Sean Platt

Adrian and Ray Porter have spent their lives battling demons that claw into our world through a thin spot: a hellish and dead place with a black lake at its center, nicknamed "The Gore Point." But as the rifts begin to change and grow for the first time in decades, can they keep the planet from becoming Hell itself?Adrian and his hotshot brother Ray work for Brigade One, in the walled-off city of Fortune on the outskirts of the Gore Point. Like their father before them, it's the Porters' job to protect citizens from the creatures that emerge from rifts opening inside the dead zone. Nobody knows what the Gore Point is or where it came from. It cannot be eradicated. It cannot be closed. The Brigades can only offer triage. Demons have always come through ... and the only solution is to slaughter them when they do. These days, few people die from the spawn that infiltrate Fortune from its rotted middle ... though as children, Ray and Adrian vividly remember watching their father do exactly that. But something has always struck intellectual Adrian as wrong about that day. The thing that killed their father (an enormous red beast called a hellbringer) wasn't supposed to be there. Adrian suspects there's something beneath the simplicity of modern riftfare, but bullheaded, showboating Ray thinks he's crazy. Until one day, when the rifts suddenly and inexplicably change. It starts to look like Hell has been sandbagging to lull us into complacence ... with help from a saboteur on the inside.

Reality bends. People break. The truth bleeds through the margins. What do a suicidal tech bro, a mute ballerina, a trauma-soaked illustrator, and an alien-infected Scoutmaster have in common? They're all just trying to survive stories that won't behave. In this genre-mashing collection of speculative tales, nothing is what it seems, and everything matters more than you think. One moment, you're laughing. The next, you're gutted. Then you're questioning whether any of this is real. It probably isn't. A blind woman confronts the ghost of the man who ruined her life. A grieving father finds a memory in the woods that rewrites everything he thought he knew. A blogger's angry parenting rant collapses reality around his son's Pinewood Derby race. A washed-up writer discovers that the AI finishing his novel might be fixing his life. A group of burned-out creatives builds an art collective in a junkyard and finds redemption in the ruin. Some stories flirt with apocalypse. Others hold your heart in their teeth and smile politely. All of them live in the uncanny space where memory, grief, technology, and identity collide. Darkly comic. Occasionally romantic. Always uncomfortably human. Illustrating Life and Other Stories is Love, Death & Robots by way of Black Mirror, with the character depth of Station Eleven and the lyrical weirdness of Cloud Atlas. These stories are emotional landmines with teeth, heart, and circuit boards. If you've ever laughed at the wrong moment, cried at the right one, or wondered if you're the only glitch in the system, this collection is for you.

Geneticist Jianna Makinde grew up in the shadow of her famous ancestor, Samara, who saved DaVinci's colonists from extinction by the fungal Bloom. But Samara's cure had off-target effects that plague every DaVincian: migraines, seizures, paralysis, and worse. Jianna dreams of fixing Samara's mistakes, but the Council refuses to fund her latest research proposal, thanks to the fearmongering of Guide Willow Evans, head of the Naturalist church. Worse, if anyone discovers she's secretly dating Michelangelo, son of a disgraced geneticist, her father will lose his Council seat. Shortly after a catastrophic radiation storm wipes out the city's power grid, a ship appears in orbit, captained by a cyborg who claims to be Aurelius Hofstadter-the eccentric genius billionaire who built the ships that saved humanity from a dying Earth. Aurelius becomes the city's savior, repairing their infrastructure with mysterious advanced technology and his crew of silent cyborgs. Aurelius wants to free Jianna's intellect: he gives her a lab on his ship and encourages her to break rules like Samara once did. But when he takes Michelangelo as his apprentice, offering unlimited access to forbidden knowledge-robotics, artificial intelligence, quantum mechanics-Jianna fears Michelangelo is dabbling with dangerous technologies that could cost his career, his freedom, even his life. As Aurelius tightens his grip on the city's infrastructure and makes himself indispensable to the desperate Council, Jianna begins to suspect his generosity hides a darker agenda, and Naturalist Guide Evans is the only Council member still standing against him. As ancient secrets surface and factions splinter around faith and fact, Jianna must discover what the immortal billionaire really wants before it's too late. For fans of The Martian, Seveneves, and Raised by Wolves, Divine Blueprint is part one of a mind-bending finale about legacy, faith, and the peril of playing god.

A brotherhood forged in fireWith Hell's king freed, the city of Fortune has been cut off from the world by an impenetrable energetic barrier. Inside, a mental plague has begun to spread outward from the Gore Point, confusing reality and creating a prison that almost nobody can feel or see.Adrian and Ray Porter - once heroes, now pariahs, and two of only a few unaffected - are the last line of defense against the king's plan. But time is running out. A six-day clock is ticking, and with each passing hour, more of Fortune succumbs to the invisible enemy.As the brothers fight to expose the truth and rally resistance, they uncover a shocking secret: the legacy of their father, Eldon Porter, is intertwined with the very fabric of the rift, holding the key to both salvation and destruction.Faced with an impossible choice, the Porters must confront their past and embrace their destiny. The fate of humanity hangs in the balance as they race against time to unleash the power of the anti-rift - a force of pure potential that could rewrite the rules of reality... or obliterate both worlds.Prepare for a heart-stopping conclusion to the Gore Point trilogy, where the lines between good and evil blur, and the fight for survival will determine the fate of two worlds.

From the multiple best-selling author team that brought you Pattern Black and Burnout comes a brand new transcendent mindfuck of a fantasy novel.Two powerful and fierce immortal gods are trapped on an island, endlessly pursuing a Sisyphean task that must be completed each day and is renewed each night. Enemies forced to work together, they sabotage each other, play tricks on each other, and murder each other, only to be resurrected the following day. Yet, despite the daily friction and violence, ultimately, they live in an uneasy balance. Until the day the stranger arrives. Then the balance tips, the pit collapses, and all hell breaks loose.

PLUGGED is a "future history" written by fictional author Sterling Gibson: a Malcolm-Gladwell-esque work of fiction written as if it were nonfiction, exploring the sci-fi world of The Beam.Are We Who We Were?Throughout the 21st Century, our world (at least for those of us inside the NAU) has become increasingly connected. So much so that we really are now thinking as a single fluid organism, changing not just how we live our daily lives, but who we are as a species. In Sterling Gibson's newest thoughtful exploration, one of the NAU's most renowned thinkers explores and illuminates how hyperconnectivity and The Beam have changed us forever.

The end of everything is not what anyone imagined. The unthinkable has happened. The Beam is down. Chaos reigns.A data anomaly has shown up in the East: something strange in place where nothing should xist. It seems to be an entity of unknown origin, actively seeking out a specific cadre of separated people spread across the globe. Can isolated scientist Gillian Rhea - marooned by forces heretofore unknown - find answers in the most unlikely of places: the abandoned research station on the moon, at Nickel Basin?Noah West is desperate to regain power and get The Beam back online, but no one dreamed he'd dare to go as far as he has. Will he unleash hismost dangerous creation upon the remains of the NAU to bring it back under his control ... no matter the damage?But the most pressing question looms above all others: Is there anyone left that can stop him?

Power is in the mind. The mind is in the network.As the NAU's "Shift" approaches, the Directorate and Enterprise parties are doing whatever they can both on-Beam and off- to win the citizen's minds. The Beam itself, however, seems to be evolving.As more and more people become addicted to connectivity, a question arises: Does the Beam serve our minds ... or do our minds serve the Beam?Meanwhile, using politics as cover, an organization is pushing human enhancements further than they were ever meant to go - and maybe more than the struggling NAU with its hyperconnected minds can hope to survive.★★★★★ "Another homerun for Platt and Truant. Usually second books in a series are the weak link -- that didn't happen in The Beam. Just like the first season I got sucked in to this book and told the kids to just feed themselves poptarts and leave mommy alone already so she could read. An amazing series " -- Patricia Eimer★★★★★ "I loved the first season, but this did such a great job of fleshing out the story line that I'm already champing at the bit for the next season." -- BruceIn Baghdad★★★★★ "A real high-tech futuristic political thriller with a great storyline and a cliff-hanger ending that leaves you wanting for more. Can't wait to read season 3." -- beachbaby

Taking Grandpa to the mall wasn't supposed to be a life or death (and after death) situation.Thom Sheldon avoids visiting his aging father as much as he possibly can. Even now that Rick started taking a new experimental drug that seems to be helping his Alzheimer's, it's still an unpredictable and rarely pleasant errand.If Thom could avoid visiting his old man without getting guilt-tripped by his wife or hounded by his own conscience, he would.But today Thoms' wife Carly and son Brendan are along for the ride, and there is no getting out of taking Rick to the mall.No one could have guessed that the zombie apocalypse would start near the food court.Except for Rick.This is how the apocalypse starts ... Dead Zero is a stand alone novel built inside of Platt & Truant's Dead World Trilogy, an intelligent, hard science fiction exploration of the zombie subgenre.