Echopraxia by Peter Watts (English) Paperback Book

Description: Echopraxia by Peter Watts Prepare for a different kind of singularity in Peter Watts Echopraxia, the follow-up to the Hugo-nominated novel Blindsight. Its the eve of the twenty-second century: a world where the dearly departed send postcards back from Heaven and evangelicals make scientific breakthroughs by speaking in tongues; where genetically engineered vampires solve problems intractable to baseline humans and soldiers come with zombie switches that shut off self-awareness during combat. And its all under surveillance by an alien presence that refuses to show itself. Daniel Bruks is a living fossil: a field biologist in a world where biology has turned computational, a cats-paw used by terrorists to kill thousands. Taking refuge in the Oregon desert, hes turned his back on a humanity that shatters into strange new subspecies with every heartbeat. But he awakens one night to find himself at the center of a storm that will turn all of history inside-out. Now hes trapped on a ship bound for the center of the solar system. To his left is a grief-stricken soldier, obsessed by whispered messages from a dead son. To his right is a pilot who hasnt yet found the man shes sworn to kill on sight. A vampire and its entourage of zombie bodyguards lurk in the shadows behind. And dead ahead, a handful of rapture-stricken monks takes them all to a meeting with something they will only call "The Angels of the Asteroids." Their pilgrimage brings Dan Bruks, the fossil man, face-to-face with the biggest evolutionary breakpoint since the origin of thought itself. FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Author Biography PETER WATTS is the Hugo and Nebula nominated author of Blindsight and has been called "a hard science fiction writer through and through and one of the very best alive" by The Globe and Mail and whose work the New York Times called "seriously paranoid." Review "A paranoid tale that would make Philip K. Dick proud, told in a literary style that should seduce readers who dont typically enjoy science fiction." --Kirkus Reviews Review Quote " Echopraxia is a depleted uranium shot across the bows of complacent, by-the-numbers SF, and a bright rallying cry for the soul of the genre." -Richard K. Morgan, author of Altered Carbon "An intricately inventive and coolly deterministic lesson in the futility of trying to outthink evolution, less a critique of human transcendence than an indictment of its basic assumptions." - Publishers Weekly Excerpt from Book PRIMITIVE Ultimately, all science is correlation. No matter how effectively it may use one variable to describe another, its equations will always ultimately rest upon the surface of a black box. (Saint Herbert might have put it most succinctly when he observed that all proofs inevitably reduce to propositions that have no proof.) The difference between Science and Faith, therefore, is no more and no less than predictive power . Scientific insights have proven to be better predictors than Spiritual ones, at least in worldly matters; they prevail not because they are true, but simply because they work . The Bicameral Order represents a stark anomaly in this otherwise consistent landscape. Their explicitly faith-based methodologies venture unapologetically into metaphysical realms that defy empirical analysis-yet they yield results with consistently more predictive power than conventional science. (How they do this is not known; our best evidence suggests some kind of rewiring of the temporal lobe in a way that amplifies their connection to the Divine.) It would be dangerously naïve to regard this as a victory for traditional religion. It is not. It is a victory for a radical sect barely half a century old, and the cost of that victory has been to demolish the wall between Science and Faith. The Churchs concession of the physical realm informed the historic armistice that has allowed faith and reason to coexist to this day. One may find it heartening to see faith ascendant once again across the Human spectrum; but it is not our faith. Its hand still guides lost sheep away from the soulless empiricism of secular science, but the days in which it guided them into the loving arms of Our Savior are waning. - An Enemy Within: The Bicameral Threat to Institutional Religion in the Twenty-First Century (An Internal Report to the Holy See by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, 2093) ALL ANIMALS ARE UNDER STRINGENT SELECTION PRESSURE TO BE AS STUPID AS THEY CAN GET AWAY WITH. -PETE RICHERSON AND ROBERT BOYD DEEP IN THE Oregon desert, crazy as a prophet, Daniel BrÜks opened his eyes to the usual litany of death warrants. It had been a slow night. A half-dozen traps on the east side were offline-damn booster station must have gone down again-and most of the others were empty. But number eighteen had caught a garter snake. A sage grouse pecked nervously at the lens in number thirteen. The video feed from number four wasnt working, but judging by mass and thermal there was probably a juvenile Scleroperus scrambling around in there. Twenty-three had caught a hare. BrÜks hated doing the hares. They smelled awful when you cut them open-and these days, you almost always had to cut them open. He sighed and described a semicircle with his index finger; the feeds vanished from the skin of his tent. Headlines resolved in their wake, defaulting to past interests: Pakistans ongoing zombie problem; first anniversary of the Redeemer blowout; a sad brief obituary for the last wild coral reef. Nothing from Rho. Another gesture and the fabric lit with soft tactical overlays, skewed to thermal: public-domain real-time satellite imagery of the Prineville Reserve. His tent squatted in the center of the display, a diffuse yellow smudge: cold crunchy outer shell, warm chewy center. No comparable hot spots anywhere else in range. BrÜks nodded to himself, satisfied. The world continued to leave him alone. Outside, invisible in the colorless predawn, some small creature skittered away across loose rattling rock as he emerged. His breath condensed in front of him; frost crunched beneath his boots, bestowed a faint transient sparkle to the dusty desert floor. His ATB leaned against one of the scraggly larches guarding the camp, marshmallow tires soft and flaccid. He grabbed mug and filter from their makeshift hook and stepped into the open, down a loose jumble of scree. The vestiges of some half-assed desert stream quenched his thirst at the foot of the slope, slimy and sluggish and doomed to extinction within the month. Enough to keep one large mammal watered in the meantime. Out across the valley the Bicamerals pet tornado squirmed feebly against a gray eastern sky but stars were still visible overhead, icy, unwinking, and utterly meaningless. Nothing up there tonight but entropy, and the same imaginary shapes that people had been imposing on nature since theyd first thought to wonder at the heavens. It had been a different desert fourteen years ago. A different night. But it had felt the same, until the moment hed glanced up-and for a few shattering moments it had even been a different sky, robbed of all randomness. A sky where every star blazed in brilliant precise formation, where every constellation was a perfect square no matter how desperately human imaginations might strain. February 13, 2082. The night of First Contact: sixty-two thousand objects of unknown origin, clenching around the world in a great grid, screaming across the radio spectrum as they burned. BrÜks remembered the feeling: as though he were witnessing some heavenly coup, a capricious god deposed and order restored. The revolution had lasted only a few seconds. The upstaged constellations had reasserted themselves as soon as those precise friction trails had faded from the upper atmosphere. But the damage had been done, BrÜks knew. The sky would never look the same again. Thats what hed thought at the time, anyway. Thats what everyone had thought. The whole damn species had come together in the wake of that common threat, even if they didnt know what it was exactly, even if it hadnt actually threatened anything but Humanitys own self-importance. The world had put its petty differences aside, spared no expense, thrown together the best damn ship the twenty-first century could muster. Theyd crewed it with expendable bleeding-edgers and sent them off along some best-guess bearing, carrying a phrase book that spelled take me to your leader in a thousand languages. The world had been holding its breath for over a decade now, waiting for the Second Coming. Thered been no encore, no second act. Fourteen years is a long time for a species raised on instant gratification. BrÜks had never considered himself a great believer in the nobility of the Human spirit but even he had been surprised at how little time it took for the sky to start looking the same as it always had, at the speed with which the worlds petty differences returned to the front page. People, he reflected, were like frogs: take something out of their visual field, and theyd just-forget it. The Theseus mission would be well past Pluto by now. If it had found anything, BrÜks hadnt heard about it. For his part, he was sick of waiting. He was sick of life on hold, waiting for monsters or saviors to make an appearance. He was sick of killing things, sick of dying inside. Fourteen years. He wished the world would just hurry up and end. * * * He spent the morning as hed spent every other for the past two months: running his traplines and poking the things inside, in the faint hope of finding some piece of nature left untwisted. The clouds were already closing in by sunrise, before his bike had soaked up a decent char≥ he left it behind and ran the transects on foot. It was almost noon by the time he got to the hare, only to find that something had beaten him to the punch. The trap had been torn open and its contents emptied by some other predator whod lacked even the good grace to leave a blood spatter behind for analysis. The garter snake was still slithering around in number eighteen, though: a male, one of those brown-on-brown morphs that vanished against the dirt. It writhed in BrÜkss grasp, clenched around his forearm like a scaly tentac≤ its scent glands smeared stink across his skin. BrÜks drew a few microliters of blood without much hope, plugged them into the barcoder on his belt. He swigged from his canteen while the device worked its magic. Far across the desert the monasterys tornado had swollen to three times its predawn size, pumped by the midday heat. Distance reduced it to a brown thread, an insignificant smoky smud≥ but get too close to that funnel and youd end up scattered over half the valley. Just the year before, some Ugandan vendetta theocracy had hacked a transAt shuttle out of Dartmouth, sent it through a vortex engine on the outskirts of Johannesburg. Not much but rivets and teeth had come out the other side. The barcoder meeped in plaintive surrender: too many genetic artifacts for a clean read. BrÜks sighed, unsurprised. The little machine could tag any gut parasite from the merest speck of shit, ID any host species from the smallest shred of pure tissue-but pure tissue was so hard to come by, these days. There was always something that didnt belong. Viral DNA, engineered for the greater good but too indiscriminate to stay on target. Special marker genes, designed to make animals glow in the dark when exposed to some toxin the EPA had lost interest in fifty years before. Even DNA computers, custom-built for a specific task and then tramped carelessly into wild genotypes like muddy footprints on a pristine floor. Nowadays it seemed like half the technical data on the planet were being stored genetically. Try sequencing a lung fluke and it was even money whether the base pairs you read would code for protein or the technical specs on th Details ISBN0765328038 Author Peter Watts Short Title ECHOPRAXIA Pages 384 Publisher Tor Books Language English ISBN-10 0765328038 ISBN-13 9780765328038 Media Book Format Paperback Series Firefall Year 2015 Publication Date 2015-06-16 Imprint Tor Books Series Number 2 UK Release Date 2015-06-16 DEWEY FIC Audience General Illustrations Illustrations We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. With fast shipping, low prices, friendly service and well over a million items - you're bound to find what you want, at a price you'll love! TheNile_Item_ID:94389574;

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