Showing results by publisher "W. F. Howes Ltd" in Science Fiction

Beneath the sea, over millennia, sentient beings await our final mistakes: soon they will make their move. Seaweed Rising follows an amateur seaweed collector who is convinced that algae are taking over the human race. From a Cornish fishing village to the Spanish coast, up to the blinding glacial landscape of the Arctic, human society falls under the microscope in this genre-bending existential drama.

This web of characters struggle, both individually and collectively, through a time of unprecedented, escalating change. Beginning in 2016, Arne Bakke witnesses the historic devastation of that summer's bushfires across the ancient wilderness of Tasmania. Elsewhere, Londoner Evie Weatherall witnesses extreme climate events in her travels. They each see a dangerous future forming. When their paths collide in Melbourne, Australia, they and their group of close friends are set on course to witness and struggle together against the coming century, an age of great individual and planetary loss.

Four students discover a manuscript, The Book of Skulls, which reveals the existence of a sect, now living in the Arizona desert, whose members can offer immortality to those who can complete its initiation rite. To their surprise, they discover that the sect exists, and is willing to accept them as acolytes. But for each group of four who enter the rite, two must die in order for the others to succeed.

Sector General is an enormous hospital based far out on the Galactic Rim. No other hospital on or off the Earth encounters the wildly diverse problems created by the hundreds of different alien life forms that turn up at Sector General for treatment. Being a doctor, human or otherwise, in this establishment requires a degree of adaptability Hippocrates never imagined. The staff are used to big problems–but can they heal a 900-mile-long carpet of flesh?

Simone is one of the Glitterati, the elite living lives of luxury and leisure. Slave to the ever-changing tides—and brutal judgements—of fashion, he is immaculate. To be anything else is to be unfashionable, and no one wants to be unfashionable, or even worse, ugly. When Simone accidentally starts a new fashion with a nosebleed at a party, another Glitterati takes the credit. Soon their rivalry threatens to raze their opulent utopia to the ground, as no one knows how to be vicious like the beautiful ones.

Cornwall, 1817. Napoleon has crushed the Duke of Wellington at the Battle of Waterloo, and his ex-wife, Josephine, presides over French-occupied England. Cornwall erupts into open rebellion, and young heiress Hester escapes with Crow, Wellington's former intelligence officer. Together, they become embroiled in a web of treachery and espionage as plans are laid to free Wellington from captivity and lead an uprising against the French occupation.

When Robert (or Kidder, as his best friend calls him) decides to impress at a job interview by making up a son, he discovers that maintaining the lie is far harder than he thought - so he invents a story that 'Brodie' has been kidnapped. After all, it's not like they're going to find the fake boy. But a few weeks later, Kidder receives a call to collect his nonexistent son from the police station, a boy who looks exactly like the picture he photoshopped....

Two people fall in love. Kevern doesn't know why his father always drew two fingers across his lips when he said a world starting with a J. Ailinn too has grown up in the dark about where she came from. On their first date Kevern kisses the bruises under her eyes. He doesn't ask who hurt her. Hanging over the lives of everyone is a past event shrouded in suspicion, now referred to as What Happened, If It Happened.

Oxford Street burned for three weeks; the Regent's Park camps have been bombed. Lalla, 16, has grown up sheltered from the new reality by her visionary father, Michael Paul. He has promised Lalla and her mother that they will escape. Escape on a ship big enough to save 500 people. Once onboard, as day follows identical day, Lalla's unease grows. Where are they going?

Beauty journalist, and 40-something year old woman, Erica Pells, is tired of feeling invisible and disappearing behind her nematode wrinkles. She’s over the ‘pro-ageing’ articles she is exclusively asked to write (apart from the punny headlines that no one appreciates.) Frankly, she's over most things; getting older, heavy contouring, boring old Wiltshire and her exasperating Mum (who clearly prefers her prodigal brother, Simon).

Ben has no qualms about signing up for the Evergreens project, a controversial new trial. But are the promises of life without aging too good to be true? Sophie has no doubt that they are. And sixty-five years down the line, she gets the chance to find out. With Ben in hospital, unresponsive and aging rapidly before her very eyes, can Sophie uncover the dark secret at the heart of the Evergreens project—and save Ben's life in the process?

The Arrest isn't post-apocalypse. It isn't a dystopia. It isn't a utopia. It's just what happens when much of what we take for granted - cars, guns, computers, and airplanes, for starters - stops working... Before the Arrest, Sandy Duplessis had a reasonably good life as a screenwriter in L.A. An old college friend and writing partner, the charismatic and malicious Peter Todbaum, had become one of the most powerful men in Hollywood. That didn't hurt. Now, post-Arrest, nothing is what it was. Sandy, who calls himself Journeyman, has landed in rural Maine.

Abandoned as a baby on the planet Remota, deep in the seventh solar system, Jake Cutler lives a sheltered life. But all that changes when his home is invaded by ruthless space pirates. Soon Jake is on the run with the suspicious-looking crew of a spaceship called the Dark Horse. Forced to contend with zero-gravity, shipwrecks and black holes, Jake must discover the truth about his past before he is hunted down and caught.

Earth used to be Galaxy Entertainment's most lucrative show. The inhabitants of the Western Galaxy just couldn't get enough of the day-to-day details of the average Earthling's life. But Channel Blue's ratings are flagging and its producers are planning a spectacular finale; the TV show is set to go out with a bang. The trouble is, so will Earth. Only one man can save our planet and he's hardly a likely hero...

The weather has gone crazy and the war has spread to China. Jase, Euan and Murdo are laggers: forced workers in a future Scotland. The laggers are helping to lay a new power line in the Highlands. Ailiss, a young woman from a secret settlement in the frozen hills, is going to strain their loyalties to breaking point - and beyond.

Kit is an 'out', she doesn't want children. Infertility is universal, and she has witnessed the agonies of her friends and sister going through the painful and dangerous fertility treatment, Induction and then struggling to keep their babies, and cannot face going through it herself. But then she meets Thomas, and gradually the idea of a baby becomes more and more important. She and Thomas go through Induction and have a baby girl, Mimi.

In Zombies, the absurdity of both life and death are on full display as the best and brightest of a high school prep school become tragically addicted to the latest drug craze - electric shocks from cardiac defibrillators. Funny, caustic, bizarre, poignant - this story represents everything listeners have come to love and expect from Chuck Palahniuk.

Scientist and dream investigator Artemis is travelling to the distant moon of Oneiros. Her ship, the Chimera has been sent to look for organisms that will help assuage Earth's global warming, but it becomes clear on the journey that there are other disturbing reasons for the mission. Accompanied by dryads – sophisticated AIs with synthetic bodies – nothing is quite as it seems, even desire. Are we just a template of memories and experiences, or is there something that makes us uniquely human?