The robots were made under the direction of demons who possessed people. Then the demons inhabited the robots. We who still felt we were alive, not just simply meat bags to serve the machines, gathered under the city to plot our rebellion, seeking ways to take out the robots before they took us all out. I had a mission: find the man with the robot-destroying weapon and help him to save humanity.

"The threat is real! Robots have assaulted Brooklyn. Guardians are go!" - Commander Summerhays Devin Sanders, President and CEO of DEVROM, threatened with being indicted by the Intergalactic Neutralization Force (INF) disappears before he can be apprehended. Meanwhile, The Guardians, a secret INF task force specially designed to combat robot crime, take on other serious robot threats against mankind brought on by the deadly Black Venom. Valiant, Virgie, Reggie, Valdez and Tina use their weapons, wisdom, and strength to confront the enemy and destroy the menacing pandemic robotic hoard that is approaching!Can the Black Venom's ominous reach be curtailed?

Assassins in Brooklyn? Aliens in Birmingham? Dragons in Scotland? Escort robots on Mars? What is this? Project Guardian Volume 1

'A gripping new drama in science ... if you want to understand how the concept of life is changing, read this' Professor Andrew Briggs, University of Oxford When Darwin set out to explain the origin of species, he made no attempt to answer the deeper question: what is life? For generations, scientists have struggled to make sense of this fundamental question. Life really does look like magic: even a humble bacterium accomplishes things so dazzling that no human engineer can match it. And yet, huge advances in molecular biology over the past few decades have served only to deepen the mystery. So can life be explained by known physics and chemistry, or do we need something fundamentally new? In this penetrating and wide-ranging new analysis, world-renowned physicist and science communicator Paul Davies searches for answers in a field so new and fast-moving that it lacks a name, a domain where computing, chemistry, quantum physics and nanotechnology intersect. At the heart of these diverse fields, Davies explains, is the concept of information: a quantity with the power to unify biology with physics, transform technology and medicine, and even to illuminate the age-old question of whether we are alone in the universe. From life's murky origins to the microscopic engines that run the cells of our bodies, The Demon in the Machine is a breath-taking journey across the landscape of physics, biology, logic and computing. Weaving together cancer and consciousness, two-headed worms and bird navigation, Davies reveals how biological organisms garner and process information to conjure order out of chaos, opening a window on the secret of life itself.

A hitman navigates a seedy London shot through with dark magic, demons, and angels in this wickedly hilarious urban fantasy series debut Meet Don Drake: a profane, alcoholic hitman . . . and summoner of demons. Drake owes a gambling debt to one such demon. Forced to carry out one more assassination to clear his debt, Don unwittingly kills an innocent child and brings the Furies of Greek myth down upon himself. Rescued by an almost-fallen angel called Trixie, Don and his magical accomplice, The Burned Man—an imprisoned archdemon—are forced to deal with Lucifer himself whilst battling a powerful evil magician. Now Don must foil Lucifer’s plan to complete Trixie’s fall and save her soul whilst preventing the Burned Man from escaping and wreaking havoc on the entire world. “What connects [Raymond] Chandler, Guy Ritchie, Harry Potter and Buffy the Vampire Slayer? ‘Not much’ is probably the answer, until now. A punchy debut novel.” —SFX Magazine

An accessible and engaging account of robots, covering the current state of the field, the fantasies of popular culture, and implications for life and work. Robots are entering the mainstream. Technologies have advanced to the point of mass commercialization—Roomba, for example—and adoption by governments—most notably, their use of drones. Meanwhile, these devices are being received by a public whose main sources of information about robots are the fantasies of popular culture. We know a lot about C-3PO and Robocop but not much about Atlas, Motoman, Kiva, or Beam—real-life robots that are reinventing warfare, the industrial workplace, and collaboration. In this book, technology analyst John Jordan offers an accessible and engaging introduction to robots and robotics, covering state-of-the-art applications, economic implications, and cultural context. Jordan chronicles the prehistory of robots and the treatment of robots in science fiction, movies, and television—from the outsized influence of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to Isaac Asimov's I, Robot (in which Asimov coined the term “robotics”). He offers a guided tour of robotics today, describing the components of robots, the complicating factors that make robotics so challenging, and such applications as driverless cars, unmanned warfare, and robots on the assembly line. Roboticists draw on such technical fields as power management, materials science, and artificial intelligence. Jordan points out, however, that robotics design decisions also embody such nontechnical elements as value judgments, professional aspirations, and ethical assumptions, and raise questions that involve law, belief, economics, education, public safety, and human identity. Robots will be neither our slaves nor our overlords; instead, they are rapidly becoming our close companions, working in partnership with us—whether in a factory, on a highway, or as a prosthetic device. Given these profound changes to human work and life, Jordan argues that robotics is too important to be left solely to roboticists.

Although they entered the world as pure science fiction, robots are now very much a fact of everyday life. Whether a space-age cyborg, a chess-playing automaton, or simply the smartphone in our pocket, robots have long been a symbol of the fraught and fearful relationship between ourselves and our creations. Though we tend to think of them as products of twentieth-century technology—the word “robot” itself dates to only 1921—as a concept, they have colored US society and culture for far longer, as Dustin A. Abnet shows to dazzling effect in The American Robot. In tracing the history of the idea of robots in US culture, Abnet draws on intellectual history, religion, literature, film, and television. He explores how robots and their many kin have not only conceptually connected but literally embodied some of the most critical questions in modern culture. He also investigates how the discourse around robots has reinforced social and economic inequalities, as well as fantasies of mass domination—chilling thoughts that the recent increase in job automation has done little to quell. The American Robot argues that the deep history of robots has abetted both the literal replacement of humans by machines and the figurative transformation of humans into machines, connecting advances in technology and capitalism to individual and societal change. Look beneath the fears that fracture our society, Abnet tells us, and you’re likely to find a robot lurking there.