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Earthweb


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

Cover art by David Mattingly



ORDER Paperback

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

First printing, May 1999

Distributed by Simon & Schuster
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN: 0-671-57809-X

Copyright 2006 by Marc Stiegler

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

A Baen Books Original
Baen Publishing Enterprises
P.O. Box 1403
Riverdale, NY 10471
http://www.baen.com

Production by Windhaven Press
Auburn, NH

Electronic version by WebWrights
http://www.webwrights.com


In Memoriam,

 

This book is dedicated to Phil Salin, who recognized the remarkable consequences of electronic commerce long before there was a Web. Phil, soon the future that once you alone could see will be so commonplace, no one will believe it was not always obvious. But then, we always knew that that is how it would be, in the end, didn't we?

Acknowledgements

 

My heartfelt thanks go to all the following people: My wife Lynne, who told me to go ahead and quit my day job to complete this book, who also undertook every research problem with enthusiasm and charm; my daughter Shea, who gave me a break just often enough to write it; Jim Baen for a decade of encouragement to write another novel; Rosie Smith for her insightful editing comments; Fordham Otieno Wara for his help understanding the culture and character of the people of Kenya; Wilfred and Agnes Chan for their similar help with Hong Kong and Guangdong; Robin Hanson for his insights about idea futures; and all the members of the Foresight Web Enhancement Project, especially Norm Hardy, Mark S. Miller, Tanya Jones, Peter McCluskey, and Eric Dean Tribble, for their review of various aspects of the security, link, and detection features yet needed by the Web before it can achieve its true destiny. As always, any errors in this book are mine alone.

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