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(0)Richard Powers
42) How to sell
Second Lives takes us on a revelatory journey through the electronic looking glass, investigates one of the most bizarre phenomena of the twenty-first century: virtual lives.
Each week, thirty-five million to fifty million people worldwide abandon reality for virtual worlds. They create a virtual body, work virtual jobs, and make virtual friends and family. And as online communities like SecondLife, EverQuest, and MySpace attract more members,
...In a time when much of the country sees red whenever the subject of gay marriage comes up, Dan Savage—outspoken author of the column Savage Love—makes it personal.
Dan Savage's mother wants him to get married. His boyfriend, Terry, says "no thanks" because he doesn't want to act like a straight person. Their six-year-old son, D.J., says his two dads aren't "allowed" to get married but that he'd like to come to the reception and eat
...54) Bottomland
55) Berserker kill
Long, long ago, two alien races fought a war of extinction. All that is left of either of them are the berserkers: vast, thinking, spacefaring, killer machines whose sole purpose is to destroy all living things. For the first time in all of their history, they have met a life form that has a chance of stopping them. In the cold reaches of space, the berserkers seize a floating laboratory full of human germ-plasm being stored for retrieval and growth
...This hilarious, take-no-prisoners novel about a cynical, sex-obsessed teenager's pining love for an intelligent girl is now a major motion picture from Dimension Films starring Michael Cera.
Youth in Revolt brings us the journals of Nick Twisp, California's most precocious diarist, whose ongoing struggles to make sense out of high school, deal with his divorced parents, and lose his virginity result in his transformation from an unassuming
...57) Pygmy
In 1991, flight attendant Nancy Ludwig checked in to an airport hotel near Detroit. The next morning she was found gagged, raped, and tortured—her throat slit with such rage that she was nearly decapitated. Her husband Arthur never gave up hope that the future would bring enough evidence to close the case. But it was the past that held the clue.
In 1985, fifty-five-year-old Margarette Eby, a music professor, met the same grisly death
...59) Berserker Fury
Before George Lucas' Death Star and before Star Trek's Doomsday Machine came the Berserkers, intelligent, space-faring killing machines whose sole purpose is to destroy all life. The Berserkers have developed a new trick: Berserker units that can pass for human-created androids. They're gambling on the advantage this gives them and massing for an all-out attack on human-held space.
But the humans have developed a trick of their own.
...60) Rogue Berserker
ROGUE: (1) A deceitful, double-dealing evildoer. (2) A fierce elephant or stamodont that has been banished from the herd. (3) Having a peculiarly malevolent or unstable nature. (4) No longer loyal, affiliated, or recognized, and hence not governable or accountable. Erring, apostate. (Galactic Dictionary of the Common Tongue)
Harry Silver has already had a lifetime of trouble from ordinary Berserkers, the automated killing machines
...