Essays on electronic communication, cyberpunk culture, and rants and flames in cyberspace consider subjects such as the magazine Mondo 2000, the typewriter, virtual reality, feminism, comics, and erotica for cybernauts. Includes blurry b&w photos and illustrations, and an interviews with science fictions writers Samuel R. Delaney, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose. Paper edition (unseen), $13.95. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

In Synners, the line between technology and humanity is hopelessly slim. To be a Synner is to join the online hardcore, an outlaw band of hackers, simulation pirates, and reality synthesizers hooked on artificial reality and virtual space. Now you can change yourself to suit the machines - all it costs you is your freedom, and your humanity. Synners shows us a world perilously close to our own. A constant stream of new technology spawns new crime before it hits the streets, and the human mind and the external landscape have fused to the point where any encounter with "reality" is incidental. Equal parts thrill-ride and cautionary tale, this classic novel by the Queen of Cyberpunk offers us a terrifying glimpse into the future of our race. Winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award for best novel, 1992

Athena becomes entangled in an Internet flame war, and enlists her friend Jason to help stop the escalating problems that result.

Deals with computer mediated communication

The stunning second novel from National Book Award finalist Andrew Krivák—“an extraordinarily elegant writer, with a deep awareness of the natural world” (The New York Times Book Review)—tells the heartbreaking, captivating story about a family awaiting the return of their youngest son from the Vietnam War. In a small town in northeastern Pennsylvania, Hannah and her son Bo mourn the loss of the family patriarch, Jozef. They were three generations under one roof; a war-haunted family in a war-torn century. Jozef was conscripted into the Austro-Hungarian army in World War I. His American-born daughter’s husband, Bexhet, an immigrant, fights in World War II—returning to Dardan, Pennsylvania, only to be taken in a hunting accident on Hannah’s family’s land. Finally, Hannah’s younger son, Sam, goes MIA in Vietnam. And so there is only Bo, a quiet man full of sorrow and conviction and a firstborn’s sense of duty. He is left to grieve but also to hope for reunion, to fall in love and create a new life, to embrace the land and work its mountain soil. The Signal Flame is a stirring exploration—the second stand-alone novel in a trilogy that began with the National Book Award finalist The Sojourn—of generations of men and the events that define them, brothers who take different paths, the old European values yielding to new world ways, and the convalescence of memory and war. Beginning shortly after Easter in 1972 and ending on Christmas Eve—as the Vietnam War winds down—this ambitious novel honors the cycles of earth and body, humming with blood and passion, and it confirms as a writer of extraordinary vision and power. Andrew Krivák’s The Signal Flame is “a complex and layered portrait of a time and place, and a family shaped, generation after generation, by the memory of war” (The Boston Globe).

divThe Internet has changed our social spaces, our political and social realities, our use of language, and the way we communicate, all with breathtaking speed. Almost everyone who deals with the Internet and the new world of cyberspace communication at times feels bewildered, dismayed, or even infuriated. In this clear and helpful book, computer communications scholar Laura J. Gurak takes a close look at the critical issues of online communication and discusses how to become literate in the new mass medium of our era. In cyberspace, Gurak shows us, literacy means much more than knowing how to read. Cyberliteracy means being able to sort fact from fiction, to detect extremism from reasonable debate, and to identify gender bias, commercialism, imitation, parody, and other aspects of written language that are problematic in online communication. Active reading skills are essential in cyberspace, where hoaxes abound, advertising masquerades as product information, privacy is often compromised, and web pages and e-mail messages distort the truth. Gurak analyzes the new language of the Internet, explaining how to prepare for its discourse and protect oneself from its hazards. This book will appeal to anyone with an interest in the impact of the Internet on the practices of reading and writing and on our culture in general./DIV

In a sacred circle between the planes, Zelia and Ares are to be united in wedlock. Elementals mix with humans in a ceremony, set to dazzle the eye, but chaos ensues when the fire elementals escape onto the mortal plane and rage unchecked across the southern continent. When their watery and airy cousins join them the delicate balance between the planes is disturbed, and the fabric of magic torn asunder. As time shifts out of sequence and the cycle of the seasons are disrupted, Zelia and Ares must once more combine forces to return order to the land or risk its utter destruction.