FirefallSeries

Recommended Reading Order

1. 1

   Blindsight

   • Peter Watts

   • 384 pages
   • 14 hours of reading

   4.0(1206)Add rating

   Canadian writer Peter Watts stands on the cutting edge of hard SF with the Hugo and Campbell Award finalist and Locus Award winning Blindsight Two 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.

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2. 2

   Echopraxia

   • Peter Watts

   3.6(155)Add rating

   It's the eve of the 22nd century and the beginning of the end. 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 Bruks 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. '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 Asher.

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• Ognisty deszcz

  • dr Michał Brzoza-Brzezina

  4.0(50)Add rating

  W skład książki wchodzą Ślepowidzenie i Echopraksja. 13 lutego 2082. Pierwszy kontakt. Sześćdziesiąt dwa tysiące obiektów nieznanego pochodzenia nurkuje w ziemską atmosferę, tworząc idealną siatkę spadających gwiazd, które spalając się, krzyczą na wszystkich radiowych częstotliwościach. Na Ziemię nie dociera nawet okruch popiołu. Trzysta sześćdziesiąt stopni globalnej obserwacji -- ktoś sobie po prostu pstryknął nasze zdjęcie. A potem... nic. Lecz z głębi kosmosu dochodzą szepty. Coś tam gada, ale nie do nas. Ziemia wysyła dwa statki, aby odkryły, skąd przybyli ci goście. Tezeusz i Korona cierniowa. Jeden wyrusza na ciemne rubieże Pasa Kuipera, drugi do serca Układu Słonecznego. Już ich załogę z trudem daje się określić mianem ludzkiej -- a tego z czym się mierzą, na pewno nie. Popis siły, na zawsze przedefiniowujący motyw Pierwszego Kontaktu Charles Stross. Jeśli macie przeczytać w tym roku tylko jedną książkę science fiction, niech to będzie ta! (...) Przyćmiewa całą resztę tego gatunku (...) i zasługuje na zgarnięcie Clarke'a, Hugo, Nebuli, BSFA i wszystkich innych nagród, do których może startować. Jest poza skalą (...) zajebista po prostu! Richard Morgan Mistrzowska fantastyka -- inteligentna, mroczna i chwytająca za gardło od pierwszej strony Neal Asher

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• Firefall

  • Peter Watts

  4.0(698)Add rating

  After an unexplained moment of surveillance by an alien intelligence no further contact has been made for twenty-five years. But all this is about to change. For a man hiding in the Oregon desert is about to play a key role in the next stage of human evolution.

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