Walter Jon Williams regularly draws praise for pushing the limits of the science fiction genre. His third novel featuring AR (augmented reality) games designer Dagmar Shaw, The Fourth Wall follows Sean, a washed-up child actor recruited to star in Dagmar's latest movie project. But when people on set start dying, Sean wonders if Dagmar's secretive behavior is hiding a more dangerous game. "Williams and Dagmar fans will rejoice, and it should attract the near-futurists and techno-thriller c...

New Critical Theory surveys contemporary leftist thought while introducing the tenets of this new form of critical theory. Beginning with an exploration of the relationship between Marxism, Habermas, and the politics of identity, William S. Wilkerson and Jeffrey R. Paris present a collection that critiques the globalization of capital. The development of personality appears as subject to socialized standards in an age of global capitalism. Only after scrutinizing the effects of su...

Sexual identity has become an idol in both the culture at large and in the Christian subculture. And yet concepts like "gay" or "straight" are relatively recent developments in human history. We let ourselves be defined by socially constructed notions of sexual identity and sexual orientation--even though these may not be the only or best ways to think about sexuality.Anthropologist Jenell Williams Paris offers a Christian framework for sexual holiness that accounts for complex postmodern ...

Racial injustice, at its core, is the domination of time. Utopia has been one response to this domination. The racially dominated are not free to define what counts as "progress," they are not free from the accumulation of past injustices, and, most importantly, they are not free from the arbitrary organization of work in capitalist labor markets. Racially unjust societies are forms of life where the justifications for how to organize time around life, labor, and leisure are out of the han...

In the world’s most developed democracies, anxiety about the future of democracy is palpable. The tension between moral aspiration and moral despair has reached a point of crisis. Christian realism arose during a similar time of crisis, when Reinhold Niebuhr used the insights of the Christian tradition to interpret the clash between democracy and totalitarianism.Beginning with Robin Lovin’s account of Christian realism as a nuanced blend of theological, moral, and political realisms...

100 ways to get students hooked on math!It happens to the best of us: that one question that’s got you stumped. Or maybe you have the answer, but it’s not all that compelling or convincing. Al Posamentier and his coauthors to the rescue with this handy reference containing fun answers to students’ 100 most frequently asked math questions. Even if you already have the answers, Al’s explanations are certain to keep kids hooked—and that’s what it’s all about.

Walter Jon Williams has received nominations for the Hugo and Nebula Awards, as well as for almost every other major award in science fiction. The expansive tale Deep State follows Dagmar Shaw, who organizes vast, alternate-reality games with millions of players across the globe - all while revolution stirs in the city around her. When her friend offers her a gig of impossibly high stakes, she can't refuse, even if it means placing her own life on the line.

Investigator Vissarion Lom has been summoned to the capital in order to catch a terrorist -- and ordered to report directly to the head of the secret police.A totalitarian state, worn down by an endless war, must be seen to crush home-grown insurgents with an iron fist. But Lom discovers Mirgorod to be more corrupted than he imagined: a murky world of secret police and revolutionaries, cabaret clubs and doomed artists.Lom has been chosen because he is an ou...

In our rapidly-changing world of "social media", everyday people are more and more able to sort themselves into social groups based on finer and finer criteria. In the near future of Robert Charles Wilson's The Affinities, this process is supercharged by new analytic technologies--genetic, brain-mapping, behavioral. To join one of the twenty-two Affinities is to change one's life. It's like family, and more than family. Your fellow members aren't just like you, and they aren't jus...

Welcome to the fractured future, at the dusk of the twenty-first century.Earth has a population of roughly a billion hominids. For the most part, they are happy with their lot. Those who are unhappy have emigrated, joining the swarming densethinker clades that fog the inner solar system with a dust of molecular machinery so thick it obscures the sun.The splintery metaconsciousness of the solar system has largely sworn off its pre-post-human cousins dirtside, but its minds s...

Aristide, a semi-retired computer scientist turned swordsman, is a scholar of the implied spaces, seeking meaning amid the accidents of architecture in a universe where reality itself has been sculpted and designed by superhuman machine intelligence. While exploring the pre-technological world Midgarth, one of four dozen pocket universes created within a series of vast, orbital matrioshka computer arrays, Aristide uncovers a fiendish plot threatening to set off a nightmare scenario, perhap...

Known for her lush, intricate worlds and complex characters, acclaimed author Martha Wells has delighted readers with her extraordinary fantasy novels of daring and wit. With The Wizard Hunters she launched her most ambitious undertaking yet—the return to the beloved world of the Nebula Award-nominated The Death of the Necromancer and The Fall of Ile-Rien. Now the saga continues in a triumph of suspense and imagination.Despite a valiant struggle against s...