Science fiction thrills collide with explosive political drama in this critically acclaimed tale from renowned writer Brian K. Vaughan and legendary artist Tony Harris--assembled in a single hardcover volume! When a strange accident gives Mitchell Hundred the ability to control machinery, he uses his newfound powers to become the world's first superhero. But the thrill of risking his life simply to help maintain the status quo eventually wears thin, leading Mitch to retire from masked crime-fighting in order to run for mayor of New York City. And that's when the real weirdness begins! Collects the Eisner Award-winning series Ex Machina #1-50 and Ex Machina Special #1-4.

**Exin Ex Machina is a new entry point for the AMARANTHE series--newcomers are welcome** When man and machine are one and the same, there are many crimes but only one sin: psyche-wipe. The secrets it has buried could lead to a civilization's salvation, or to its doom. The Asterion Dominion is at peace with its neighbors and itself. Its citizens enjoy great freedoms and all the luxuries their biosynthetic minds can imagine, design and create. But beneath the idyllic veneer, something is going wrong. People are going wrong, driven to commit inexplicable crimes without motive or purpose. And once imprisoned for those crimes, they simply vanish. Psyche-wiped and dumped in an alley 5 years ago, awakened into a culture where ancestral memories stretch back for millennia, Nika Tescarav's past is a blank canvas. But if whoever erased her did so in the hope of silencing her, they should have tried harder. Someone must speak for the lost. Someone must uncover how and why they became lost. Someone must find the lost. Nika is that someone. ASTERION NOIR 700,000 years ago, the Asterions fled persecution for their pro-synthetic beliefs. In the safe harbor of a distant galaxy, they have evolved into a true biosynthetic race and built a thriving society upon the pillars of personal autonomy, mutual respect and boundless innovation. Now that society is fracturing at the seams. Beneath lies built upon lies, the shocking truth as to why threatens the future of not merely the Asterions, but all life in the universe. Cyberpunk and space opera collide in a thrilling new trilogy from the author of the epic Aurora Rhapsody space opera saga. Enter a world of technological wonders, exotic alien life, enthralling characters, captivating worlds—and a terrifying evil lurking in the void that will shatter it all. Fans of Neuromancer, Blade Runner and Altered Carbon will love this intense, action-packed science fiction noir thriller with a space opera twist. Explorations of artificial intelligence, the value of memories and what it means to be alive intermingle with mysteries, conspiracies, intrigue, rebellion and lost love. * EXIN EX MACHINA is a new entry point for the Amaranthe series and can be read before the Aurora novels. *** AMARANTHE UNIVERSE: --------------------------------------- ~ AURORA RHAPSODY ~ (should be read in order) AURORA RISING TRILOGY #1: STARSHINE (Aurora Rising Book One) #2: VERTIGO (Aurora Rising Book Two) #3: TRANSCENDENCE (Aurora Rising Book Three) AURORA RENEGADES TRILOGY #4: SIDESPACE (Aurora Renegades Book One) #5: DISSONANCE (Aurora Renegades Book Two) #6: ABYSM (Aurora Renegades Book Three) AURORA RESONANT TRILOGY #7: RELATIVITY (Aurora Resonant Book One) #8: RUBICON (Aurora Resonant Book Two) #9: REQUIEM (Aurora Resonant Book Three) #10: SHORT STORIES OF AURORA RHAPSODY (can be read at any time) ~ ASTERION NOIR TRILOGY ~ (a new entry point for the series - can be read before Aurora Rhapsody) #11: EXIN EX MACHINA (Asterion Noir Book 1) #12: OF A DARKER VOID (Asterion Noir Book 2) #13: THE STARS LIKE GODS (Asterion Noir Book 3) ~ RIVEN WORLDS ~ (should be read after Aurora Rhapsody and Asterion Noir) #14: CONTINUUM (Riven Worlds Book One) #15: INVERSION (Riven Worlds Book Two) #16: ECHO RIFT (Riven Worlds Book Three) #17: ALL OUR TOMORROWS (Riven Worlds Book Four) #18: CHAOTICA (Riven Worlds Book Five) #19: DUALITY (Riven Worlds Book Six) ~ COSMIC SHORES ~ (a new entry point for the series - each book can be read at any time and without reading any of the other books) #20: MEDUSA FALLING (A Cosmic Shores Novel) #21: THE THIEF (A Cosmic Shores Novel)

Caleb, a 24 year old coder at the world's largest internet company, wins a competition to spend a week at a private mountain retreat belonging to Nathan, the reclusive CEO of the company. But when Caleb arrives at the remote location he finds that he will have to participate in a strange and fascinating experiment in which he must interact with the world's first true artificial intelligence, housed in the body of a beautiful robot girl. EX MACHINA is an intense psychological thriller, played out in a love triangle. It explores big ideas about the nature of consciousness, emotion, sexuality, truth and lies.

In this last deluxe EX MACHINA hardcover, Mayor Mitchell Hundred descends into the NYC sewers to learn why he was given the strange powers that helped him become the heroic Great Machine while a powerful new foe reveals a terrifying plan that's been in the works since the series began.

Poetry. Winner of the 2014 Kelsey Street Press FIRSTS Contest. "Jennifer Pilch's DEUS EX MACHINA pulls the ache from a fractured century, stitching the bloom past artifice into an urgent, prismatic form unlike any we have seen. Each voice 'risks/transforms night' into 'a blossom that punctures that blots.' A book like this, assembled from music and ruin and light, is rare and necessary." Joshua Poteat "In DEUS EX MACHINA, Jennifer Pilch crashes classical tragedy into melodrama, foregrounding the parameters of representation in an analog of early photography's impact. With lush language, she explores the photograph's obviating violence, focusing on the 'taken' part of the picture and the lens's seizure of sensory mechanics. Working at varying distances from the stage, the page, and the photographic image, her historical characters successively worry the line between romance and fidelity, presence and preservation, and contend with a colonizing mode of 'perception stuck to where there's light.'" Kate Colby"

A neuroscientist and a linguist show how evolution could have given rise to structured language. A machine for language? Certainly, say the neurophysiologists, busy studying the language specializations of the human brain and trying to identify their evolutionary antecedents. Linguists such as Noam Chomsky talk about machinelike "modules" in the brain for syntax, arguing that language is more an instinct (a complex behavior triggered by simple environmental stimuli) than an acquired skill like riding a bicycle. But structured language presents the same evolutionary problems as feathered forelimbs for flight: you need a lot of specializations to fly even a little bit. How do you get them, if evolution has no foresight and the intermediate stages do not have intermediate payoffs? Some say that the Darwinian scheme for gradual species self-improvement cannot explain our most valued human capability, the one that sets us so far above the apes, language itself. William Calvin and Derek Bickerton suggest that other evolutionary developments, not directly related to language, allowed language to evolve in a way that eventually promoted a Chomskian syntax. They compare these intermediate behaviors to the curb-cuts originally intended for wheelchair users. Their usefulness was soon discovered by users of strollers, shopping carts, rollerblades, and so on. The authors argue that reciprocal altruism and ballistic movement planning were "curb-cuts" that indirectly promoted the formation of structured language. Written in the form of a dialogue set in Bellagio, Italy, Lingua ex Machina presents an engaging challenge to those who view the human capacity for language as a winner-take-all war between Chomsky and Darwin.

Poetry. A long poem at the fringes of the Canadian tradition, EX MACHINA is a latticework of poetic and philosophical statements concerning the symbiosis of humans, books, and machines. A series of three intertwining sequences, the reader is encouraged to move back and forth from statement to statement, seeking development but meeting frustration. The reader thus becomes a larval stage in the poem's development, forging connections between its disparate parts during the course of this mental processing, as the text evolves over multiple readings.