在阴霾的天空下,是人命如草芥的废铁镇。而在云霄之上,则是被视为乐土的扎雷姆。废铁城中一位叫艾德的医生,有天在垃圾山上找到一个少女的机械残躯。原来她的脑袋还保持著假死的状态,艾德成功把她救活并为她改名为凯丽,但她已失去了以前的记忆。艾德除了是医生外,原来也是奖金猎人。在缉捕犯人的战斗他清楚知道废铁城的黑暗,所以他希望凯丽能像个普通女孩子般过著幸福的生活。但在一次偶然的机会下,发现凯丽原来懂得已失传的火星古武术「机甲术」。虽然记忆失去,但她身体流著战斗的血,令她不理艾德的反对而登记成为奖金猎人。凯丽的本性其实是很善良的,但她的自傲和好胜为她带来不少麻烦。加上她优秀的机甲术技巧,强大的战斗力为她注定了要不停战斗的命运。随着时间的流逝,凯丽用自己的眼睛观察并用心灵诠释着这个充满绝望的世界,并如同手中的那把大马士革钢刀一样坚韧不拔的生活着……

What's the best way to create artificial intelligence? In 1950, Alan Turing wrote, 'Many people think that a very abstract activity, like the playing of chess, would be best. It can also be maintained that it is best to provide the machine with the best sense organs that money can buy, and then teach it to understand and speak English. This process could follow the normal teaching of a child. Things would be pointed out and named, etc. Again I do not know what the right answer is, but I think both approaches should be tried.' The first approach has been tried many times in both science fiction and reality. In this new novella, at over 30,000 words, his longest work to date, Ted Chiang offers a detailed imagining of how the second approach might work within the contemporary landscape of startup companies, massively-multiplayer online gaming, and open-source software. It's a story of two people and the artificial intelligences they helped create, following them for more than a decade as they deal with the upgrades and obsolescence that are inevitable in the world of software. At the same time, it's an examination of the difference between processing power and intelligence, and of what it means to have a real relationship with an artificial entity.

Spine-tingling and entertaining, The Invisible Man is a science fiction classic–and a penetrating, unflinching look into the heart of human nature. To its author, H. G. Wells, the novel was as compelling as “a good gripping dream.” But to generations of readers, the terrible and evil experiment of the demented scientist, Griffin, has conveyed a chilling nightmare of believable horror. An atmosphere of ever-increasing suspense begins with the arrival of a mysterious stranger at an English village inn and builds relentlessly to the stark terror of a victim pursued by a maniacal invisible man. The result is a masterwork: a dazzling display of the brilliant imagination, psychological insight, and literary craftsmanship that made H. G. Wells one of the most influential writers of his time.

This Hugo and Nebula Award winner tells the sweeping tale of a desert planet called Arrakis, the focus of an intricate power struggle in a byzantine interstellar empire. Dune is one of the most famous science fiction novels ever written, and deservedly so. The setting is elaborate and ornate, the plot labyrinthine, the adventures exciting. (from Amazon.com)

Two months have past since a myriad of alien objects clenched about the Earth, screaming as they burned. The heavens have been silent since--until a derelict space probe hears whispers from a distant comet. Something talks out there: but not to us. Who you do send to meet the alien when the alien doesn't want to meet? You send a linguist with multiple personalities carved surgically into her brain. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees x-rays and tastes ultra- sound, so compromised by grafts and splices he no longer feels his own flesh. You send a pacifist warrior whose career-defining moment was an act of treason. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called vampire, recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. And you send a synthesist — an informational topologist with half his mind gone — as an interface between here and there, a conduit through which the Dead Center might hope to understand the Bleeding Edge. You send them all to the edge of interstellar space, praying you can trust such freaks and retrofits with the fate of a world. You fear they may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find. But you'd give anything for that to be true, if you only knew what was waiting for them...