"Alfred Bester was one of the handful of writers who invented modern science fiction." Dazzling, effervescent, sexy, and sardonic, Virtual Unrealities is a historic collection from one of science fiction's true pathbreakers. Make a deal with the Devil-but not without calling your agent. Meet a warlock who practices on Park Avenue and whose potions comply with the Pure Food and Drug Act. Find out why tourists are flocking to a hellish little town in a post-nuclear Kansas. Read about the sweet-natured young man whose phenomenal good luck turns out to be disastrous for the rest of humanity. And nowhere is Bester funnier, speedier, or more audacious than in these seventeen short stories-two of them previously unpublished-that have now been brought together in a single volume for the first time. His stories never stand still a moment."Īlfred Bester took science fiction into hyperdrive, endowing it with a wit, speed, and narrative inventiveness that have inspired two generations of writers. "Dazzlement and enchantment are Bester's methods. Now Nik faces an impossible decision: side with the mages and let humanity die out? Or stand with Jem and the humans-and risk endangering everything he knows and loves?
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A ballerina-turned-soldier by the circumstances of war, Jem is more than just a human-her cybernetic enhancement mods make her faster, smarter, and are the only things that give her a fighting chance against the artificial beings bent on humanity's eradication. Jem is a Runner for the Human Resistance. Outside the dome, unprepared and on the run, Nik finds Jem.
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Not only that, outside the domes a war rages between the last enclaves of free humans and vast machine intelligences. The humans weren't nuked into oblivion-they're still alive. But when confronted by one of his former instructors gone rogue, Nik tumbles into a dark secret. As a cadet in the Mage King's army, Nik has finally found what he always wanted-a purpose. But he's also tasked with a higher calling-to maintain the Veils that protect mage-kind from the hazards of the wastes beyond.
Nikolai is obsessed with artifacts from twentieth-century human life: mage-crafted replica Chuck Taylors on his feet, Schwarzenegger posters on his walls, Beatlemania still alive and well in his head. Safe within domes that protect them from the nuclear wasteland on the other side, the mages have spent the last century putting their lives back together.
The mages have retreated from the world after a madman blew up civilization with weaponized magical technology. Little do they realize that something bigger than either of them, something begun years ago in their youth, is determined to bring them together - to either save the world, or plunge it into a new dark ages.Ī deeply magical, darkly funny examination of life, love, and the apocalypse.
Patricia is a graduate of Eltisley Maze, the hidden academy for the world's magically gifted, and works with a small band of other magicians to secretly repair the world's ever-growing ailments. Laurence is an engineering genius who's working with a group that aims to avert catastrophic breakdown through technological intervention into the changing global climate. After all, the development of magical powers and the invention of a two-second time machine could hardly fail to alarm one's peers and families.īut now they're both adults, living in the hipster mecca San Francisco, and the planet is falling apart around them.
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