With this extraordinary first volume in what promises to be an epoch-making masterpiece, Neal Stephenson hacks into the secret histories of nations and the private obsessions of men, decrypting with dazzling virtuosity the forces that shaped this century. As an added bonus, the e-book edition of this New York Times bestseller includes an excerpt from Stephenson's new novel, Seveneves.

In 1942, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse—mathematical

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From the acclaimed author of New York 2140 and Red Mars, this NYT bestselling novel tells the story of a future where humanity has populated miraculous new habitats engineered across the solar system--and the one death that triggers a precarious chain of events that could destroy it all. Winner of the Nebula Award for Best Science Fiction Novel The year is 2312. Scientific and technological advances have opened gateways to an extraordinary future....

"Half a century after the Doomsday Battle, the uneasy balance of Dark Forest Deterrence keeps the Trisolaran invaders at bay. Earth enjoys unprecedented prosperity due to the infusion of Trisolaran knowledge. With human science advancing daily and the Trisolarans adopting Earth culture, it seems that the two civilizations will soon be able to co-exist peacefully as equals without the terrible threat of mutually assured annihilation. But the peace...

-- Darwin's Radio “Virus hunter” Christopher Dicken is a man on a mission, following a trail of rumors, government cover-ups, and dead bodies around the globe in search of a mysterious disease that strikes only pregnant women and invariably results in miscarriage. But when Dicken finds what he’s looking for, the answer proves to be stranger—and far deadlier—than he ever could have imagined. Something that has slept in human DNA for millions...

Working as a lowly research assistant at MIT, Matt Fuller is working on a project to measure quantum forces related to time changes in gravity and electromagnetic force, when his calibrator is transformed into a time machine.

The gates have opened the way to thousands of habitable planets, and the land rush has begun. Settlers stream out from humanity's home planets in a vast, poorly controlled flood, landing on a new world. Among them, the Rocinante, haunted by the vast, posthuman network of the protomolecule as they investigate what destroyed the great intergalactic society that built the gates and the protomolecule. But Holden and his crew must also contend with the...

It is the year 12,020 G.E. and Emperor Cleon I sits uneasily on the Imperial throne of Trantor. Here in the great multidomed capital of the Galactic Empire, forty billion people have created a civilization of unimaginable technological and cultural complexity. Yet Cleon knows there are those who would see him fall - those whom he would destroy if only he could read the future. Hari Seldon has come to Trantor to deliver his paper on psychohistory,...

The fledgling Foundation finds itself at the mercy of corrupt warlords rising in the wake of the receding Empire. Mankind's last best hope is faced with an agonizing choice : submit to the barbarians and be overrun, or fight them and be destroyed.

The Foundation, a colony of psychologists, battles for supreme power in the galaxy, while also struggling to preserve all the accumulated knowledge of humankind in The Foundation, a sanctuary created by Hari Seldon.