Googled around and found descriptions of the non-Martin books:
Spin by Robert Charles Wilson Quote:Tyler Dupree is twelve and his best friends, twins Jason and Diane Lawton, are thirteen when the stars vanish from the sky. The Spin, as it comes to be known, is the after-effect of something, somewhere wrapping the Earth in a barrier that slows down time by a factor of one hundred million.
Scientists learn that the barrier is permeable, and space probes can cross it. The membrane blocks out lethal levels of solar radiation while letting in the right balance of light to allow the seasons to continue, crops to grow and life to be sustained. The problem is that the deceleration of time on Earth means the sun will die in less than fifty standard years—during the friends’ lifetimes.
Jason becomes a scientist and devotes his life to understanding the problem and devising technology that can avert disaster. Diane turns to religion to find her answers. Tyler pours his energy into the practice of medicine, doing what he can to keep death at bay.
Hoping to buy time, the United States launches a program to colonize Mars, where time is still progressing normally. The colonists’ plan to terraform the planet works and the future looks promising…until an identical barrier appears around Mars.
Now, life for Tyler, Diane and Jason—and people everywhere—could spin out of control…. Warning: Explicit language. Jacket art by Jim Burns. (364 pp.) 2005.
Learning the World by Ken MacLeod Quote:Fourteen millennia from the dawn of the space age, humanity has spread to every star within five hundred light-years of its half-forgotten origin, greening the suns' light with a haze of arboreal habitats. In all those years, the human form has remained close to its ancestral structure and brainpower, though occasional evolutionary experiments have flared up and quickly burned out.
Inside the ancient world ship But the Sky, My Lady! The Sky!, cities have been built and destroyed, their ruins fed into the drive as reaction mass. Generations were born and trained: the free-flyers, for work in the ship's zero-gee biosphere; the flatfooters, for survival in planetary colonies. Outside, the universe around them failed to give signs of other intelligent life…until now.
After a journey of four hundred years, the ship has arrived at the system of Destiny's Star. Fifteen-year-old Atomic Discourse Gale and her cohort are eager to make their future on its only terrestrial world. But then they detect curious electromagnetic emissions that manifest into undeniable images: intelligent aliens are living on their promised world! For as long they remember, humanity has prepared its children for the worst that space could deal them. But nothing has prepared them for what will happen next….
Meanwhile, down on the planet, a young astronomer searches for his system's outermost planet. A moving point of light thrills, then disappoints him. It's only a comet. But there's something very odd about the comet's path: it seems to be heading their way….
Humans are not the only ones for whom the world has changed.
Accelerando by Charles Stross Quote: It is the era of the posthuman. Artificial intelligences have surpassed the limits of human intellect. Biotechnological beings have rendered people all but extinct. Molecular nanotechnology runs rampant, replicating and reprogramming at will. Contact with extraterrestrial life grows more imminent with each new day. Struggling to survive and thrive in this accelerated world are three generations of the Macx clan:
• Manfred, a memebroker who makes strangers rich with his free ideas. His mind divided between his physical environment and the Internet, he helps liberate a collective of crustaceans trapped in cyberspace, handles a nasty divorce from his iron-willed wife and becomes a target of the Mafiya-run music-rights industry, all while working on a plan to dismantle Mars and lay the groundwork for singularity—a moment of transcendent intelligence beyond which progress is meaningless.
• His teenage daughter, Amber, who runs away from her crazy mother to seek her fortune in the outer solar system as an indentured astronaut. Though she lacks genetic enhancements, her neural augments make her as alien to her parents' generation as humans are to the alien traders she meets around the brown dwarf Hyundai—creatures who are both more and less than they seem.
• Amber's son, Sirhan, an historian who has lived hundreds of childhoods, recording every one, and who has placed his reproductive organs on hold till he needs them. Sirhan's master project: a comprehensive work of posthuman history. No mean feat, when people can split their personalities at random and spend years dead only to revive….
• And then there's Manfred's cat, Aineko. Originally a robotic toy and later Amber's wisecracking companion, it upgrades progressively until it advances beyond human comprehension, with designs of its own….
An ideological tour de force, Accelerando is destined to stand beside Neuromancer and Snow Crash as one of the great modern works of science fiction. (390 pp.)
Old Man's War by John Scalzi Quote: John Perry did two things on his 75th birthday. First he visited his wife’s grave. Then he joined the Colonial Defense Force, the military branch of the interplanetary Colonial Union.
Yes, humanity has finally made it out to interstellar space. But under the auspices of the CU, which holds a monopoly on spaceships capable of FTL travel, folks are only allowed off-planet if they enlist or become colonists. Unfortunately, planets fit for human habitation are few, and alien races that are willing to fight us for them are many. Far from Earth, the Colony Wars have gone on for decades. And only seniors can enlist, because the CDF wants people with a lifetime of experience. In return, they’re somehow made young again, and—if they survive—they get a new life on a new world, never to return to Earth.
Faced with increasing decrepitude and a useless death from old age, John Perry thinks it’s a sweet deal. So he’s taken off Earth to serve two years at the front, but he doesn’t have the vaguest idea what he’s getting into. He doesn’t dream that his old body will be completely replaced with a new young body that is better than human. That there are an awful lot of alien species out there with a taste for human meat. That after a year of fighting space octopi and sentient pteradactyls and one-inch-high humanoids, he’ll feel like he’s become a soulless killing machine. And that the remedy will be to fall in love again, with someone who seems terribly familiar…. Warning: Explicit language. Jacket art by Donato Giancola. (316 pp.) 2005.
All of these descriptions are from the Science Fiction BooK Club website <i></i>
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