My name is Ryan Kingston, and I'm a rule follower. I've never been in a fistfight. I always obey the speed limit. I don't get drunk, and I definitely don't pick up random women at bars. Except the night I found out that my whole existence has been a lie. I got drunk. And picked up a stranger. Her name was Queenie, and she was everything I'm not: reckless, impulsive, and chaotic. We did shots and traded secrets. And ended up naked at my place. She left me a thank-you note in the morning and her panties as a parting gift. But no way to contact her. Six weeks later I'm sitting in the first official team meeting of the season, and there she is. I neglected to mention that I'm the goalie for Seattle's NHL team. And Queenie? Turns out she's the general manager's daughter.

Four time Hugo Award winner Vernor Vinge has taken readers to the depths of space and into the far future in his bestselling novels A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky. Now, he has written a science-fiction thriller set in a place and time as exciting and strange as any far-future world: San Diego, California, 2025. Robert Gu is a recovering Alzheimer's patient. The world that he remembers was much as we know it today. Now, as he regains his faculties through a cure developed during the years of his near-fatal decline, he discovers that the world has changed and so has his place in it. He was a world-renowned poet. Now he is seventy-five years old, though by a medical miracle he looks much younger, and he's starting over, for the first time unsure of his poetic gifts. Living with his son's family, he has no choice but to learn how to cope with a new information age in which the virtual and the real are a seamless continuum, layers of reality built on digital views seen by a single person or millions, depending on your choice. But the consensus reality of the digital world is available only if, like his thirteen-year-old granddaughter Miri, you know how to wear your wireless access—through nodes designed into smart clothes—and to see the digital context—through smart contact lenses. With knowledge comes risk. When Robert begins to re-train at Fairmont High, learning with other older people what is second nature to Miri and other teens at school, he unwittingly becomes part of a wide-ranging conspiracy to use technology as a tool for world domination. In a world where every computer chip has Homeland Security built-in, this conspiracy is something that baffles even the most sophisticated security analysts, including Robert's son and daughter-in law, two top people in the U.S. military. And even Miri, in her attempts to protect her grandfather, may be entangled in the plot. As Robert becomes more deeply involved in conspiracy, he is shocked to learn of a radical change planned for the UCSD Geisel Library; all the books there, and worldwide, would cease to physically exist. He and his fellow re-trainees feel compelled to join protests against the change. With forces around the world converging on San Diego, both the conspiracy and the protest climax in a spectacular moment as unique and satisfying as it is unexpected. This is science fiction at its very best, by a master storyteller at his peak. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

This book features the latest advances and future trends in water science and technology. It also discusses the scientific popularization and quantitative resolution of a variety of mysterious properties of water and ice from the perspective of hydrogen-bond cooperativity in response to stimuli such as chemical contamination, electrification, magnetification, mechanical compression, molecular undercoordination, and thermal excitation. Anomalies include the floating of ice, the Hofmeister effect in solutions, regelation of ice, slipperiness of ice, water’s tough skin, the Mpemba paradox, and the floating bridge. It also addresses the superfluidity of microchannels, hydrogen bond potentials, nanodroplet and bubble thermodynamics, quasisolidity and supersolidity, controlling superhydrophobicity–superhydrophilicity transition, and high-pressure ice formation. The target audience for this book includes students, senior scholars, engineers and practitioners in the area of physical chemistry, biology, as well as aqueous and colloid solutions.

Come lie with me and be my love. How Dione Kelley longed to hear those words. But Blake Remington could never speak them to her. An accident had left him unable to walk, and her therapy had made him whole again. She had given him back the strength he needed to be a man—and in so doing robbed him of the chance to see her as a woman. How could she believe his words of love, when she knew they were spoken only out of gratitude?

In The Real North Korea, Lankov substitutes cold, clear analysis for the overheated rhetoric surrounding this opaque police state. Based on vast expertise, this book reveals how average North Koreans live, how their leaders rule, and how both survive