Expelling the Immigrants was Easy. Forcing One to Return…How Hard Could It Be?

Long ago, the President for Life expelled all foreign engineers from Silicon Valley. They moved to the BrainTrust, a fleet of cruise liners off the coast of San Francisco.

Now a brilliant young BrainTrust woman tackles the Fountain of Youth.

No one needs her cure more than the aged and dying President.

Taking her back should be easy. After all . . . 

The BrainTrust has no Army, no Navy, no Air Force. Their ships have neither weapons nor armor.

Yet a key question remains:

Can a society that has earned the name BrainTrust ever be truly defenseless?

He has the Brawn. She has the BrainTrust. Game On!

If a rocketship dies, who wins?

The world’s most advanced rocket company suffers a catastrophic explosion that becomes a publicity disaster. Within hours, the new CEO Matt Toscano learns he faces much deeper trouble than a public relations problem—

The California governor plans to destroy him.

Suddenly mankind’s best hope of better space travel lies on the water, with the BrainTrust.

Fortunately Dash Ambarawati, the BrainTrust’s most brilliant researcher, has studied rocket science since childhood. With her help, Matt stands a chance.

But Dash brings trouble with her. Matt and Dash find themselves with a host of enemies on their heels, including the Russian Union Premier and the American President for Life. The race is on.

One way or the other, this race will end in a Crescendo of Fire.

Meanwhile,

An itty bitty ninja gets her fondest wish. An ex-commando squares off with a Red Princess. And a retired project director toils quietly behind the scenes.

Kidnappers, oligarchs, politicians, dictators, princelings—outwitting them is not just a job, it’s an adventure.

And all in a day’s work…on the BrainTrust.

Doomsday Came About Every Five Years

Someone Out There really hated humans. Twenty years have passed since Shiva I first swept aside Earth's crude defenses and rained down destruction. Now Shiva V has entered the Solar System, more powerful than any of its predecessors.

The Shiva cannot be destroyed by fleets of ships: we tried, and it was the fleets that were destroyed. It cannot be defeated by a clandestinely developed super-weapon based on new principles of physics: no such weapon exists. It cannot be defeated by a forceful American President and his faithful generals: they do not know what to do.

There is only one way to defeat a Shiva: get inside and kill it. Once again, in the personae of five champions, four billion of us are about to do just that.

"A high-voltage adventure story" and an intriguing look at what the worldwide web may become."
—Vernor Vinge

"A brilliant vision of our future networked intelligence."
—Max More, Ph.D., President of the Extropy Institute and the Extropy Newsletter

"Why read expensive industry newsletters to puzzle out the future of the Web Read Earthweb to pull way ahead of today's Web pundits."
—Christine Peterson, Executive Director, The Foresight Institute

Now with an all-new afterword by Marc Stiegler. Doomsday Came About Every Five Years

Someone Out There really hated humans. Twenty years have passed since Shiva I first swept aside Earth's crude defenses and rained down destruction. Now Shiva V has entered the Solar System, more powerful than any of its predecessors.

The Shiva cannot be destroyed by fleets of ships: we tried, and it was the fleets that were destroyed. It cannot be defeated by a clandestinely developed super-weapon based on new principles of physics: no such weapon exists. It cannot be defeated by a forceful American President and his faithful generals: they do not know what to do.

There is only one way to defeat a Shiva: get inside and kill it. Once again, in the personae of five champions, four billion of us are about to do just that.

If the First Plague Apocalypse Doesn't Kill Them All, Try Another.

The most brilliant mind in a thousand years has been tortured and twisted by human cruelty. His solution:

Burn the world down and start from scratch.

Almost no one can stop him. A single obstacle stands in his way.

He must destroy the BrainTrust and its medical researcher extraordinaire, Dr. Dash.

With millions dying, nuclear war in the offing, and the BrainTrust under siege, the fight for the very soul of humanity hinges on a last desperate question:

Who remains to Defy the Darkness?

The World Economy Crashed and Burned. What's a BrainTrust To Do?

Having barely dodged an extinction level event, humanity now faces a new disaster: the world plunges into a Great Crash deeper and more cruel than the Depression of 1929. The BrainTrust has an answer. But the old, corrupt, dirtside Powers don’t need an answer.

They need a scapegoat.

Soon an unholy alliance launches three mighty fleets, each individually powerful enough to destroy all the combined navies of WWII. Relentless and unstoppable, they bear down on the effectively unarmed archipelago.

Now Dash and her mentor Colin must face a last question.

It will be her Final Exam.

Can Dash even accept the only answer?

How terrible is the price she will have to pay?

Welcome to the thrilling finale of the BrainTrust saga!

She’s Invading the Cradle of Civilization.

Thousands of years ago, the northern plateau of China gave rise to the first great civilization.

Now Jam, an ex-commando from the BrainTrust, is searching the plateau for the untapped geniuses needed to power the BrainTrust’s expansion. She leads a two-woman invasion that could roil the power structure in China to its core.

As Jam rides roughshod over tyranny, bureaucracy and ignorance, as she accumulates ever more enemies, she wanders ever nearer to an ancient secret—

The secret that powered the first Cradle of Civilization so long ago.

Even with all the help she can get from her best friends Dash and Ping, will it be enough to bring the secret home where it belongs?

Is Dash’s brilliance truly nonhuman?

And above all, will Ping ever get to use her Big Gun?

These stories by Marc Stiegler are about hope: hope that technology is not the destroyer of the human race, but will lead to a future we can hardly imagine. The transformation of humanity through nanotechnology has begun, and Marc Stiegler’s tales, most of which appeared in Analog Science Fiction Magazine, take us to a dangerous, wonder-filled future that may await us, ready or not. For Stiegler, technology is the “gentle seducer” that eases us from mere denizens of planet Earth to Masters of the Universe.