2082, First Contact. Sixty-two thousand objects of unknown origin plunge into Earth's atmosphere – a perfect grid of falling stars screaming across the radio spectrum as they burn. Not even ashes reach the ground. Three hundred and sixty degrees of global surveillance: something just took a snapshot. And then... nothing. But from deep space, whispers. Something out there talks – but not to us. Two ships, Theseus and the Crown of Thorns, are launched to discover the origin of Earth's visitation, one bound for the outer dark of the Kuiper Belt, the other for the heart of the Solar System. Their crews can barely be called human, what they will face certainly can't. 'A tour de force, redefining the First Contact story for good' Charles Stross. 'If you only read one science fiction novel this year, make it this one!... It puts the whole of the rest of the genre in the shade... It deserves to walk away with the Clarke, the Hugo, the Nebula, the BSFA, and pretty much any other genre award for which it's eligible. It's off the scale... F**king awesome!' Richard Morgan. 'State-of-the-art science fiction: smart, dark and it grabs you by the throat from page one' Neal Ascher.

This book explores a range of problems in the application of agency law in commercial practice. Moving beyond the limited introductory resources currently available, it "tests" abstract agency law concepts in specific commercial contexts, with reference to jurisdictions around the world. There is an enduring commonality of concepts and principles within agency law, both within the Commonwealth and within the jurisdictions of the United States. The book's comparative approach, drawing together analysis of national and international jurisdictions, provides innovative perspectives and insights, as well as practical guidance on solving commercial problems. The book opens with a detailed introductory chapter which provides a broad overview of the agency issues arising in specific commercial contexts. The subsequent chapters are grouped thematically: company law, financial transactions and services, sale of goods; as well as agency in procedural contexts. Topics covered include the role of the director and directorial board in company law and agency law, agency in shipping law, undisclosed principal in sale of goods cases, regulation of conflicts of interest in securities transactions, poseur-agents and transactional intermediation, the operation of agency in retail financial services, the agent's warranty of authority, and power of attorney.This book is an invaluable resource on both agency theory and commercial practice.

So when civilization needs someone to run generating stations three kilometres below the surface of the Pacific, it seeks out a special sort of person for its Rifters program. It recruits those whose histories have pre-adapted them to dangerous environments, people so used to broken bodies and chronic stress that life on the edge of an undersea volcano would actually be a step up. Nobody worries too much about job satisfaction; if you haven't spent a lifetime learning the futility of fighting back, you wouldn't be a rifter in the first place. It's a small price to keep the lights going, back on shore.But there are things among the cliffs and trenches of the Juan de Fuca Ridge that no one expected to find, and enough pressure can forge the most obedient career-victim into something made of iron. At first, not even the rifters know what they have in them - and by the time anyone else finds out, the outcast and the downtrodden have their hands on a kill switch for the whole damn planet.

Julio Mario Santo Domingo (1957-2009) was a collector and visionary who filled his homes and warehouses with the world’s greatest private collection related to the subjects of drugs, sex, magic, and rock and roll. A library of more than 100,000 items, it contained everything from rare manuscripts and photos to posters, bottles, letters, opium pipes, and pinball machines. Exploring the innumerable influences of mind-enhancing drugs on art, science, and politics over the centuries, Santo Domingo’s collection contained work by diverse figures including Andy Warhol, Timothy Leary, Sigmund Freud, the Marquis de Sade, Charles Baudelaire, Allen Ginsberg, the Rolling Stones, Aleister Crowley, and many more. This extraordinary collection is vividly documented in Altered States: The Library of Julio Santo Domingo.