New Hampshire's Mount Washington is known as "Home of the World's Worst Weather." A handful of hardy souls live on the mountain's Observatory year-round. Do they have to be just a bit unusual to seek out such a career? Perhaps. But the Observatory crew find much to enjoy in their icy home—even when it means dealing with hundred-mile-per-hour winds, wandering moose, and odd questions from visitors. They are also treated to spectacular sunsets, spine-tingling thunderstorms, and breathtaking toboggan runs. Former observer Eric Pinder describes with wry humor the joys and terrors of living in the clouds and explains Mount Washington's geology and weather. The book ends with a one-of-a kind cookbook of favorite "Recipes from the Rockpile."

A Triumphant New Gateway Adventure

Twenty-five years after the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning bestseller Gateway, Frederik Pohl returns with a new Gateway novel. Filled with excitement and the sense of wonder that made Gateway a huge success, The Boy Who Would Live Forever is a memorable journey into the unknown.

Stan and Estrella, two young people from Earth, journey to the Gateway asteroid looking for adventure, and discover each other during a flight in one of the ships the alien Heechee left behind when they explored our Solar System. Stan and Estrella settle among the Heechee on a planet in the galactic core, never suspecting that the two of them may be the last, best hope to save the humans and Heechee in the core from destruction by a crazed madman.

Wan Enrique Santos-Smith, a man full of loathing for the Heechee, will stop at nothing to destroy the Heechee and their human friends. But Stan and Estrella, with the help of a fabulously wealthy philanthropist and the unique machine mind Marc Antony, are determined to thwart Wan’s terrible plan. At stake is nothing less than the fate of all life in the galaxy.

Every schoolchild learns about the mutually beneficial dance of honeybees and flowers: The bee collects nectar and pollen to make honey and, in the process, spreads the flowers’ genes far and wide. In The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan ingeniously demonstrates how people and domesticated plants have formed a similarly reciprocal relationship. He masterfully links four fundamental human desires—sweetness, beauty, intoxication, and control—with the plants that satisfy them: the apple, the tulip, marijuana, and the potato. In telling the stories of four familiar species, Pollan illustrates how the plants have evolved to satisfy humankind’s most basic yearnings. And just as we’ve benefited from these plants, we have also done well by them. So who is really domesticating whom?

A stunning literary SF novel from the multiple award winning Christopher Priest. A tale of murder, artistic rivalry and literary trickery; a Chinese puzzle of a novel where nothing is quite what it seems; a narrator whose agenda is artful and subtle; a narrative that pulls you in and plays an elegant game with you. 

The Dream Archipelago is a vast network of islands. The names of the islands are different depending on who you talk to, their very locations seem to twist and shift. Some islands have been sculpted into vast musical instruments, others are home to lethal creatures, others the playground for high society. Hot winds blow across the archipelago and a war fought between two distant continents is played out across its waters. THE ISLANDERS serves both as an untrustworthy but enticing guide to the islands, an intriguing, multi-layered tale of a murder and the suspect legacy of its appealing but definitely untrustworthy narrator.

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning and bestselling author of The Shipping News and Accordion Crimes comes one of the most celebrated short-story collections of our time.

Annie Proulx's masterful language and fierce love of Wyoming are evident in these breathtaking tales of loneliness, quick violence, and the wrong kinds of love. Each of the stunning portraits in Close Range reveals characters fiercely wrought with precision and grace.

These are stories of desperation and unlikely elation, set in a landscape both stark and magnificent — by an author writing at the peak of her craft.

Part noir, part psychedelic romp, all Thomas Pynchon— private eye Doc Sportello comes, occasionally, out of a marijuana haze to watch the end of an era as free love slips away and paranoia creeps in with the L.A. fog

It's been awhile since Doc Sportello has seen his ex-girlfriend. Suddenly out of nowhere she shows up with a story about a plot to kidnap a billionaire land developer whom she just happens to be in love with. Easy for her to say. It's the tail end of the psychedelic sixties in L.A., and Doc knows that "love" is another of those words going around at the moment, like "trip" or "groovy," except that this one usually leads to trouble. Despite which he soon finds himself drawn into a bizarre tangle of motives and passions whose cast of characters includes surfers, hustlers, dopers and rockers, a murderous loan shark, a tenor sax player working undercover, an ex-con with a swastika tattoo and a fondness for Ethel Merman, and a mysterious entity known as the Golden Fang, which may only be a tax dodge set up by some dentists.

In this lively yarn, Thomas Pynchon, working in an unaccustomed genre, provides a classic illustration of the principle that if you can remember the sixties, you weren't there . . . or . . . if you were there, then you . . . or, wait, is it . . .

“The good thing is, no one will ever die again. The bad thing is, everyone will want to.”

A physicist receives a mysterious paper. The ideas in it are far, far ahead of current thinking and quite, quite terrifying. In a city of “fast ones,” shadow players, and jinni, two sisters contemplate a revolution.
And on the edges of reality a thief, helped by a sardonic ship, is trying to break into a Schrödinger box for his patron. In the box is his freedom. Or not.

Jean de Flambeur is back. And he’s running out of time.

In Hannu Rajaniemi’s sparkling follow-up to the critically acclaimed international sensation The Quantum Thief, he returns to his awe-inspiring vision of the universe…and we discover what the future held for Earth.

Jean le Flambeur is a post-human criminal, mind burglar, confidence artist, and trickster. His origins are shrouded in mystery, but his exploits are known throughout the Heterarchy— from breaking into the vast Zeusbrains of the Inner System to stealing rare Earth antiques from the aristocrats of Mars. Now he’s confined inside the Dilemma Prison, where every day he has to get up and kill himself before his other self can kill him.

Rescued by the mysterious Mieli and her flirtatious spacecraft, Jean is taken to the Oubliette, the Moving City of Mars, where time is currency, memories are treasures, and a moon-turnedsingularity lights the night. What Mieli offers is the chance to win back his freedom and the powers of his old self—in exchange for finishing the one heist he never quite managed.

As Jean undertakes a series of capers on behalf of Mieli and her mysterious masters, elsewhere in the Oubliette investigator Isidore Beautrelet is called in to investigate the murder of a chocolatier, and finds himself on the trail of an arch-criminal, a man named le Flambeur….

The Quantum Thief is a crazy joyride through the solar system several centuries hence, a world of marching cities, ubiquitous public-key encryption, people communicating by sharing memories, and a race of hyper-advanced humans who originated as MMORPG guild members. But for all its wonders, it is also a story powered by very human motives of betrayal, revenge, and jealousy. It is a stunning debut.   The Quantum Thief is a Kirkus Reviews Best of 2011 Science Fiction & Fantasy title.   One of Library Journal's Best SF/Fantasy Books of 2011

One hundred and fifty years from now, Africa has become the world’s dominant technological and economic power. Crime, war, disease and poverty have been practically eliminated. The Moon and Mars are settled, and colonies stretch all the way out to the edge of the solar system. And Ocular, the largest scientific instrument in history, is about to make an epochal discovery…
 
Geoffrey Akinya wants only one thing: to be left in peace, so that he can continue his long-running studies into the elephants of the Amboseli basin. But Geoffrey’s family, which controls the vast Akinya business empire, has other plans for him. After the death of his grandmother Eunice—the erstwhile space explorer and entrepreneur—something awkward has come to light on the Moon, so Geoffrey is dispatched there to ensure the family name remains untarnished.
 
But the secrets Eunice died with are about to be revealed—secrets that could change everything...or tear this near utopia apart.

The first short story collection by “ONE OF SCIENCE FICTION’S BEST AND MOST AMBITIOUS NOVELISTS”(SFX).

With eight short stories and novellas, Galactic North imparts the centuriesspanning events that have produced this dark and turbulent world.

Centuries from now, solidarity stretches thin as humanity spreads past the solar system and to the nearest stars. Technology has produced powerful new tools, but lethal risk accompanies each new advancement.

“[Alastair] Reynolds’s depth of imagination, adeptness with creating multi-dimensional characters, and brisk pacing are again in evidence” (Publishers Weekly) as the author of Blue Remembered Earth continues his Poseidon’s Children saga…

Chiku Akinya, great granddaughter of the legendary space explorer Eunice Akinyaand heir to the family empire, is just one among millions on a long one way journey towards a planet they hope to call their new home. For Chiku, the journey is a personal one, undertaken to ensure that the Akinya family achieves its destiny among the stars.

The passengers travel in huge self-contained artificial worlds—holoships—putting their faith in a physics they barely understand. Chiku’s ship is called Zanzibar—and over time, she will discover it contains an awesome secret—one which will lead her to question almost every certainty about her voyage, and its ultimate destiny…

Tom Dreyfus is a Prefect, a law enforcement officer. His current case: investigating a murderous attack against one of the Glitter Band habitats that leaves nine hundred people dead. But then he uncovers an even greater threat—a covert plot by an enigmatic entity seeking nothing less than total control of the Glitter Band.

2057. Bella Lind and the crew of her nuclear-powered ship, the Rockhopper, push ice. They mine comets. But nothing can prepare them for the surprises in store when Janus, one of Saturn's ice moons, spins out of control.

This stunning sequel to Revelation Space begins late in the twenty-sixth century. The human race has advanced enough to accidentally trigger alien machines designed to detect intelligent life—and destroy it.