Stephen Baxter

1916: the Western Front. Private Percy Blakeney wakes up. 2015: Madison, Wisconsin. Cop Monica Jansson is exploring the burned-out home of a reclusive (some said mad, others dangerous) scientist when she finds a curious gadget - a box containing some wiring, a three-way switch and a...potato.

Praised as "one of the most inventive writers that science fiction has ever produced" (SF Site), national bestselling author Stephen Baxter presents a new saga of a world that could have become our own.... Ten thousand years ago, a vast and fertile plain existed that linked the British Isles to Europe. Home to a tribe of simple hunter-gatherers, Northland teems with nature's bounty, but is also subject to its whims. Fourteen-year-old Ana calls Northland home, but her world is changing. The air is warming, the ice is melting, and the seas are rising. One day Ana meets a traveler from a far-distant city called Jericho--a town that is protected by a wall. And she starts to imagine the impossible....

An epic wall has been built to keep the sea out. And the history of the world has been changed. A superb alternate history from an SF master.

Cop Monica Jansson is exploring the burned-out home of a reclusive - some said mad, others dangerous - scientist when she finds a curious gadget: a box containing some wiring, a three-way switch and a...potato.

Audiences around the world have been enchanted by James Cameron's visionary Avatar, with its glimpse of the Na'vi on the marvelous world of Pandora. But the movie is not entirely a fantasy; there is a scientific rationale for much of what we saw on the screen, from the possibility of travel to other worlds, to the life forms seen on screen and the ecological and cybernetic concepts that underpin the 'neural networks' in which the Na'vi and their sacred trees are joined, as well as to the mind-linking to the avatars themselves. From popular science journalist and acclaimed science fiction author Stephen Baxter, THE SCIENCE OF AVATAR is a guide to the rigorous fact behind the fiction. It will enhance the readers' enjoyment of the movie experience by drawing them further into its imagined world.

The epic story of one prehistoric girl's bid to change her future and the future of our world. This is alternate history at its most mindblowing.

In FLOOD Baxter drowned the world, in ARK he shows that mankind's future is no less perilous.

The books that launched Stephen Baxter's career; the creation of one of the most astonishingly ambitious universes in SF's history: brought together in one astounding volume.

From Arthur C. Clarke, the brilliant mind that brought us 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Stephen Baxter, one of the most cogent SF writers of his generation, comes a novel of a day, not so far in the future, when the barriers of time and distance have suddenly turned to glass. When a brilliant, driven industrialist harnesses cutting-edge physics to enable people everywhere, at trivial cost, to see one another at all times--around every corner, through every wall--the result is the sudden and complete abolition of human privacy, forever. Then the same technology proves able to look backward in time as well. The Light of Other Days is a story that will change your view of what it is to be human.

From Terry Pratchett's co-author on the Long Earth books comes the ultimate disaster novel - the world is drowning and there is nowhere left on earth to go.

Two of the biggest names in SF together again, with the third of the acclaimed Time's Odyssey sequence

The Firstborn-the mysterious race of aliens who first became known to science fiction fans as the builders of the iconic black monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey-have inhabited legendary master of science fiction Sir Arthur C. Clarke's writing for decades. With Time's Eye and Sunstorm, the first two books in their acclaimed Time Odyssey series, Clarke and his brilliant co-author Stephen Baxter imagined a near-future in which the Firstborn seek to stop the advance of human civilization by employing a technology indistinguishable from magic. Their first act was the Discontinuity, in which Earth was carved into sections from different eras of history, restitched into a patchwork world, and renamed Mir. Mir's inhabitants included such notables as Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, and United Nations peacekeeper Bisesa Dutt. For reasons unknown to her, Bisesa entered into communication with an alien artifact of inscrutable purpose and godlike power-a power that eventually returned her to Earth. There, she played an instrumental role in humanity's race against time to stop a doomsday event: a massive solar storm triggered by the alien Firstborn designed to eradicate all life from the planet. That fate was averted at an inconceivable price. Now, twenty-seven years later, the Firstborn are back. This time, they are pulling no punches: They have sent a "quantum bomb." Speeding toward Earth, it is a device that human scientists can barely comprehend, that cannot be stopped or destroyed-and one that will obliterate Earth. Bisesa's desperate quest for answers sends her first to Mars and then to Mir, which is itself threatened with extinction. The end seems inevitable. But as shocking new insights emerge into the nature of the Firstborn and their chilling plans for mankind, an unexpected ally appears from light-years away.

Stephen Baxter's new series is full of page-turning action, intriguing mystery and awe-inspiring scientific speculation. Full of evocative historical detail and characters who jump of the page this is history lived by people whose future is not yet locked as our past.Navigator is the third of the series, and delves deep into the discovery of America.

This book constitutes a major reappraisal of the late Anglo-Saxon state on the eve of its demise. Its principal focus is the family of Ealdorman Leofwine, which obtained power in Mercia and retained it throughout an extraordinary period of political upheaval between 994 and 1071. In doing so it explores a paradox: that earls were extraordinarily wealthy and powerful yet distinctly insecure. The book contains the first extended treatment of earls' powers in late Anglo-Saxon England and shows that although they wielded considerable military, administrative and political powers, they remained vulnerable to exile and other forms of political punishment including loss of territory. The book also offers a path-breaking analysis of land tenure and the mechanics of royal patronage, and argues that the majority of earls' estates were held from the king on a revocable basis for the duration of their period in office. In order to compensate for such insecurities, earls used lordship and religious patronage to construct local networks of power. The book uses innovative methods for interpreting the representation of lordship in Domesday Book to reconstruct the affinity of the earls of Mercia. It also examines how the house of Leofwine made strategic use of religious patronage to cement local power structures. All this created intense competition between the earls of Mercia and their rivals for power, both at court and in the localities, and the book explores how factional rivalry determined the course of politics, and ultimately the fate of the late Anglo-Saxon state.

The final volume in Baxter's keynote series Destiny's Children.

It begins with the death of the last Roman and ends with the crowning of a king, the birth of a new order.As the centuries between these two events pass, as Britain emerges from the ruins of Roman rule to become a vibrant, rich power in its own right, as invasions ebb and flow and Kings rule and die, a single thread is spun and stretched.A prophecy found in the shadow of Hadrian's crumbling wall, a prophecy preserved by the monks at Lindisfarne. A prophecy remembered, a prophecy handed down.A prophecy that speaks of the cross, of dragons from the north. Of a new world and of a new empire.A prophecy fulfilled in one remarkable year: 1066.CONQUEROR is a fast moving historical thriller that casts a bright light onto a shadowy period of British history and brings it to vibrant life. Steeped in blood and violence this was also a time of artistic endeavour, a time of nation building and law-giving. And it is a time of chance, where history can be shaped by the Weaver ...

A woman gives birth to her child in a village in Northern England, the cold northern edge of the Roman Empire. As she struggles through a painful labour she begins to scream out a series of words in Latin. A language she has never heard before, much less spoken. One of the family recognises the words for what they are.Only later does it become clear that the women has spoken a prophecy. A prophecy that relates to the death of the Emperor Constantine. A prophecy that if enacted will change the fate of the Roman Empire and all of the future beyond it.Stephen Baxter's new series takes ordinary individuals living at history's tipping points and presents them with a prophecy that challenges everything they believe about their world and prompts them to take action that could change it forever.The fourth volume reveals the nature of the prophecies and reveals a battle that has been fought through the ages.

Baxter's ability to combine wildly divergent narrative threads has become a trademark of his writing and has been seen to its best effect in the previous two novels from this sequence. TRANSCENDENT, with its melding of a near future narrative that carries a terrible warning about the post-oil and post-global warming world and a narrative thread that tours the fantastically varied diverse species that mankind has become in the impossibly distant future is an example of Baxter at his best.At once a cautionary tale of what we are capable of destroying and a celbration of what we could become this is the capstone to Baxter's best series to date.In TRANSCENDENT we find out what happened to the children of the Poole brothers (from COALESCENT) and what will happen to mankind.

Two of the biggest names in SF together again; the sequel to the acclaimed Time's Eye.

In the sequel to Time's Eye, a modern-day woman hurtled into the midst of the turmoil stumbles upon a mysterious portal that links back to the Firstborn, omnipotent beings responsible for the upheaval of history and the creators of the notorious black monolith of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Reprint.