Watkins Media

An omnibus edition consisting of all three volumes of Madeline Ashby's epic sci-fi masterwork, The Machine Dynasty. Collects vN, iD and ReV.

vN
Amy Peterson is a von Neumann machine, a self-replicating humanoid robot. For the past five years, she has been grown slowly as part of a mixed organic/synthetic family. She knows very little about her android mother's past, so when her grandmother arrives and attacks her mother, little Amy wastes no time: she eats her alive.

Now she carries her malfunctioning granny as a partition on her memory drive, and she's learning impossible things about her clade's history - like the fact that the failsafe that stops all robots from harming humans has failed… Which means that everyone wants a piece of her, some to use her as a weapon, others to destroy her.

iD
Javier is a self-replicating humanoid on a journey of redemption. Javier's quest takes him from Amy's island, where his actions have devastating consequences for his friend, toward Mecha where he will find either salvation... or death.

ReV
The Rapture, which vN were engineered for, finally comes to pass. Now that the failsafe that once kept vN from harming humans has been hacked, all are discovering the promise - and the peril - of free will.

With her consciousness unleashed across computer systems all across the world, the vicious vN Portia stands poised to finally achieve her lifelong dream of bringing humanity to its knees. The old battle between her and her granddaughter Amy comes to an epic conclusion in the war for the very systems that keeps the planet running. Can Amy get her family to the stars before Portia destroys every opportunity for escape and freedom?

File Under: Science Fiction [ Von Neumann Sisters | Fail Safe Fail | Robot Nation | Internet Ex-Portia ]

We know from countless spirituality and self-help books that authentic joy has no object-it is truly free and boundless. And yet, try as we might, how many of us can say that joy is more than a fleeting fleeting?

Daniel Odier's approach, which is based in part on his study of Chinese Zen, is refreshingly straightforward. All it requires is a willingness to disengage from our habitual ways of thinking and practice being present throughout the day. He calls his method, "The Practice of Consciousness." Its purpose is to unlock our spontaneity and recover our innocence and creativity. He writes,

"Consciousness manifests itself as presence. To work with presence is similar to learning a musical instrument, the body being our instrument. To enter this state, take a sensation such as water flowing into your hand or the feel of your bare feet on the ground. Enter deeply into the contact; breathe by relaxing your abdomen; and after fifteen or twenty seconds, leave the sensation and return to your habitual mode. Doing this thirty, forty or fifty times a day allows us to enter into a deep acquaintance with sensation."

With a nod to Aldous Huxley, whose book Doors of Perception laid the groundwork for the psychedelic and sexual revolutions, Odier's aim is nothing short of total human liberation. Still, he is realistic about the power that habit and our ingrained ways of operating in the world has over us. To counter them, he offers up some mischievous advice--like this,

"There is something suspect about our adoration of harmony. One of the things I fantasize about is replacing the Buddha on my altar with one of Caesar. The harmony of the Buddha puts us to sleep and makes us soft, but the chaos of Caesar can wake us up. Every morning before this altar we would abandon harmony in favor of the infinite possibilities that chaos represents."

With Doors of Joy, Daniel Odier has discovered the trip-wire that keeps us from experiencing lasting joy and he gives us the tool kit that will bring it back into our lives for good.

Running Out of Time asks why running matters, and what its history of collective struggle can tell us about living in a sedentary society on the verge of climate collapse.

Running is at the core of human experience. From our prehistoric ancestors who hunted and lived by moving fast on their feet, to our desk-bound selves who put on our trainers to stay sane, human beings have always run in order to learn about our lives and our world.

But the scientists who first studied running saw it as just another form of labour, fundamentally the same as punching rivets. Their mistake meant that, for almost a century, we forgot what it is that is so special about running: it's not like work at all, but is instead a profoundly human form of exploration and play that can teach us about our potentials as a species.

It's only by running right to our limits that we find the kind of freedom that allows us to collectively go beyond what we thought we could do. The freedom of running stands in total opposition to the unfreedom of our modern lives, and shows us a way out - not a return to prehistory, but an acceleration towards a newly designed social world, where we can chase down the horizons of the possible as fast as our legs will carry us. In dark times, when widespread depression sees people giving up on their ability to remake the world, that experience of enduring the unendurable allows us to plot a path forward.

Combining first hand accounts of running a really long way with a broader account of human nature, sports science, contemporary capitalism and nihilism in an era of climate collapse, Running Out of Time is a running book about how we can always do more than we think is possible.