It’s the year 2307. For 250 years, the Great Division has held firm—an impenetrable wall made of frozen light that separates two radically different worlds. In the Kingdom, loved-based emotion is seen as weak and disgusting. Its citizens, transformed by a brain-altering process called PowerTurn, wield sharpened intellect and unbridled ambition, stripped of emotional attachment and unchecked by discipline. On the other side is the PLD, where the Full-Merge process has fused heart and mind i...

The term "Artificial Intelligence" has been around since the 1950s, but a lot has changed since then. Today, AI is referenced in the news, books, movies, and TV shows, and the exact definition is often misinterpreted. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning For Dummies provides a clear introduction to AI and how it’s being used today. Inside, you’ll get a clear overview of the technology, the common misconceptions surrounding it, and a fascinating look at its applications in everythin...

It’s San Francisco, 1928, and Sam Spade is a wisecracking, womanising Private Investigator. Missing husbands and unfaithful wives are his usual stock-in-trade, but when the beautifully distressed Miss Wonderley calls he gets involved in a dangerous caper most people would run a mile from. Miss Wonderley asks Sam’s partner, Miles Archer, to shadow Floyd Thursby, whom she maintains has kidnapped her sister. But then Archer is shot dead, and Miss Wonderley’s story turns out to be a lie – just...

A collection of seven ingenious full-cast thrillers and crime dramas by Rod BeachamActor, dramatist and founding member of Laurence Olivier’s National Theatre, Rod Beacham wrote over 15 plays for BBC Radio. This collection comprises seven crime dramas first broadcast on Radio 4’s ‘Saturday Night Theatre’ strand between 1980 and 1987, ranging in tone from tense whodunnits to light-hearted comedy thrillers.The Inter-City Contract – A...

Did you know that your actions during pregnancy impact your child's health after birth and into adulthood? That what you eat, how much you exercise, your stress level, and your immediate environment are all key factors in determining your baby's predisposition to such conditions as heart disease, obesity, diabetes, stroke, cancer, even depression? Based on more than thirty years of rigorous scientific research, Dr. Nathanielsz's The Prenatal Prescription explains why this is so an...

A huge international corporation has developed a facility along the Juan de Fuca Ridge at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean to exploit geothermal power. They send a bio-engineered crew—people who have been altered to withstand the pressure and breathe the seawater—down to live and work in this weird, fertile undersea darkness.Unfortunately the only people suitable for long-term employment in these experimental power stations are crazy, some of them in unpleasant ways. How many of the...

This is the way the world ends:A nuclear strike on a deep sea vent. The target was an ancient microbe—voracious enough to drive the whole biosphere to extinction—and a handful of amphibious humans called rifters who'd inadvertently released it from three billion years of solitary confinement.The resulting tsunami killed millions. It's not as through there was a choice: saving the world excuses almost any degree of collateral damage.Unless, of course, you miss the ta...

The Thin Man introduces Nick and Nora Charles, New York’s coolest crime-solving couple.Nick retired from detecting after his wife inherited a tidy sum, but six years later, a pretty blonde spies him at a speakeasy and asks for his help finding her father, an eccentric inventor who was once Nick’s client.Nick can no more resist the case than a morning cocktail or a good fight, and soon he and Nora are caught in a complicated web of confused identiti...

Paul Madvig was a cheerfully corrupt ward heeler who aspired to something better: the daughter of Senator Ralph Bancroft Henry, the heiress to a dynasty of political purebreds. Did he want her badly enough to commit murder? And if Madvig was innocent, which of his dozens of enemies was doing an awfully good job of framing him? Dashiell Hammett's tour de force of detective fiction combines an airtight plot, authentically venal characters, and writing of telegraphic crispness.A one-t...

It's 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 it's all under surveillance by an alien presence. Daniel Bruks is a field biologist in a world where biology has turned computational. He's turned his back on humanity, but awakens one night to find himself at the center of a...

The Continental Op is a short, squat, and utterly unsentimental tank of a private detective. Miss Gabrielle Dain Leggett is young, wealthy, and a devotee of morphine and religious cults. She has an unfortunate effect on the people around her: they have a habit of dying violently. Is Gabrielle the victim of a family curse? Or is the truth about her weirder and infinitely more dangerous? The Dain Curse is one of the Continental Op's most bizarre cases and a tautly crafted masterpiec...

How do you stage a mutiny when you’re only awake one day in a million? How do you conspire when your tiny handful of potential allies changes with each job shift? How do you engage an enemy that never sleeps, that sees through your eyes and hears through your ears, and relentlessly, honestly, only wants what’s best for you? Trapped aboard the starship Eriophora, Sunday Ahzmundin is about to discover the components of any successful revolution: conspiracy, code―and unavoidable casu...