In the twenty-fourth century, the Company preserves works of art and extinct forms of life. It recruits orphans from the past, renders them all but immortal, and trains them to serve the Company. One of these is Mendoza, the botanist, who is sent to Elizabethan England to collect samples from the garden of Sir Walter Iden.

Einstein said that the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible. On this issue, two of the world's famous physicists - Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose - disagree. Here, they explain their positions in a work based on six lectures with a final debate.

Metropolis is a city of superheroes where you can become anyone you like. Sankhara is a universe where everything is remade by night, according to the inhabitants' deepest, darkest dreams. Koker Ai is a city of another time and space, where Intana, courtesan to the court of a decaying empire, has just discovered a warrior who cannot die.

In the near future psychologist Natalie Armstrong sees her work suddenly become crucial to a military project for creating mind-control. Meanwhile, as a matter of national security, Jude Westhorpe is tracking a Cold War defector. Somehow Jude and Natalie meet to face trouble together.

It is in the far future. The human species has diversified. Alongside the seed-forms of the Unevolved (ordinary humans) live and work the Augmented, people who have been forged, not born. Nonetheless the Augmented are human beneath their vast and complex biotechnological bodies which allow them to live deep in the oceans and out in space.