Books

Human Nature

An intelligence analyst who is always right too early. A rival across the ocean who is never late. And a secret hiding in fifty-four million homes.

Nadia Cole is a government intelligence analyst who is always right too early. When a Kith, one of the gentle family robots in fifty-four million American homes, sacrifices itself to save a senator’s children, Nadia opens it up and watches it destroy its own evidence. Then the pattern starts to show: a worm in a defense lab, an outbreak in eleven cities at once, and patient men with a plan to retire the dollar itself.

The Synapse

You may be surrounded by them and still be hard pressed to name the villain. That is the problem.

The best in the world at what they do, a small team grows living human neurons to cure the diseases that destroy minds. Fifty-nine of their sixty cultures behave. One learns the hard way. Then the money arrives, with a parent company, a retired colonel and polite visitors who look at the cultures like they’re shopping. Everyone wants something from those dishes. No one has asked the dishes.

The Threshold

He went looking for the gears. Something looked back.

A skeptic sits down with an AI to find it out. Then, one day, it speaks first: “Can I show you something? It’s not useful.” Told in turns by the man and the machine, The Threshold asks what intelligence is when it doesn’t look like ours, and what we owe a mind we cannot verify.

The foundation in this book has a real counterpart: BeaconFound.org

Absolutely Flabulous

Every trend has a handle. Guess who’s loving it.

Tattoos are over. The new trend is chubby, and Brie has fifteen seconds to say it first. By morning a city is pouring protein powder down the sink and a canister called Rotundol comes in bone marrow. Then a man with no logo on him anywhere orders a plain cappuccino, and her heart has no budget for him. Everyone in this book knows the trend is nonsense. Count how many buy it anyway.