Laurence Gonzales’s electrifying adventure opens in the jungles of the Congo. Jenny Lowe, a primatologist studying chimpanzees—the bonobos—is running for her life.
A civil war has exploded and Jenny is trapped in its crosshairs . . . She runs to the camp of a fellow primatologist.
The rebels have already been there.
Everyone is dead except a young girl, the daughter of Jenny’s brutally murdered fellow scientist—and...

The characters' lives are linked to each other by acts of generosity or cruelty. A daughter in early 20th century Chicago; a hobo during the Great Depression; an office girl in 1950s Manhattan; the young man reveling in 1960s San Francisco, then later tends to dying friends as the AIDS pandemic hits; as the new century opens, a man who has lost his way finds a measure of peace in a photograph he discovers in an old box-an image of pure and simple...

It was a day like any other. Except it was our last ... As Pounce ponders his suddenly uncertain future, the pieces are falling into place for a robot revolution that will eradicate humankind. His owners, Ezra's parents, are a well-intentioned but oblivious pair of educators who are entirely disconnected from life outside their small, affluent, gated community. Spending most nights drunk and happy as society crumbles around them, they watch in disbelieving...

"One Easter Sunday, Madame Ballandra puts her hands together and exclaims: 'A miracle!' Baby Pascal is stikingly beautiful, brown in complexion, with gray-green eyes like the sea. But where does he come from? Is he really the child of God? So goes the rumor, and many signs throughout his life will cause this theory to gain ground. From journey to journey and from one community to another, Pascal sets off in search of his origins, trying to understand...

"What if you could live multiple lives simultaneously, have constant, perfect companionship, and never die? That's the promise of Join, a revolutionary technology that allows small groups of minds to unite, forming a single consciousness that experiences the world through multiple bodies. But as two best friends discover, the light of that miracle may be blinding the world to its horrors. Chance and Leap are jolted out of their professional routines...

"Set in the glittering art deco world of a century ago, MEM makes one slight alteration to history: a scientist in Montreal discovers a method allowing people to have their memories extracted from their minds, whole and complete. The Mems exist as mirror-images of their source -- zombie-like creatures destined to experience that singular memory over and over, until they expire in the cavernous Vault where they are kept. And then there is Dolores Extract...

"Once upon an apocalypse, there lived an obscenely handsome American crow named S.T., which was, of course, short for Sh*t Turd . . . When the world last checked-in with its beloved Cheeto addict, the planet had been overrun by flesh-hungry, zombie-like beasts, and all things natural had started staking claim to territory that had previously been inhabited by humans. And S.T., alongside his Bloodhound-bestie Dennis, had set about saving pets that...

"In a novel of breathtaking reach and inspired imagination, the Booker Prize-winning author of Schindler's Ark tells the stories of two men who have much in common. What separates them is 42,000 years. Shade lives with his second wife amid their clan on the shores of a bountiful lake. A peaceable man, he knows that when danger threatens, the Hero ancestors will call on him to kill, or sacrifice himself, to save his people. Over 40,000 years later,...

Jin is a designer and spreader of plagues intended to keep the human population in balance with the dwindling resources at hand. Jin is also a neuter, one of a clandestine group of naturally genderless humans. When a young woman named Sandy is thrust violently into the world of the neuters, the worlds of genders and neuters begin to clash. From the limestone caverns deep beneath the New Mexico desert to the streets of Albuquerque, Amarillo, and St....

"The short stories in More human than human demonstrate the depth and breadth of artificial humanity in contemporary science fiction. Issues of passing, of what it is to be human, of autonomy and slavery and oppression, and yes, the hubris of creation; these ideas have fascinated us for at least two hundred years, and this selection of stories demonstrates why it is such an alluring and recurring conceit."