"The world's population is soaring, creating overcrowded cities and an economic crisis. And in the UK, the breaking point has arrived. A growing number of people can no longer afford to start families, let alone raise them. But for those desperate to experience parenthood, there is an alternative. For a monthly subscription fee, clients can create a virtual child from scratch who they can access via the metaverse and a VR headset. To launch this new...

Bea's five-year old daughter, Agnes, is slowly wasting away in front of her. The smog and pollution of the City--the over-populated, over-built metropolis where most of the population lives in buildings on top of buildings, where there is no room for parks or plants--is destroying her lungs. If they stay in the City, Agnes will die. Across the country is the Wilderness State, a huge swath of protected land, remote and unwelcoming, a refuge for wildlife...

Edward O. Wilson The future of life: Biodiversity in the New Millennium excellent. A vivid and hopeful journey through the world of biodiversity. Wilson's ideas are seminal to any serious discussion of the relationship between science, nature, and humanity. Peter Raven, Chair, National Research Council, Division of Earth and Life Studies Bottlenecks: From the destruction of natural habitats to the accelerating loss of species, Wilson sets his stage...

Charlton Heston plays a cop in this science-fiction horror story. The setting is New York in the year 2022, teeming with 40 million citizens, most of whom are out of work. Environmental erosion is almost complete and voluntary death is encouraged by government-sponsored clinics. For their food, the people have grown to rely on a wafer-like substance called soylent. As Heston investigates the murder of a magnate in the dictatorial Soylent Company,...

A New York Times Editors' Choice
"Entertaining, phenomenally weird . . . Rat City may well be the world’s first-ever work of socio-biographical-scientific pop history. . . .a freaky romp down a peculiar passage in the history of ideas, full of oddball cameos (Aldous Huxley! Buckminster Fuller!) and some very sharp science writing."—The New York Times
"Facebook, Yik Yak, Twitter, Twitch—each...

On a twenty-second-century Earth where life expectancy has increased to span centuries and robots perform most of society's work, a ragtag ensemble of unlikely heroes join forces to save the frozen living head of an assassinated leading citizen's daughter, who represents humanity's only protection against a genocide plot by wealthy immortals.

"It was the strangest of experiments. What began as a utopian environment, where mice had sumptuous accommodations, all the food and water they could want, and were free from disease and predation, turned into a mouse hell. Science writer and animal behaviorist Lee Alan Dugatkin reintroduces readers to the bizarre and compelling work of rodent researcher John Bumpass Calhoun. In this enthralling tale of Calhoun and his work, Dugatkin shows how an...