They thought they could force her to conform. They were wrong. Inside a dystopian school in the Singularity, the twelve-year-old girl known as One Twenty-Four struggles to survive. Failure to conform means death at the hands of her teacher. Assuming her clone sisters don't kill her first. The Terran Empire has tasked Imperial Marine Lieutenant Grace Tolliver to lead her platoon into the Singularity as a privateer. Her mission: to tear a great bloody strip off their enemies and to take anything that isn't nailed down. The collision of this unlikely pair will change the humanity in ways that no one could predict. If they survive. Author's Note: This novel takes place more than five centuries before the Empire of Bones series and the events unfolding here have implications there.

"Empires do not grow old gracefully. As the edifice of ancient government succumbs to entropy, as civil war reigns, and upstart nations encroach upon the elder government's prerogatives and borders, the result is indeed 'interesting times,' the times of interstellar Huns locked in mortal combat with Imperial storm troopers. The times of The Crash of Empire."--Pg. [4] of cover.

Slavery is back. America, 1962. Having lost a war, America finds itself under Nazi Germany and Japan occupation. A few Jews still live under assumed names. The 'I Ching' is prevalent in San Francisco. Science fiction meets serious ideas in this take on a possible alternate history.

Gender, Nation and State in Modern Japan makes a unique contribution to the international literature on the formation of modern nation–states in its focus on the gendering of the modern Japanese nation-state from the late nineteenth century to the present. References to gender relations are deeply embedded in the historical concepts of nation and nationalism, and in the related symbols, metaphors and arguments. Moreover, the development of the binary opposition between masculinity and femininity and the development of the modern nation-state are processes which occurred simultaneously. They were the product of a shift from a stratified, hereditary class society to a functionally-differentiated social body. This volume includes the work of an international group of scholars from Japan, the United States, Australia and Germany, which in many cases appears in English for the first time. It provides an interdisciplinary perspective on the formation of the modern Japanese nation–state, including comparative perspectives from research on the formation of the modern nation–state in Europe, thus bringing research on Japan into a transnational dialogue. This volume will be of interest in the fields of modern Japanese history, gender studies, political science and comparative studies of nationalism.