Wil McCarthy Books In Order

Aggressor Six

An alien armada from the center of Orion makes its deadly way through the galaxy, destroying all human life in the process, and only Marine Corporal Kenneth Jonson and the Aggressor Six team can stop the onslaught.

Flies from the Amber

Struggling for survival despite limited technology and daily earthquakes, the mining colonists on Unua dig up a beautiful alien mineral just before Earth scientists discover an alien artifact that inexplicably rests beside a black hole.

The Fall of Sirius

Awakened from a two thousand year cryostatis, Malyene Andreivne struggles to come to terms with the changes in her home world, which include the previously unthinkable union race of half human and half Waister beings.

The Collapsium

No writer stretches the boundaries of science fiction like Wil McCarthy does. Now this acclaimed author has crafted his most wildly ambitious and stunningly original tale yet, an unforgettable tale set in a wondrous future in which the secrets of matter have been unlocked and death itself is but a memory. A future also imperiled by a bitter rivalry between two brilliant scientists: one perhaps the greatest genius in the history of humankind; the other, its greatest monster…
In the eighth decade of the glorious reign of Her Majesty Tamra Lutui, the Queendom of Sol enjoys a peace and prosperity even gods might envy. In fact, two awesome technologies have given human beings all the powers and caprices of the gods they once worshiped. The first is wellstone, a form of programmable matter capable of emulating almost any substance: natural, artificial, even hypothetical. The second is collapsium, a deadly crystal, composed of miniature black holes, that allows the virtually instantaneous transmission of information and matter including humans throughout the solar system. Bruno de Towaji, royal consort and the inventor of collapsium, dreams of building the arc de fin, an almost mythical device capable of probing the farthest reaches of spacetime. Marlon Sykes, de Towaji’s rival in both love and science, is meanwhile hard at work on a vast telecommunications project whose first step consists of constructing a ring of collapsium around the sun. But when a ruthless saboteur attacks the Ring Collapsiter and sends it falling toward the sun, the two scientists must put aside personal animosity and combine their prodigious intellects to prevent the destruction of the solar system…
and every living thing within it.

The Wellstone

In his Nebula Award nominated novel The Collapsium, acclaimed author Wil McCarthy introduced a richly imagined future of boundless possibility, where poverty, war, and even death are banished forever. Only now that world’s exquisite perfection propels one restless young man toward the ultimate challenge.

The Wellstone

For the children of immortal parents, growing up can be hard to do. A prince will forever be a prince leaving no chance for Bascal Edward de Towaji Lutui to inherit his parents throne. So what is an angry young blue blood to do? Punch a hole in the shadow he s been living in by rallying his equally disgruntled companions to make an improbable spaceship, busting out of the so called summer camp in which their parents have stowed them and making a daring escape across the vastness of space. Ne er do well Conrad Mursk is just along for the joyride until he realizes this is no typical display of teenage angst. The children are rising up in an honest to gods revolution. And, boyo, things are going to get raw.

Lost in Transmission

In a novel that challenges our expectations at every turn, acclaimed author Wil McCarthy sweeps us into the future as only he can imagine it. Here is a thrilling odyssey of discovery and adventure aboard a ship of exiled rebels coming of age in an eternity that may be a lot shorter than anyone ever guessed. Brash and idealistic, they were rebels without a cause in a world governed by science, reason…
and immortality. Banished for their troubles to the starship Newhope, they now face a bold future: to settle the worlds of Barnard’s Star. Now King Bascal Edward de Towaji Lutui, former prince of the Queendom of Sol, together with Captain Xiomara Xmary Li Weng and her lover, first mate Conrad Mursk, face a perilous voyage with thousands of their fellow exiles. The journey will last a century, but with Queendom technology it s no problem to step into a fax machine and print a fresh, youthful version of yourself. But what this crew of rebels will find is far from the paradise they seek. Before long, their optimistic young colony has started to show signs of strain. And worst of all, death itself has returned with a vengeance.

To Crush the Moon

In the conclusion to this epic interstellar adventure by Nebula Award nominee Wil McCarthy, humanity stands at a crossroads as the heroes who fashioned a man made heaven must rescue their descendants from eternal damnation . To Crush the MoonOnce the Queendom of Sol was a glowing monument to humankind’s loftiest dreams. Ageless and immortal, its citizens lived in peaceful splendor. But as Sol buckled under the swell of an immorbid population, space itself literally ran out . Conrad Mursk has returned to Sol on the crippled starship Newhope. His crew are the frozen refugees of a failed colony known as Barnard s Star. A thousand years older, Mursk finds Sol on the brink of rebellion, while a fanatic necro cult is reviving death itself. Now Mursk and his lover, Captain Xiomara Xmary Li Weng, are sent on a final, desperate mission by King Bruno de Towaji one of the greatest terraformers of the ages to literally crush the moon. If they succeed, they ll save billions of lost souls. If they fail, they ll strand humanity between death and something unimaginably worse .

Murder in the Solid State

David Sanger, an ambitious young physicist, attends a party at which a pompous older scientist, who just happens to have thrwarted the younger man’s innovative ideas, is murdered. Suddenly it is not just David’s career, but his life that is at stake. Are his ideas that important? Who’s out to stop David from changing the world?

Bloom

Wil McCarthy dares to combine two branches of scientific study space travel technology and biotechnology to create a chilling and very believable future as Bloom pits humankind against an enemy of its own creation, grown rampantly out of control. In the late twenty first century, man made, self replicating organisms called mycora smaller than the tiniest bacteria mutated and swept across the globe in a chain reaction so swift and deadly there was no time to act. No time to do anything but flee an Earth destroyed by the very science created to nurture and sustain it. Soon the entire inner solar system was consumed, incorporated into the lethal psychedelic Bloom of the Mycosystem. Scant years later, the remnants of humanity cling to the asteroid belt and the inhospitable moons of Jupiter. As the society known as the Immunity ekes out a precarious existence, fighting off the invasion of deadly mycospores while working feverishly to build a starship that will carry them to safety, an ominous discovery alters everything. Mycora are incorporating gene sequences to elude Immunity defenses perhaps even to thrive in the harsh environment of the outer system. The only way to be sure is to journey into the diseased heart of the Mycosystem, from which no one has ever returned. The starship is readied and a crew is selected on the basis of expertise and expendability. But when sabotage forces an early launch, suspicions arise among the crew. Someone or something doesn’t want the mission to succeed. As the starship rockets toward Earth, under relentless attack from without and within, the questions and the terror multiply faster than a contagion. Who or what is the true enemy? When is change something to fight or something to embrace? And how can humanity forge a future for itself in the face of an unstoppable foe seemingly destined to overwhelm the cosmos…
?With both deep insight into the human condition and a far reaching understanding of science, Bloom offers a compelling and frightening peek into one of our possible futures.

Once upon a Galaxy

…
in these original new stories by today’s masters of science fiction and fantasy. Two time tested genres test the limits of ‘happily ever after’ when beloved tales like ‘Goldilocks’ and ‘Sleeping Beauty’ are given an outer space spin.

Hacking Matter

Why programmable atoms are the ultimate killer app. Programmable matter is probably not the next technological revolution, nor even perhaps the one after that. But it’s coming, and when it does, it will change our lives as much as any invention ever has. Imagine being able to program matter itself to change it, with the click of a cursor, from hard to soft, from paper to stone, from fluorescent to super reflective to invisible. Supported by companies ranging from Levi Strauss to IBM and the Defense Department, solid state physicists in laboratories at MIT, Harvard, Sun Microsystems, and elsewhere are currently creating arrays of microscopic devices called ‘quantum dots’ that are capable of acting like programmable atoms. They can be configured electronically to replicate the properties of any known atom and then can be changed, as fast as an electrical signal can travel, to have the properties of a different atom. Soon it will be possible not only to engineer into solid matter such unnatural properties as variable magnetism, programmable flavors, or centuple bonds far stronger than diamond, but also to change these properties at will. Wil McCarthy visits the laboratories and talks with the researchers who are developing this extraordinary technology; describes how they are learning to control its electronic, optical, thermal, magnetic, and mechanical properties; and tells us where all this will lead. The possibilities are truly magical.