Description: Science fiction award-winner, flesh-eating-bacteria survivor, and somewhat questionably convicted felon Peter Watts returns with his first short story collection since 2013. Including an unpublished work, Watts posits unlimited brain-computer interfaces, the possibility of life existing inside stars, the hacking of human behavior, and ecological collapse. (Also, the healing power of revenge.)
"Peter Watts: Never cheerful. Always brilliant."--John Scalzi, author of the Old Man's War series What if a weaponized water supply reprograms pattern recognition in the brain, provoking violent rage at the sight of the Google logo. Or an accidental hive mind creates a global agenda to resurrect itself in the scant seconds between its emergence and dissolution? A steroidal jump gate-building ship attempts to survive passage through a red-giant sun by hiding inside an ice-giant planet. When something is trying to colonize the sun, humans try to stop it. (Spoiler alert: Nobody comes off very well.) In his newest short fiction, alongside an introduction by Richard K. Morgan, Watts (The Freeze-Frame Revolution) reserves whatever hope he has for whatever comes after humans.
Review Quotes: Advance Praise for Fold Catastrophes
"Peter Watts: Never cheerful. Always brilliant."--John Scalzi, author of the Old Man's War series "Fold Catastrophes is a fully autonomous delivery system for eleven supersaturated scientific truth-bombs, precision-tooled by one of the sharpest thinkers in modern SF."
--Alastair Reynolds, author of Halcyon Years "Fold Catastrophes is fascinating and frightening in equal measure. This is science fiction with an edge as dark and sharp as an obsidian blade, written as if by the flickering light of a data center burning in a wasteland of its own creation."
--Robert Charles Wilson, author of Spin "Peter Watts's fiction weaves the human soul into dark glittering tapestries, studded with black holes and exploding stars. They compel you while challenging all your assumptions. Fold Catastrophes will have readers gasping for breath--both in awe, and from its straight-up gut punch to the emotions."
--L.X. Beckett, author of Dealbreaker
"All the stories are characterized by a fierce intelligence."
--The Pinocchio Theory
"For all [Watts's] exceptional skill in creating alien points of view and bizarre transformations, it's somehow reassuring that he can be just as insightful in dealing with the visceral anxieties and self-doubts that can plague us all."
--Locus Praise for Peter Watts "If science fiction can really be claimed as a literature of ideas, then Watts is without doubt its premier practitioner."
--Richard Morgan, author of Altered Carbon "A new book from crazy genius Watts is always cause for celebration . . . Watts is one of those writers who gets into your brain and remains lodged there like an angry, sentient tumor."
--io9 "Watts displays a gleefully macabre inventiveness combined with scientific rigour."
--Nalo Hopkinson, author of Brown Girl in the Ring "[Watts] asks the questions that the best science fiction writers ask, but that the rest of us may be afraid to answer."
--Chicago Tribune "Watts continues to challenge readers with his imaginative plots and superb storytelling."
--Library Journal "A hard science fiction writer through and through--and one of the very best alive, a peer of writers such as Neal Stephenson, Allen Steele, and the Three Gregs, Benford, Bear and Egan."
--The Globe and Mail "Even when Watts is wrong, he is brilliant."
--Armed and Dangerous