Avatars Dance

This is the omnibus edition of the full trilogy: GLASS HOUSES, PROXIES, and BURNING THE ICE.

Glass Houses:

Ruby runs waldos. Freelance. Construction, securityno job too large or small. And her favorite tool is Golem, six hundred pounds of vaguely human-shaped, remote-operated power. Not an easy living, but it's better than most in half-sunken, greenhouse-heated, 21st Century New York. Best of all the waldoes go Outside, not Ruby. Ruby hates the Outside.

But when a Ruby/Golem tries to rescue a rich Egyptian from a collapsing skyscraper, and accepts the papers he presses into her hands as he dies, Ruby's in trouble. She may have to go Outside for real.

All of which might be a lot easier if she hadn't stolen the diamonds off his body

Proxies:

Laura J. Mixon's 22nd century is a far cry from utopia; pollution and global warming have begun to ravage the planet and drive a cowering populace indoors. Gangs of violent, dispossessed children prowl city streets, fresh foods are hard to come by, and average temperatures reach 130 degrees Fahrenheit. But along with the bad side effects of technology come the good: scientist Carli D'Auber's stunning advancement in communications allows people to send their consciousness across vast distances and interact at the other end through a remote device called a waldo. Most people are familiar with the small, trash-can-like waldos... but in a secret crèche, children are being raised to pilot humanoid versions called proxies, and they're being instilled with a deadly serious ideology.

Can Carli, hunted by a renegade proxy with incredible strength and a frighteningly simplistic agenda, stay alive long enough to figure out what's going on?

Part mystery, part human drama, and part a fantastic blend of cybertechnology, cloning, and telepresence, Proxies will keep you on your toes till the end.

Burning the Ice:

More than a hundred years after a small band of humans stole an antimatter-fueled starship and headed away at near-lightspeed, a colony of those renegades' descendants are now struggling to survive on Brimstone, a barely-habitable world of ice and bitter cold four dozen light-years from Earth.

In the long run, they hope to slowly terraform Brimstone, making it, if not Earthlike, at least bearable. In the short run-well, life is hard, and everyone lives in everyone else's laps. Not easy for anyone. Particularly hard if, like Manda, you just aren't cut out to get along with others in conditions of constant crowding and zero privacy.

Most people wouldn't be eager to get away from the main colony and work on a scientific project in the howling frozen wastes. For Manda, it's a deliverance. But news of the intelligent life she discovers in Brimstone's depths will change everything-if she can bring the news back to her fellows alive. For, it turns out, there are political plots and counterplots still active in the colony, dangerous twists tracing back to Earth itself...and outward to the stars.

Dettagli