Century Rain

Download or read book Century Rain written by Alastair Reynolds and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2006-05-30 with total page 644 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An awe-inspiring novel from the award-winning author of the Revelation Space series... “Century Rain fuses time-travel, hard SF, alternate history, interstellar adventure and noir romance to create a novel of blistering powers and style.”—SF Revu Three hundred years from now, Earth has been rendered uninhabitable due to the technological catastrophe known as the Nanocaust. Archeologist Verity Auger specializes in the exploration of its surviving landscape. Now, her expertise is required for a far greater purpose. Something astonishing has been discovered at the far end of a wormhole: mid-twentieth century Earth, preserved like a fly in amber. Somewhere on this alternate planet is a device capable of destroying both worlds at either end of the wormhole. And Verity must find the device, and the man who plans to activate it, before it is too late—for the past and the future of two worlds…

Download or read book Rain written by Cynthia Barnett and published by Crown. This book was released on 2016-04-05 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rain is elemental, mysterious, precious, destructive. It is the subject of countless poems and paintings; the top of the weather report; the source of the world's water. Yet this is the first book to tell the story of rain. Cynthia Barnett's Rain begins four billion years ago with the torrents that filled the oceans, and builds to the storms of climate change. It weaves together science—the true shape of a raindrop, the mysteries of frog and fish rains—with the human story of our ambition to control rain, from ancient rain dances to the 2,203 miles of levees that attempt to straitjacket the Mississippi River. It offers a glimpse of our "founding forecaster," Thomas Jefferson, who measured every drizzle long before modern meteorology. Two centuries later, rainy skies would help inspire Morrissey’s mopes and Kurt Cobain’s grunge. Rain is also a travelogue, taking readers to Scotland to tell the surprising story of the mackintosh raincoat, and to India, where villagers extract the scent of rain from the monsoon-drenched earth and turn it into perfume. Now, after thousands of years spent praying for rain or worshiping it; burning witches at the stake to stop rain or sacrificing small children to bring it; mocking rain with irrigated agriculture and cities built in floodplains; even trying to blast rain out of the sky with mortars meant for war, humanity has finally managed to change the rain. Only not in ways we intended. As climate change upends rainfall patterns and unleashes increasingly severe storms and drought, Barnett shows rain to be a unifying force in a fractured world. Too much and not nearly enough, rain is a conversation we share, and this is a book for everyone who has ever experienced it.

Download or read book Century Rain written by Alastair Reynolds and published by Orbit. This book was released on 2020-04-21 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Part science fiction thriller, part interstellar adventure, and part noir crime, Century Rain is an astonishing international bestseller of "blistering powers and style" (SF Revu). Three hundred years from now, Earth has been rendered uninhabitable due to the technological catastrophe known as the Nanocaust. Archaeologist Verity Auger specializes in the exploration of its surviving landscape. Now, her expertise is required for a far greater purpose. Something astonishing has been discovered at the far end of a wormhole: a mid-20th-century version of Earth, preserved like a fly in amber. Somewhere on this alternate planet is a device capable of destroying both worlds at either end of the wormhole. And Verity must find the device, and the man who plans to activate it, before it's too late -- for the past and the future of two worlds. Century Rain is a jaw-droppingly good SF thriller, packed with pace, adventure, brilliant storytelling and with twists that will keep you guessing to the end.

Download or read book Forty Signs of Rain written by Kim Stanley Robinson and published by Spectra. This book was released on 2005-07-26 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The bestselling author of the classic Mars trilogy and The Years of Rice and Salt presents a riveting new trilogy of cutting-edge science, international politics, and the real-life ramifications of global warming as they are played out in our nation’s capital—and in the daily lives of those at the center of the action. Hauntingly yet humorously realistic, here is a novel of the near future that is inspired by scientific facts already making headlines. When the Arctic ice pack was first measured in the 1950s, it averaged thirty feet thick in midwinter. By the end of the century it was down to fifteen. One August the ice broke. The next year the breakup started in July. The third year it began in May. That was last year. It’s a muggy summer in Washington, D.C., as Senate environmental staffer Charlie Quibler and his scientist wife, Anna, work to call attention to the growing crisis of global warming. But as these everyday heroes fight to align the awesome forces of nature with the extraordinary march of technology, fate puts an unusual twist on their efforts—one that will place them at the heart of an unavoidable storm.

Download or read book Make It Rain written by Kristine C. Harper and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-06-04 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Weather control. Juxtaposing those two words is enough to raise eyebrows in a world where even the best weather models still fail to nail every forecast, and when the effects of climate change on sea level height, seasonal averages of weather phenomena, and biological behavior are being watched with interest by all, regardless of political or scientific persuasion. But between the late nineteenth century—when the United States first funded an attempt to “shock” rain out of clouds—and the late 1940s, rainmaking (as it had been known) became weather control. And then things got out of control. In Make It Rain, Kristine C. Harper tells the long and somewhat ludicrous history of state-funded attempts to manage, manipulate, and deploy the weather in America. Harper shows that governments from the federal to the local became helplessly captivated by the idea that weather control could promote agriculture, health, industrial output, and economic growth at home, or even be used as a military weapon and diplomatic tool abroad. Clear fog for landing aircraft? There’s a project for that. Gentle rain for strawberries? Let’s do it! Enhanced snowpacks for hydroelectric utilities? Check. The heyday of these weather control programs came during the Cold War, as the atmosphere came to be seen as something to be defended, weaponized, and manipulated. Yet Harper demonstrates that today there are clear implications for our attempts to solve the problems of climate change.

Download or read book Dark Matter written by Sheree R. Thomas and published by Aspect. This book was released on 2004-01-02 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dark Matter is the first and only series to bring together the works of black SF and fantasy writers. The first volume was featured in the "New York Times," which named it a Notable Book of the Year.

Download or read book Planetary written by Warren Ellis and published by . This book was released on 2010-04-23 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Their existence is a secret buried under riddles and conspiracies, their mission as diverse and complex as the universe itself. They are Elijah Snow, Jakita Wagner and The Drummer: Planetary! The last secrets are revealed in this final collection of Planetary adventures as Elijah hatches and executes his masterplan.