"Ryland Grace is the sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission-and if he fails, humanity and the earth itself will perish. Except that right now, he doesn't know that. He can't even remember his own name, let alone the nature of his assignment or how to complete it. All he knows is that he's been asleep for a very, very long time. And he's just been awakened to find himself millions of miles from home, with nothing but two corpses for company....

"Humans have subdued 75 percent of the land surface, concocted a wizardry of industrial and medical marvels, strung lights all across the darkness. We tinker with nature at every opportunity; we garden the planet with our preferred species of plants and animals, many of them invasive; and we have even altered the climate, threatening our own extinction. Yet we reckon with our own destructive capabilities in extraordinary acts of hope-filled creativity...

Outlines a reassessment of human evolution that draws on recent fossil findings and challenges current theories to say that humans coexisted and competed across the African continent while exchanging genes, tools, and behaviors.

"A wide-ranging take on why humans have a troubled relationship with being an animal, and why we need a better one Human are the most inquisitive, emotional, imaginative, aggressive, and baffling animals on the planet. But we are also an animal that does not think it is an animal. How well do we really know ourselves? How to Be Animal tells a remarkable story of what it means to be human and argues that at the heart of our existence is a profound...

A paleontologist examines the importance of the way dinosaurs lived and may have died, the meaning of fossils, the nature of deep time, and humans? place in the world as the earth moves into an uncertain environmental future.

"Six interconnected stories that ask how far we will go to remake ourselves into the perfect human specimens, and how hard that will push the definition of human"--

Challenges popular conceptions of an innately selfish human race to offer new historical and evolutionary perspectives that argue humans are more hardwired for kindness, cooperation and trust.

A provocative exploration of how computers are reshaping ideas about what it means to be human profiles the annual Turing Test to assess a computer's capacity for thought while analyzing related philosophical, biological, and moral issues.

After eighty years of fragile peace, the Architects are back, wreaking havoc as they consume entire planets. In the past, Originator artefacts – vestiges of a long-vanished civilization – could save a world from annihilation. This time, the Architects have discovered a way to circumvent these protective relics. Suddenly, no planet is safe. Facing impending extinction, the Human Colonies are in turmoil. While some believe a unified front is the...