Научная Фантастика

Starfish
Starfish

Peter Watts's first novel explores the last mysterious place on earth — the floor of a deep sea rift. Channer Vent is a zone of freezing darkness that belongs to shellfish the size of boulders and crimson worms three meters long. It's the temporary home of the maintenance crew of a geothermal energy plant-a crew made up of the damaged and dysfunctional flotsam of an overpopulated near-future earth. The crew's reluctant leader, basket case Lenie Clarke, can barely survive in the upper world, but she quickly falls under the rift's spell, just as Watts's magical descriptions of it enchant the reader: "Steam never gets a chance to form at three hundred atmospheres, but thermal distortion turns the water into a column of writhing liquid prisms, hotter than molten glass."Watts is investigating monsters. Gigantic deep sea monsters, surgically-altered-from-human monsters, faceless jellied-brain computer monsters-which monsters are human, which are more than human, which are less? Watts keeps the story line stripped down to showcase the theme of dehumanization. The anonymous millions who live along the unstable shore of N'AmPac come under threat (a triggered earthquake, and perhaps a disaster that's slower but even more pitiless) from their own dehumanized creations. But Watts is less interested in whether Lenie can save the dry world as in whether she can save herself. In Starfish, Watts stretches the boundaries of humanity up, down, and sideways to see whether its dimensions reveal anything we'd be proud to be a part of.

Peter Watts

Научная Фантастика
Evolution
Evolution

Evolution is a collection of short stories that work together to form an episodic science fiction novel. It follows 565 million years of human evolution, from shrewlike mammals 65 million years in the past to the ultimate fate of humanity (and its descendants, both biological and non-biological) 500 million years in the future.The primary protagonist in Evolution is evolution itself (although primates as a group constitute another protagonist). The book follows the hero's course as it shapes surviving pre-humans into tree dwellers, remoulds a group that drifts from Africa to a (then much closer) New World on a raft formed out of debris, and confronting others with a terrible dead end as ice clamps down on Antarctica.The stream of DNA runs on elsewhere, where ape-like creatures in North Africa are forced out of their diminishing forests to come across grasslands where their distant descendants will later run joyously. At one point, hominids become sapient, and go on to develop technology, including a universal constructor machine that goes to Mars and multiplies, and in an act of global ecophagy consumes Mars by converting the planet into its descendants. Human extinction (or the extinction of human culture) also occurs in the book, as well as the end of planet Earth and the rebirth of life on another planet. (The extinction-level event that causes the human extinction is, indirectly, an eruption of the volcano Rabaul, coupled with various actions of humans themselves, some of which are only vaguely referred to, but implied to be a form of genetic engineering which removed the ability to reproduce with non-engineered humans.) Also to be found in Evolution are ponderous Romans, sapient dinosaurs, the last of the wild Neanderthals, a primate who witnesses the extinction of the dinosaurs, symbiotic primate-tree relationships, mole people, and primates who live on a Mars-like Earth.

Grey Rollins , Stephen Baxter

Научная Фантастика
Тайна Мастера
Тайна Мастера

По замыслу автора в романе «Тайна Мастера» показано противоборство двух систем — добра и зла. На стороне светлых сил основной персонаж Генрих Штайнер, уроженец немецкой колонии. В начале тридцатых годов двадцатого столетия, проходя службу в советском авиаотряде рядом с секретной германской летной школой, военный летчик Генрих Штайнер будет привлечен местными чекистами в работу по изобличению германских агентов. Затем произойдут события, в результате которых он нелегально покинет Советский Союз и окажется в логове фашистской Германии.А все началось с того, что в юности на территории немецкой колонии Новосаратовка Генрих Штайнер случайно соприкоснулся с тайной своего предка — оружейного мастера Фрица Бича, история, которой началась два века назад в Германии. Мастер, подвергаясь преследованиям тайного ордена, в 1703 году приехал в Санкт-Петербург. Причиной конфликта с орденом была загадочная капсула, принадлежащая Мастеру, которая после его смерти исчезнет. Через много лет поиски капсулы возобновятся потому, что она будет недостающим звеном в решении проблем могущественного ордена.Одновременно на секретной базе в Германии крупные немецкие ученые и инженеры при содействии медиумов работают над проектом «Юпитер». Их цель — создать сверхсовременный летательный аппарат.Генрих Штайнер будет вовлечен в сложные события этой весьма загадочной истории и сумеет внедриться на секретный объект гитлеровской Германии, чтобы выполнить специальное задание советских чекистов.

Николай Михайлович Калифулов

Научная Фантастика