In a new world of digital beings, where humans have chosen to be forever digitized, have selected renewable robotic bodies, or remain flesh on Earth, a devastating event puts the Fleshers in danger from beings that can reshape subatomic particles and transcend time.
Transformed into an electronic code, a Copy must discover an alternate way out, back into its real body, because the original avenue of escape has been cut off by the human version from which its was originally copied. Original.
Earth is threatened by the invasion of an interstellar research probe gone mad, in a study of the complex interactions--and their ramifications--between human passions and the inflexible equations of science.
Vividly imagined, stunningly prophetic, and epic in scope, The Diamond Age is a major novel from one of the most visionary writers of our time Decades into our future, a stone’s throw from the ancient city of Shanghai, a brilliant nanotechnologist named John Percival Hackworth has just broken the rigorous moral code of his tribe, the powerful neo-Victorians. He's made an illicit copy of a state-of-the-art interactive device called A Young Ladys Illustrated Primer Commissioned by an eccentric duke for his grandchild, stolen for Hackworth's own daughter, the Primer’s purpose is to educate and raise a girl capable of thinking for herself. It performs its function superbly. Unfortunately for Hackworth, his smuggled copy has fallen into the wrong hands. Young Nell and her brother Harv are thetes—members of the poor, tribeless class. Neglected by their mother, Harv looks after Nell. When he and his gang waylay a certain neo-Victorian—John Percival Hackworth—in the seamy streets of their neighborhood, Harv brings Nell something special: the Primer. Following the discovery of his crime, Hackworth begins an odyssey of his own. Expelled from the neo-Victorian paradise, squeezed by agents of Protocol Enforcement on one side and a Mandarin underworld crime lord on the other, he searches for an elusive figure known as the Alchemist. His quest and Nell’s will ultimately lead them to another seeker whose fate is bound up with the Primer—a woman who holds the key to a vast, subversive information network that is destined to decode and reprogram the future of humanity.
Dethroned cult leader Lot Apollinario and his companions have left the sky-city of Silk with a mission. They aim to find the Chenzeme--the mysterious race that annihilated most sentient life in the galaxy many thousands of millennia ago--whose automated weapons still destroy all they meet. Yet life beyond the known fringes of "civilized" space is a strange and wild thing, and the heroes are unprepared for the wonders--and horrors--that wait in the vastness.
