An ancient starship from Earth reaches its destination after four hundred years of travel and makes a life-changing discovery in this compelling space opera. “MacLeod . . . delivers perhaps the finest novel of first contact since Vernor Vinge’s A Deepness in the Sky. . . . This is contemporary SF at its best.”—Publishers Weekly Humanity has spread to every star within five hundred light-years of its half-forgotten origin, coloring the sky with a haze of habitats. Societies rise and fall. Incautious experiments burn fast and fade. On the fringes, less modified humans get on with the job of settling a universe that has, so far, been empty of intelligent life. The ancient starship But the Sky, My Lady! The Sky! is entering orbit around a promising new system after a four-hundred-year journey. For its long-lived inhabitants, the centuries have been busy. Now a younger generation is eager to settle the system. The ship is a seed-pod ready to burst. Then they detect curious electromagnetic emissions from the system’s Earth-like world. As the nature of the signals becomes clear, the choices facing the humans become stark. On Ground, second world from the sun, a young astronomer searches for his system’s outermost planet. A moving point of light thrills, then disappoints him. It’s only a comet. His physicist colleague Orro takes time off from trying to invent a flying-machine to calculate the comet's trajectory. Something is very odd about that comet's path. They are not the only ones for whom the world has changed . . . At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied. “Highly entertaining.” —Locus “MacLeod continues to dazzle readers with vividly rendered landscapes of technological splendor and fascinating yet plausible visions of humanity’s future.” —Booklist

Ken MacLeod is one of the brightest and most progressive of Britain’s “Hard SF” stars who navigate exciting new futures to the delight of legions of fans around the world. His works combine cutting-edge scientific speculation, socialist and anarchist themes, and a deeply humanistic vision. Described by fans and adversaries alike as a “techno-utopian socialist,” MacLeod thrusts his characters into uncanny encounters that have included AI singularities, divergent human evolution, and posthuman cyborg-resurrection. In his novella The Human Front, a young Scottish guerrilla fighter is drawn into low-intensity sectarian war in a high-intensity dystopian future, and the arrival of an alien intruder (complete with saucer!) calls for new tactics and strange alliances. Its companion piece, “Other Deviations,” first published in this edition, reveals the complex origins of MacLeod’s alternate history. Plus: “The Future Will Happen Here, Too,” in which a Hebridean writer celebrates the landscapes that shaped his work, measures Scotland’s past against humanity’s future, and peers into the eyes of an eel. And Featuring: our irreverent Outspoken Interview, a candid and often cantankerous conversation that showcases our author’s deep erudition and mordant wit.

A major new hard science fiction novel from the acclaimed, award-winning author of The Cassini Division and Cosmonaut Keep

The fate of a second attempt to conquer space hinges on the records left by Myra Godwin at the end of the first era of space flight centuries before.

'Thought-provoking and entertaining, this highly original first-contact story should please any science fiction reader.' - School Library Journal 'Mind-expanding science fiction at its best; it is no surprise that it has been shortlisted for all the main science fiction awards.' - THE TIMES The great sunliner 'But the Sky, My Lady! The Sky!' is nearing the end of a four-hundred-year journey. A ship-born generation is tense with expectation for the new system that is to be their home. Expecting to find nothing more complex than bacteria and algae, the detection of electronic signals from one of the planets comes as a shock. In millennia of slow expansion, humanity has never encountered aliens, and yet these new signals cannot be ignored. They suspect a fast robot probe has overtaken them, and send probes of their own to investigate. On a world called Ground, whose inhabitants are struggling into the age of radio, petroleum and powered flight, a young astronomer searching for distant planets detects an anomaly that he presumes must be a comet. His friend, a brilliant foreign physicist, calculates the orbit, only to discover an anomaly of his own. The comet is slowing down ... Reminding us that the universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we CAN imagine, LEARNING THE WORLD is a stunning novel of exploration, discovery and Mankind's destiny amongst the stars. Books by Ken MacLeod: Fall Revolution The Star Fraction The Stone Canal The Cassini Division The Sky Road Engines of Light Cosmonaut Keep Dark Light Engine City Corporation Wars Trilogy Dissidence Insurgence Emergence Novels The Human Front Newton's Wake Learning the World The Execution Channel The Restoration Game Intrusion Descent

The Concluding Volume of the Engines of Light With Cosmonaut Keep and Dark Light, both finalists for science fiction's Hugo Award, Ken MacLeod launched a new interstellar epic with all the engaging characters and ingenious SF inventiveness of his earlier Fall Revolution novels. Now MacLeod delivers the culmination of his epic of a human future crammed with innumerable varieties of intelligent alien life, and in which humans find themselves involved in the politics of aliens as powerful and inscrutable as gods...and entangled in their wars. For ten thousand years, Nova Babylonia has been the greatest city of the Second Sphere, an interstellar civilization of human and other beings who have been secretly removed, throughout history, from Earth. Now humans from the far reaches of the Sphere have come to offer immortality—and to urge them to build defenses against the alien invasion they know is coming. As humans and aliens compete and conspire, the wheels of history will lathe all the players into shapes new and surprising. The alien invasion will reach New Babylon at last—led by the most alien figure of all. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

“A portal to a deeply imagined future history that parlays X-Files paranoia about Area 51 and alien Greys into a vast interstellar community.” —Paul McAuley, Interzone A Hugo Award Nominee for Best Novel Ranging from a gritty near-future Earth to a distant alien world, Ken MacLeod’s Cosmonaut Keep is contemporary science fiction at its highest level. A visionary epic filled with daring individuals seeking a place for themselves in a vast, complex, and enigmatic universe. Matt Cairns is a twenty-first-century outlaw Programmer who takes on the shady jobs no one else will touch. Against his better judgment, he accepts an assignment to crack the Marshall Titov, a top-secret orbital station operated by the European Space Agency. But what Matt will discover there will propel him on an extraordinary and quite unexpected journey. Gregor Cairns is an exobiology student and descendant of one of Terra Nova’s first families. Hopelessly infatuated with a lovely young trader’s daughter, he is unaware that his research partner, Elizabeth, has fallen in love with him. Together, Gregor and Elizabeth confront the great work his family began three centuries earlier—to rediscover the secret of interstellar travel. “MacLeod handles the strands of the plot deftly, weaving one beautifully realized world with the other and highlighting the parallels between the two. Rarely does a book demand so much of the reader and then deliver.” —Publishers Weekly “One of the more original sf writers at work today.” —Booklist

Moh Kohn is a security mercenary, his smart gun and killer reflexes for hire. Janis Taine is a scientist working on memory-enhancing drugs, fleeing the US/UN's technology cops. Jordan Brown is a teenager in the Christian enclave of Beulah City, dealing in theologically-correct software for the world's fundamentalists-and wants out. In a balkanized twenty-first century, where the "peace process" is deadlier than war, the US/UN's spy satellites have everyone in their sights. But the Watchmaker has other plans, and the lives of Moh, Janis, and Jordan are part of the program. A specter is haunting the fight for space and freedom, the specter of the betrayed revolution that happened before. . . . With The Star Fraction, Ken MacLeod burst onto the SF scene and began the Fall Revolution sequence that continued with The Stone Canal, The Cassini Division, and The Sky Road.

It's after 9/11. After the bombing. After the Iraq war. After 7/7. After the Iran war. After the nukes. After the flu. After the Straits. After Rosyth. In a world just down the road from our own, on-line bloggers vie with old-line political operatives and new-style police to determine just where reality lies. James Travis is a British patriot and a French spy. On the day the Big One hits, Travis and his daughter must strive to make sense of the nuclear bombing of Scotland and the political repercussions of a series of terrorist attacks. With the information war in full swing, the only truth they have is what they're able to see with their own eyes. They know that everything else is--or may be--a lie. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

A bishop is dead. As Detective Inspector Adam Ferguson picks through the rubble of the tiny church, he discovers that it was deliberately bombed. That it's a terrorist act is soon beyond doubt. It's been a long time since anyone saw anything like this. Terrorism is history ...After the Middle East wars and the rising sea levels - after Armageddon and the Flood - came the Great Rejection. The first Enlightenment separated church from state. The Second Enlightenment has separated religion from politics. In this enlightened age there's no persecution, but the millions who still believe and worship are a marginal and mistrusted minority. Now someone is killing them. At first, suspicion falls on atheists more militant than the secular authorities. But when the target list expands to include the godless, it becomes evident that something very old has risen from the ashes. Old and very, very dangerous ...