The definitive novel of today’s Silicon Valley, After On flash-captures our cultural and technological moment with up-to-the-instant savvy. Matters of privacy and government intrusion, post-Tinder romance, nihilistic terrorism, artificial consciousness, synthetic biology, and much more are tackled with authority and brash playfulness by New York Times bestselling author Rob Reid.Meet Phluttr—a diabolically addictive new social network and a villai...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERLow-level entertainment lawyer Nick Carter thinks it’s a prank, not an alien encounter, when a redheaded mullah and a curvaceous nun show up at his office. But Frampton and Carly are highly advanced (if bumbling) extraterrestrials. The entire cosmos, they tell him, has been hopelessly hooked on American pop songs ever since “Year Zero” (1977 to us), resulting in the biggest copyright violation since the Big Bang and bankrupting the...

Home to Chicago's Polish Village, impressive examples of architecture, and the legendary Olson Waterfall, Avondale is often called "the neighborhood that built Chicago." Images of America: Avondale and Chicago's Polish Village sheds light on the little known history of the community, including its fascinating industrial past. From its beginnings as a sleepy subdivision started by a Michigan senator, it became a cultural mecca for Chicago's Polish community, playing a crucial role in Poland...

Reaching Reluctant Young Readers features 150 middle-grade books. Each profiled title has the potential to hook the reluctant reader and lure them to read the entire book. To specifically encourage elementary and middle-school-age reluctant children to read, there is first a pitch to get the reader’s attention. That is followed by a short reading passage to “set the hook” and encourage the young person to read the rest of the book on their own. Further, the book contains several hundred ad...

CockroachDB is the distributed SQL database that handles the demands of today's data-driven applications. The second edition of this popular hands-on guide shows software developers, architects, and DevOps/SRE teams how to use CockroachDB for applications that scale elastically and provide seamless delivery for end users while remaining indestructible.Data professionals will learn how to migrate existing applications to CockroachDB's performant, cloud-native data architecture. You'...

Get a practical introduction to CockroachDB. This book starts with installation and foundational concepts and takes you through to creating clusters that are ready for production environments. You will learn how to create, optimize, and operate CockroarchDB clusters in single and multi-region environments. You will encounter anti-patterns to avoid, as well as testing techniques for integration and load testing.The book explains why CockroachDB exists, goes over its major benefits, ...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERAn alien advance party was suddenly nosing around my planet.Worse, they were lawyering up. . . .In the hilarious tradition of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Rob Reid takes you on a headlong journey through the outer reaches of the universe—and the inner workings of our absurdly dysfunctional music industry.Low-level entertainment lawyer Nick Carter thinks it’s a prank, not an...

The definitive novel of today’s Silicon Valley, After On flash-captures our cultural and technological moment with up-to-the-instant savvy. Matters of privacy and government intrusion, post-Tinder romance, nihilistic terrorism, artificial consciousness, synthetic biology, and much more are tackled with authority and brash playfulness by New York Times bestselling author Rob Reid.Meet Phluttr—a diabolically addictive new social network and a villai...

In a dystopian world ravaged by war and environmental collapse, one man fights history to discover the truth about his wife and child. After decades of war, the brutal Tathadann Party restored order to shattered Eitan City by outlawing the past and rewriting history. Memory is a commodity - bought and sold, and experienced like a drug. Henraek works as a Tathadann memory thief, draining citizens' memories. Everything changes when Henraek harvests a memory of his own wife's death, in the hi...

The essential resource for anyone who reads, writes, watches, or studies science fiction.Men have walked on the Moon. Siri and Alexa manage—at least often enough to be helpful—to make sense of the things we say. Biologists have decoded DNA, and doctors have begun to tailor treatments to suit our individual genetic make-ups. In short: science and tech happen.But faster-than-light travel? Time travel? Telepathy? A six million dollar—as adjusted, of course, for inflation—man? ...

When out-of-shape IT technician Roen wakes up and starts hearing voices in his head, he naturally assumes he’s losing it.He isn’t.As of last night, he has a passenger in his brain—an ancient alien life-form called Tao, whose race crash-landed on Earth before the first fish crawled out of the oceans. Over the millennia his people have trained human heroes to be great leaders, to advance our species at a rate far beyond what it would have achieved on its own....

Brutal murders don’t happen often in NowZo and City Detective Mac MacHenry is puzzled when Darmes national security interferes with the autopsy of a dead girl. It’s not MacHenry’s jurisdiction, but the outraged Medical Examiner asks her to dig deeper. Mac’s paranoia grows as she follows a trail into the crumbling ruins of the Decayed Zone and discovers a mysterious medical facility, a group of fundamentalist outcasts, and a secret that could change the world.