UPDATE: Now coming to Manchester Comiccon 2022! ★★★★★ "whether you're into Douglas Adams or Isaac Asimov or Robert Heinlein, there's something in here for you." Who Built The Humans? is a novel length collection of mindbending short stories, some of which come together to form their own novellas inside the book. At 125,000 words, it's a multiverse in the palm of your hand. Meet Lax Morales TV personality, founder of Virtualism, and possibly an alien spider from an alternate reality. His story starts with the Swamphenge UFO crash and ends with a teenager called Darlene luring him to the swamps to kill him, because she thinks he killed her sister. In what could be his final moments, Lax has to convince Darlene that she's wrong, whilst fighting off the murderous psychic influence of the horrifying greymen waiting across the water. Nori Furukawa Dubbed 'Spooky Nori' by his peers, this eccentric professor has just announced to the world that he has invented time travel. His plan? To lure real time travellers back from the future so he can capture them and steal their tech. Lucy An intelligent afterlife machine trapped on a parallel Earth. In her timeline humans are long extinct, and it is her life's mission to drag them back from the abyss, even as the universe itself tries to stop her. T'Kxa A reptilian archaeologist on a secretive final mission, T'kxa is exploring one of the last 1000 planets in the universe. She's searching for evidence of the 'ancient ones', an enigmatic race of technologically advanced beings who could stop the stars from dying. T'Kxa's people don't believe in supernovas, but they are about start believing if she can't find what she's looking for. What she doesn't know is that she's looking in the wrong place. The 'ancient ones' are closer than she thinks. Tin foil Tim The world's bestselling 'proberotica' novelist, Tin foil Tim left his office job to pursue a life writing steamy romances about that time he was abducted by aliens. What the world doesn't know yet is that the stories are true. A multiverse in the palm of your hand. WBTH soars from mindbending Science Fiction to delirious comedy at breakneck speeds, bringing the reader along for a ride that seamlessly combines time travel with simulation theory, immortality cults with alien abduction, and squid-like alien overlords with jokes about the dark future we might be hurtling towards. Science Fiction just got weirder. Who Built The Humans? represents a new sub-genre of science fiction. It's a 'Novelthology' guaranteed to get you hooked into Carter's growing multiverse. Each of its 11 universes can be enjoyed individually, or as parts to a greater whole. This is a standalone book, but shares some characters and locations with the upcoming HOLOGRAM KEBAB and THE STEPHANIE GLITCH More reviews (Goodreads) ★★★★★ "Carter writes like a madman and that is truly the only way these stories could have been written. Just like the scribblings of a mad genius" ★★★★★ "Alien architects, infant gods, and your run-of-the-mill tinfoil-hat conspiracy theorists are just a few of the people you'll meet within these 47 stories [...] The content aside, the thing I love most about Who Built The Humans? is the writing style. The cadence of the story telling is absolutely stunning" Try Who Built The Humans? today. It might just become your next favorite book. check out @whobuiltthehumans on instagram for author updates, archived radio interviews and news about new books so far featured on AllFM, North Manchester radio, and others

A penetrating take on how our planet would respond without the relentless pressure of the human presence

Winner of the Hugo Award! In A Psalm for the Wild-Built, bestselling Becky Chambers's delightful new Monk and Robot series, gives us hope for the future. It's been centuries since the robots of Panga gained self-awareness and laid down their tools; centuries since they wandered, en masse, into the wilderness, never to be seen again; centuries since they faded into myth and urban legend. One day, the life of a tea monk is upended by the arrival of a robot, there to honor the old promise of checking in. The robot cannot go back until the question of "what do people need?" is answered. But the answer to that question depends on who you ask, and how. They're going to need to ask it a lot. Becky Chambers's new series asks: in a world where people have what they want, does having more matter? At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

“If Sapiens was a testament to human sophistication, this history of failure cheerfully reminds us that humans are mostly idiots.” —Greg Jenner, author of A Million Years in a Day Now an International Bestseller A Toronto Star–Bestselling Book of the Year Modern humans have come a long way in the seventy thousand years they’ve walked the earth. Art, science, culture, trade—on the evolutionary food chain, we’re true winners. But it hasn’t always been smooth sailing, and sometimes—just occasionally—we’ve managed to truly f*ck things up. Weaving together history, science, politics and pop culture, Humans offers a panoramic exploration of humankind in all its glory, or lack thereof. From Lucy, our first ancestor, who fell out of a tree and died, to General Zhou Shou of China, who stored gunpowder in his palace before a lantern festival, to the Austrian army attacking itself one drunken night, to the most spectacular fails of the present day, Humans reveals how even the most mundane mistakes can shift the course of civilization as we know it. Lively, wry and brimming with brilliant insight, this unique compendium offers a fresh take on world history and is one of the most entertaining reads of the year. “It’s hard to imagine someone other than Phillips pulling off a 250+ page roast of mankind, but his perfect blend of brilliance and goofiness makes it a joy to read.” —Buzzfeed “With the delicate touch of a scholar and the laugh-out-loud chops of a comedian, Tom Phillips shows us how our species has been messing things up . . . [for] four million years.” —Steve Brusatte, New York Times–bestselling author

From the co-author of the international bestseller Who Built the Moon? comes this well-researched scientific study of the possibility of a divine creator – or God This book puts the idea of God on trial. Whilst the case has been hotly disputed over recent generations with scientists on one side and theologians on the other, evidence either way has been thin on the ground. Faith - belief without evidence - has been the basis for the world's major religions. Most scientists reject the notion of God because they require factual, empirical evidence in order to accept any proposition as being real. However, new information has become available, which appears to provide hard-nosed evidence of God's existence. Can faith be replaced by understanding, and can scientists formally embrace, once again, the concept of a supreme being as they did in Isaac Newton's day? Nothing less than God's 'blueprint' appears to have been discovered - found by chance by the author while researching the science of the Neolithic (late Stone Age) people of western Europe. The case will be tried taking the evidence step-by-step. You, the reader, are the jury. You must evaluate the evidence as the proceedings develop and, to aid you, there will be a brief summing up at the end of each section.At the close of the book you are asked to make a judgment as to whether the case is proven or not. Does God exist?

UPDATE: Now coming to Manchester Comiccon 2022! ★★★★★ "whether you're into Douglas Adams or Isaac Asimov or Robert Heinlein, there's something in here for you." Who Built The Humans? is a novel length collection of mindbending short stories, some of which come together to form their own novellas inside the book. At 125,000 words, it's a multiverse in the palm of your hand. Meet Lax Morales TV personality, founder of Virtualism, and possibly an alien spider from an alternate reality. His story starts with the Swamphenge UFO crash and ends with a teenager called Darlene luring him to the swamps to kill him, because she thinks he killed her sister. In what could be his final moments, Lax has to convince Darlene that she's wrong, whilst fighting off the murderous psychic influence of the horrifying greymen waiting across the water. Nori Furukawa Dubbed 'Spooky Nori' by his peers, this eccentric professor has just announced to the world that he has invented time travel. His plan? To lure real time travellers back from the future so he can capture them and steal their tech. Lucy An intelligent afterlife machine trapped on a parallel Earth. In her timeline humans are long extinct, and it is her life's mission to drag them back from the abyss, even as the universe itself tries to stop her. T'Kxa A reptilian archaeologist on a secretive final mission, T'kxa is exploring one of the last 1000 planets in the universe. She's searching for evidence of the 'ancient ones', an enigmatic race of technologically advanced beings who could stop the stars from dying. T'Kxa's people don't believe in supernovas, but they are about start believing if she can't find what she's looking for. What she doesn't know is that she's looking in the wrong place. The 'ancient ones' are closer than she thinks. Tin foil Tim The world's bestselling 'proberotica' novelist, Tin foil Tim left his office job to pursue a life writing steamy romances about that time he was abducted by aliens. What the world doesn't know yet is that the stories are true. A multiverse in the palm of your hand. WBTH soars from mindbending Science Fiction to delirious comedy at breakneck speeds, bringing the reader along for a ride that seamlessly combines time travel with simulation theory, immortality cults with alien abduction, and squid-like alien overlords with jokes about the dark future we might be hurtling towards. Science Fiction just got weirder. Who Built The Humans? represents a new sub-genre of science fiction. It's a 'Novelthology' guaranteed to get you hooked into Carter's growing multiverse. Each of its 11 universes can be enjoyed individually, or as parts to a greater whole. This is a standalone book, but shares some characters and locations with the upcoming HOLOGRAM KEBAB and THE STEPHANIE GLITCH More reviews (Goodreads) ★★★★★ "Carter writes like a madman and that is truly the only way these stories could have been written. Just like the scribblings of a mad genius" ★★★★★ "Alien architects, infant gods, and your run-of-the-mill tinfoil-hat conspiracy theorists are just a few of the people you'll meet within these 47 stories [...] The content aside, the thing I love most about Who Built The Humans? is the writing style. The cadence of the story telling is absolutely stunning" Try Who Built The Humans? today. It might just become your next favorite book. check out @whobuiltthehumans on instagram for author updates, archived radio interviews and news about new books so far featured on AllFM, North Manchester radio, and others

As technology races ahead, what will people do better than computers? What hope will there be for us when computers can drive cars better than humans, predict Supreme Court decisions better than legal experts, identify faces, scurry helpfully around offices and factories, even perform some surgeries, all faster, more reliably, and less expensively than people? It’s easy to imagine a nightmare scenario in which computers simply take over most of the tasks that people now get paid to do. While we’ll still need high-level decision makers and computer developers, those tasks won’t keep most working-age people employed or allow their living standard to rise. The unavoidable question—will millions of people lose out, unable to best the machine?—is increasingly dominating business, education, economics, and policy. The bestselling author of Talent Is Overrated explains how the skills the economy values are changing in historic ways. The abilities that will prove most essential to our success are no longer the technical, classroom-taught left-brain skills that economic advances have demanded from workers in the past. Instead, our greatest advantage lies in what we humans are most powerfully driven to do for and with one another, arising from our deepest, most essentially human abilities—empathy, creativity, social sensitivity, storytelling, humor, building relationships, and expressing ourselves with greater power than logic can ever achieve. This is how we create durable value that is not easily replicated by technology—because we’re hardwired to want it from humans. These high-value skills create tremendous competitive advantage—more devoted customers, stronger cultures, breakthrough ideas, and more effective teams. And while many of us regard these abilities as innate traits—“he’s a real people person,” “she’s naturally creative”—it turns out they can all be developed. They’re already being developed in a range of far-sighted organizations, such as: • the Cleveland Clinic, which emphasizes empathy training of doctors and all employees to improve patient outcomes and lower medical costs; • the U.S. Army, which has revolutionized its training to focus on human interaction, leading to stronger teams and greater success in real-world missions; • Stanford Business School, which has overhauled its curriculum to teach interpersonal skills through human-to-human experiences. As technology advances, we shouldn’t focus on beating computers at what they do—we’ll lose that contest. Instead, we must develop our most essential human abilities and teach our kids to value not just technology but also the richness of interpersonal experience. They will be the most valuable people in our world because of it. Colvin proves that to a far greater degree than most of us ever imagined, we already have what it takes to be great.