"Like Don DeLillo's Underworld, Simon Ings's remarkable new work delivers nothing less than a secret key, a counter-history, of the last sixty years."—Mark Costello, author of Big IfThe Weight of Numbers describes the metamorphosis of three people: Anthony Burden, a mathematical genius destroyed by the beauty of numbers; Saul Cogan, transformed from prankster idealist to trafficker in the poor and dispossessed; and Stacey Chavez, ex-teena...

Post-cyberpunk SF that recalls the darkness of M. John Harrison and the wild visual imagination of China Mieville and Hannu Rajaniemi, HEADLONG felt ahead of the curve when first published and now serves to show just why Simon Ings has remained on the cutting edge of genre fiction.Surgically connected to their swarming robotic workers, architects Christopher and Joanne Yale are turning the moon into a paradise.But now, without warning, the machines have pulled the plug and ...

**An astronaut returns to Earth after a 10-year mission to find a utopian society he hardly recognizes in this classic science fiction novel by the author of Solaris.“[Lem’s] marvelous, absorbing and often hilarious books make our weary universe seem pale and undistinguished by comparison.” —The Washington Post**Stanisław Lem’s Return from the Stars recounts the experiences of Hal Bregg, an astronaut who returns from an exploratory mission that la...

Artificial intelligence in 100 stories.To ready us for the inevitable, here are 100 of the best short stories ever written – most of them by humans – about artificial intelligence. Simon Ings has assembled anthropomorphic cyborgs and invertebrate AIs, thuggish metal lumps and wisps of manufactured intelligence so delicate that if you blink you might miss them in the new overlord of all robot literary compendiums.It's Alive! is about inventors and their creat...

The new novel from Simon Ings is a story that balances on the knife blade of a new technology. Augmented Reality uses computing power to overlay a digital imagined reality over the real world. Whether it be adverts or imagined buildings and imagined people, with Augmented Reality the world is no longer as it appears to you, it is as it is imagined by someone else.Two friends are working at the cutting edge of this technology and when they are offered backing to take the idea and ma...

Simon Ings has written a surreal adventure probing the very fabric of existence, tearing it open to reveal a sometimes horrifying world within. It is a work that will delight any fan of China Mieville.Only a fool would question the strange magics that maintain the cool haven of the City of the Iron Fish in the middle of an inferno of scorching heat and splintered rock, for the well-watered streets of the city hide secrets in their shadows.Thomas Kemp is just such a fool ......

A searing near-future tale about love, loss and loneliness in an incomprehensible world.Humanity has been split into three different species. Mutual incomprehension has fractured the globe. As humans race to be the first of their kind to reach the stars, another Great War looms.For you, that means returning to Yorkshire and the town of your birth, where factories churn out the parts for gigantic spaceships. You're done with the pretensions of the capital an...

An ambitious SF novel that is at once post-cyberpunk and post-modern. Complex, multi-layered, it combines hard science, tarot and images of late 20th-century Europe to make something utterly original. And introduces a memorable new heroine to the genre ...Malise has a problem. She's come downwell to Earth, but years of space combat have ruined her: her muscles have wasted away, her past is a confused torture of events and her brain is wired to addictive military hardware that's ill...

A mysterious box that he cannot open is all that might save Adam's autistic son as they are plunged into a world of old corruptions and new terrors.In PAINKILLERS, Simon Ings deftly teases out his knotted story that, with its many conventional elements, could have run a risk of overfamiliarity: sinister Oriental Triad gangsters, their even more sinister wives, a speedy Hong Kong with its ruthless Brit yuppies and its nightlife ridden with drugs, strange sex and violence. Shooting b...

The Future Is OurselvesThe world is rapidly changing. We surf future-shock every day, as the progress of technology races ever on. Increasingly we are asking: how do we change to live in the world to come?Whether it’s climate change, inundated coastlines and drowned cities; the cramped confines of a tin can hurtling through space to the outer reaches of our Solar System; or the rush of being uploaded into cyberspace, our minds and bodies are going to have t...

An epic story of courage, genius and terrible folly, this is the first history of how the Soviet Union's scientists became both the glory and the laughing stock of the intellectual world.Simon Ings weaves together what happened when a handful of impoverished and underemployed graduates, professors and entrepreneurs, collectors and charlatans, bound themselves to a failing government to create a world superpower. And he shows how Stalin's obsessions derailed a great experiment in 'r...

A fast-moving cyberpunk thriller set in a world of thinking cities, ruthless corporations and mad orbital AIs. A novel that links the groundbreaking works of William Gibson to the new generation of writers such as Charlie Stross and Hannu Rajaniemi.Ajay had a future once, birthing intelligent cities for the Haag Agency. First Delhi, then Milan. But then he is seduced into betraying his employers and finds himself working for a city that wishes to become human.Ajay must stea...