Send My Love and a Molotov Cocktail! (57 page)

Geek Mafia: Black Hat Blues

Rick Dakan

ISBN: 978-1-60486-088-7

272 pages $17.95

What do you call 1000 hackers assembled into one hotel for the weekend? A menace to society? Trouble waiting to happen? They call it a computer security conference, or really, a Hacker Con. A place for hackers, security experts, penetration testers, and tech geeks of all stripes to gather and discuss the latest hack, exploits, and gossip. For Paul, Chloe, and their Crew of con artist vigilantes, it's the perfect hunting ground for their most ambitious plans yet.

After a year of undercover recruiting at hacker cons all over the country, Chloe and Paul have assembled a new Crew of elite hackers, driven anarchist activists, and seductive impersonators. Under the cover of one of the Washington DC's biggest and most prestigious hacker events, they're going up against power house lobbyists, black hat hackers, and even the U.S. Congress in order to take down their most challenging, and most deserving target yet. The stakes have never been higher for them, and who knows if their new recruits are up to the immense challenge of undermining “homeland security” for the greater good.

Inspired by years of author Rick Dakan's research in the hacker community,
Geek Mafia: Black Hat Blues
opens a new, self-contained chapter in the techno-thriller series.

“Filled with charming geek humor, thoroughly likable characters, and a relentless plot … ” —
Cory Doctorow, co-editor of
BoingBoing,
on the Geek Mafia books”

“A first rate example of geek fiction getting it right.
Black Hat Blues
gives new meaning to the term ‘hacker con'—you won't want to put it down.” —
Heidi Potter, Shmoocon organizer

“Rick Dakan is one of the few fiction authors working today who tries to understand hacker culture not as a sideshow or scare tactic, but as a way of living a life. His words ring with honest research.” —
Jason Scott, director of
BBS: The Documentary

The Lucky Strike

Kim Stanley Robinson

ISBN: 978-1-60486-085-6

128 pages $12.00

Combining dazzling speculation with a profoundly humanist vision, Kim Stanley Robinson is known as not only the most literary but also the most progressive (read “radical”) of today's top rank SF authors. His bestselling Mars Trilogy tells the epic story of the future colonization of the red planet, and the revolution that inevitably follows. The Years of Rice and Salt is based on a devastatingly simple idea: If the medieval plague had wiped out all of Europe, what would our world look like today? His latest novel,
Galileo's Dream,
is a stunning combination of historical drama and far-flung space opera, in which the ten dimensions of the universe itself are rewoven to ensnare history's most notorious torturers.

The Lucky Strike, the classic and controversial story Robinson has chosen for PM's new Outspoken Authors series, begins on a lonely Pacific island, where a crew of untested men are about to take off in an untried aircraft with a deadly payload that will change our world forever. Until something goes wonderfully wrong …

Plus: A Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions, in which Robinson dramatically deconstructs “alternate history” to explore what might have been if things had gone differently over Hiroshima that day. As with all Outspoken Author books, there is a deep interview and autobiography: at length, in-depth, no-holds-barred and all-bets off: an extended tour though the mind and work, the history and politics of our Outspoken Author. Surprises are promised.

“The foremost writer of literary utopias.” —
Time

“The best nature writer in the U.S. today also happens to write science fiction.”
— The Ends of the Earth

“It's no coincidence that one of our most visionary science fiction writers is also a profoundly good nature writer.” —
Los Angeles Times

“If I had to choose one writer whose work will set the standard for science fiction in the future, it would be Kim Stanley Robinson.” —
The New York Times

Byzantium Endures: The First Volume of the Colonel Pyat Quartet

Michael Moorcock with an introduction by Alan Wall

ISBN: 978-1-60486-491-5

400 pages $22.00

Meet Maxim Arturovitch Pyatnitski, also known as Pyat. Tsarist rebel, Nazi thug, continental conman, and reactionary counterspy: the dark and dangerous anti-hero of Michael Moorcock's most controversial work.

Published in 1981 to great critical acclaim—then condemned to the shadows and unavailable in the U.S. for thirty years—
Byzantium Endures,
the first of the Pyat Quartet, is not a book for the faint-hearted. It's the story of a cocaine addict, sexual adventurer, and obsessive anti-Semite whose epic journey from Leningrad to London connects him with scoundrels and heroes from Trotsky to Makhno, and whose career echoes that of the 20th century's descent into Fascism and total war.

This is Moorcock at his audacious, iconoclastic best: a grand sweeping overview of the events of the last century, as revealed in the secret journals of modern literature's most proudly unredeemable outlaw. This authoritative U.S. edition presents the author's final cut, restoring previously forbidden passages and deleted scenes.

“What is extraordinary about this novel … is the largeness of the design. Moorcock has the bravura of a nineteeth-century novelist: he takes risks, he uses fiction as if it were a divining rod for the age's most significant concerns. Here, in
Byzantium Endures,
he has taken possession of the early twentieth century, of a strange, dead civilization and recast them in a form which is highly charged without ceasing to be credible.”
— Peter Ackroyd,
Sunday Times

“A tour de force, and an extraordinary one. Mr. Moorcock has created in Pyatnitski a wholly sympathetic and highly complicated rogue … There is much vigorous action here, along with a depth and an intellectuality, and humor and color and wit as well.”—
The New Yorker

“Clearly the foundation on which a gigantic literary edifice will, in due course, be erected. While others build fictional molehills, Mr. Moorcock makes plans for great shimmering pyramids. But the footings of this particular edifice are intriguing and audacious enough to leave one hungry for more.”
— John Naughton,
Listener