One night in October when he was ten years old, Tyler Dupree stood in his back yard and watched the stars go out. They all flared into brilliance at once, then disappeared, replaced by a flat, empty black barrier. He and his best friends, Jason and Diane Lawton, had seen what became known as the Big Blackout. It would shape their lives. The effect is worldwide. The sun is now a featureless disk - a heat source, rather than an astronomical object. The moon is gone, but tides remain. Not only have the world's artificial satellites fallen out of orbit, their recovered remains are pitted and aged, as though they'd been in space far longer than their known lifespans. As Tyler, Jason, and Diane grow up, space probe reveals a bizarre truth: The barrier is artificial, generated by huge alien artifacts. Time is passing faster outside the barrier than inside - more than a hundred million years per day on Earth. At this rate, the death throes of the sun are only about forty years in our future. Jason, now a promising young scientist, devotes his life to working against this slow-moving apocalypse. Diane throws herself into hedonism, marrying a sinister cult leader who's forged a new religion out of the fears of the masses. Earth sends terraforming machines to Mars to let the onrush of time do its work, turning the planet green. Next they send humans...and immediately get back an emissary with thousands of years of stories to tell about the settling of Mars. Then Earth's probes reveal that an identical barrier has appeared around Mars. Jason, desperate, seeds near space with self-replicating machines that will scatter copies of themselves outward from the sun - and report back on what they find. Life on Earth is about to get much, much stranger.

An orphan boy's triumph over adversity, with help from a fire-breathing, winged horse Stormy is an orphan and a kitchen skivvy. He tends the compost, he scrubs the floors, and watches feasts make their way up the mountain as he survives on bread and water. A skivvy is all that Stormy can hope to be. But Stormy has a secret. He wants to be a sky-rider, to soar amongst the clouds on spitfyres: flying horses that spit fire and smoke, and answer only to their riders. A chance meeting with an escaped convict turns Stormy's life upside down. Sent up to the Academy he uncovers a web of lies, deceits and neglect, at the centre of which lies the mysterious thirteenth horse. Can Stormy save Thirteen, defeat the dark forces at work within the Academy and prove himself worthy as a sky-rider?

Put into practice today's winning strategy for achieving success in high-end sales! The SPIN Selling Fieldbook is your guide to the method that has revolutionized big-ticket sales in the United States and globally. It's the method being used by one-half of all Fortune 500 companies to train their sales forces, and here's the interactive, hands-on field book that provides the practical tools you need to put this revolutionary method into actionimmediately. The SPIN Selling Fieldbook includes: Individual diagnostic exercises Illustrative case studies from leading companies Practical planning suggestions Provocative questionnaires Practice sessions to prepare you for dealing with challenging selling situations Written by the pioneering author of the original bestseller, SPIN Selling, this book is aimed at making implementation easy for companies that have not yet established SPIN techniques. It will also enable companies that are already using the method to reinforce SPIN methods in the field and in coaching sessions.

True or false? In selling high-value products or services: 'closing' increases your chance of success; it is essential to describe the benefits of your product or service to the customer; objection handling is an important skill; open questions are more effective than closed questions. All false, says this provocative book. Neil Rackham and his team studied more than 35,000 sales calls made by 10,000 sales people in 23 countries over 12 years. Their findings revealed that many of the methods developed for selling low-value goods just don‘t work for major sales. Rackham went on to introduce his SPIN-Selling method. SPIN describes the whole selling process: Situation questions Problem questions Implication questions Need-payoff questions SPIN-Selling provides you with a set of simple and practical techniques which have been tried in many of today‘s leading companies with dramatic improvements to their sales performance.

"Vortex" tells the story of Turk Findley, the protagonist introduced in "Axis," who is transported 10,000 years into the future by the mysterious entities called "the Hypotheticals."

A discounted ebundle of author Robert Charles Wilson's Hugo Award-winning and critically-acclaimed Spin Saga Trilogy, which includes: Spin, Axis, and Vortex “Robert Charles Wilson is a hell of a storyteller.” —Stephen King on Spin “Wilson does so many fine things, it’s hard to know where to begin to praise him.” —The Washington Post on Spin Spin One night in October when he was ten years old, Tyler Dupree stood in his back yard and watched the stars go out. They all flared into brilliance at once, then disappeared, replaced by a flat, empty black barrier. He and his best friends, Jason and Diane Lawton, had seen what became known as the Big Blackout. It would shape their lives... Life on Earth is about to get much, much stranger. Axis Visit the "world next door"—the planet engineered by the mysterious Hypotheticals to support human life, and connected to Earth by way of the Arch that towers hundreds of miles over the Indian Ocean. Humans are colonizing this new world—and, predictably, fiercely exploiting its resources, chiefly large deposits of oil in the western deserts of the continent of Equatoria. Vortex Turk and his young friend Isaac Dvali are taken up by a community of fanatics who use them to enable a passage to the dying Earth, where they believe a prophecy of human/Hypothetical contact will be fulfilled. The prophecy is only partly true, however, and Turk must unravel the truth about the nature and purpose of the Hypotheticals before they carry him on a journey through warped time to the end of the universe itself. Tor books by Robert Charles Wilson Last Year The Affinities Burning Paradise Julian Comstock Blind Lake The Chronoliths The Perseids and Other Stories Bios Darwinia Mysterium A Bridge of Years A Hidden Place At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.