When the "Smile Time" demonic puppets take their evil television show to Japan, Spike and Lorne must take on thousands of puppet ninjas to protect the unsuspecting children.

Spike created by Joss Whedon and David Greenwalt.

In a story written by the actor who played Spike on the Buffy TV show, James Marsters, the vampire who chose to have a soul takes a break from hanging with Buffy. In a small California town, low on funds and food, Spike runs into his past - hidden under the floorboards of an old store - as well as a patience-trying slimy monster, stolen children and some trouble with his boots. And of course there's always a girl. How can a good guy catch a break when he's constantly trying to hide the vampire inside?

"Includes Spike #1-8 written by Brian Lynch"--P. [4] of cover.

When the "Smile Time" demonic puppets take their evil television show to Japan, Spike and Lorne must take on thousands of puppet ninjas to protect the unsuspecting children.

Above all don’t use the word good as though it meant something in evolutionary science. The Hard Problem is a tour de force, exploring fundamental questions of how we experience the world, as well as telling the moving story of a young woman whose struggle for understanding her own life and the lives of others leads her to question the deeply held beliefs of those around her. Hilary, a young psychology researcher at the Krohl Institute for Brain Science, is nursing a private sorrow and a troubling question. She and other researchers at the institute are grappling with what science calls the “hard problem”—if there is nothing but matter, what is consciousness? What Hilary discovers puts her fundamentally at odds with her colleagues, who include her first mentor and one-time lover, Spike; her boss, Leo; and the billionaire founder of the institute, Jerry. Hilary needs a miracle, and she is prepared to pray for one.

Hugo and Shirley Jackson award-winning Peter Watts stands on the cutting edge of hard SF with his acclaimed novel, Blindsight Two months since the stars fell... Two months of silence, while a world held its breath. Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune's orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Whatever's out there isn't talking to us. It's talking to some distant star, perhaps. Or perhaps to something closer, something en route. So who do you send to force introductions with unknown and unknowable alien intellect that doesn't wish to be met? You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees x-rays and tastes ultrasound. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won't be needed. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called vampire, recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. And you send a synthesist—an informational topologist with half his mind gone—as an interface between here and there. Pray they can be trusted with the fate of a world. They may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.