The story is set in several locations; the earlier chapters are set in the town of London, contemporaneous to the time of Barrie''s writing, and involving some time travel of a few years, and other fantasy elements, while remaining within the London setting. The middle chapters that later became Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens are set in London''s famous Kensington Gardens, introduced by the statement that "All perambulators lead to Kensington Gardens". The Kensington Gardens chapters include detailed descriptions of the features of the Gardens, along with fantasy names given to the locations by the story''s characters, especially after "Lock-Out Time", described by Barrie as the time at the end of the day when the park gates are closed to the public, and the fairies and other magical inhabitants of the park can move about more freely than during the daylight, when they must hide from ordinary people. The third section of the book, following the Kensington Gardens chapters, are again set generally in London, though there are some short returns to the Gardens that are not part of the Peter Pan stories. In a two-page diversion in chapter 24, Barrie brings the story to Patagonia, and a journey by ship returning to England at the "white cliffs of Albion".

The Little White Bird

Like The Call of the Wild, The Sea Wolf tells the story of a soft, domesticated protagonist, in this novel''s case an intellectual man named Humphrey van Weyden, forced to become tough and self-reliant by exposure to cruelty and brutality. The story starts with him aboard a San Francisco ferry, called Martinez, which collides with another ship in the fog and sinks. He is set adrift in the Bay, eventually being picked up by Wolf Larsen. Larsen is the captain of a seal-hunting schooner, the Ghost. Brutal and cynical, yet also highly intelligent and intellectual (though highly biased in his opinions, as he was self-taught), he rules over his ship and terrorizes the crew with the aid of his exceptionally great physical strength. Van Weyden adequately describes him as an individualist, hedonist, and materialist. Larsen does not believe in the immortality of the soul, he finds no meaning in his life save for survival and pleasure and has come to despise all human life and deny its value. Being interested in someone capable of intellectual disputes, he somewhat takes care of Van Weyden, whom he calls ''Hump'', while forcing him to become a cabin boy, do menial work, and learn to fight to protect himself from a brutal crew. A key event in the story is an attempted mutiny against Wolf Larsen by several members of the crew. The organizers of the mutiny are Leach and Johnson. Johnson had previously been beaten severely by Larsen, and Leach had been punched earlier while being forced to become a boat-puller, motivating the two. The first attempt is by sending Larsen overboard; however, he manages to climb back onto the ship. Searching for his assailant, he ventures into the sleeping quarters, located beneath the main deck, the only exit being a ladder. Several, at least seven men, take part in the mutiny and attack Larsen. Larsen however, demonstrating his inhuman endurance, strength, and conviction, manages to fight his way through the crew, climb the ladder with several men hanging off him, and escape relatively unharmed. Van Weyden is promoted as mate, for the original mate had been murdered. Larsen later gets his vengeance by torturing his crew, and constantly claiming that he is going to murder Leach and Johnson at his earliest convenience, being after the hunting season is done, as he can''t afford to lose any crew. He later allows them to be lost to the sea when they attempt to flee on a hunting boat. During this section, the Ghost picks up another set of castaways, including a poet named Maud Brewster. Miss Brewster and van Weyden had known each other previously—but only as writers. Both Wolf Larsen and van Weyden immediately feel attraction to her, due to her intelligence and "female delicacy". Van Weyden sees her as his first true love. He strives to protect her from the crew, the horrors of the sea, and Wolf Larsen. As this happens, Wolf Larsen meets his brother Death Larsen, a bitter opponent of his. Wolf kidnapped several of Death''s crew and forced them into servitude to fill his own ranks, lost previously during a storm. During one of Wolf Larsen''s intense headaches, which render him near immobile, van Weyden steals a boat and flees with Miss Brewster. The two eventually land on an uninhabited island, heavily populated with seals. They hunt, build shelter and a fire, and survive for several days, using the strength they gained while on the Ghost. The Ghost eventually crashes on the island, with Wolf Larsen the only crew member. As a revenge, Death Larsen had tracked his brother, bribed his crew, destroyed his sails, and set Larsen adrift at sea. It is purely by chance that van Weyden and Miss Brewster meet Larsen again. Van Weyden obtains all of the firearms left on the ship, but he cannot bear to murder Larsen, who does not threaten him. Van Weyden and Miss Brewster decide they can repair the ship, but Larsen, who intends to die on the island and take them with him, sabotages any repairs they make. After a headache, Larsen is rendered blind. He feigns paralysis and attempts to murder van Weyden when he draws within arm''s reach but just then is hit with a stroke that leaves him blind and the right side of his body paralyzed. His condition only worsens; he loses usage of his remaining arm, leg, and voice. Miss Brewster and van Weyden, unable to bring themselves to leave him to rot, care for him. Despite this kindness, he continues his resistance, setting fire to the bunk''s mattress above him. Van Weyden finishes repairing the Ghost, and he and Miss Brewster set sail. During a violent storm, Wolf Larsen dies. They give Larsen a burial at sea, an act mirroring an incident van Weyden witnessed when he was first rescued. The story ends with the two being rescued by an American revenue cutter.

The Sea-Wolf

Set in South America, Bush, a car-cleaning boy, greets Paul Faustino when he sees him. When he goes to his shed in the slums, Felicia tells him that his sister, Bianca, is missing. He soon finds her watching the night entertainment at an alley. Meanwhile, Otello becomes contracted to the Rialto football team. He is taken to a party at Brabanta''s house and he meets Desmerelda there. After the party, Desmerelda asks him to marry her. Despite Brabanta''s disapproval of their relationship, Otello and Desmeralda live a life under the scrutiny of the media. In an attempt to stop "wolf men" from looking at Bianca, Bush makes her wear an oversized sweatshirt. After a failed hold up targeted at Desmerelda, Brabanta pulls some strings to prevent his and his daughter''s name from newspaper articles mentioning the hold up. Otello assigns Michael to look after Desmerelda. However, when Michael is involved in a nightclub brawl, Desmerelda gets Otello to take Michael back. Meanwhile, Felicia and Bush discuss how to look after Bianca. Felicia forces her breasts against him and goes away just immediately, leaving Bush in a state of emotional confusion. At the same time, Desmerelda discovers that she is pregnant. In response to other racist and defaming sport articles about Otello''s first season in Rialto, Paul lists Otello''s achievements in the first season of his Rialto career. To promote Otello''s product range, the "Paff!" label was developed. Targeted at teenagers, the main theme of the label was rebellion so they used slum kids. Bianca was the most photogenic child at the photoshoot, with the all the advertisements of the "Paff!" label featuring her. With Bianca missing for three days, Bush and Felicia go to Paul for help. They find her dead with new clothes on her body and 100 dollars in her bra. Bush and Felicia are overwhelmed by her death. Meanwhile, Otello is accused of looking at child pornography. In the aftermath, Desmeralda leaves Otello and employs Felicia to look after her son and Bush to learn from her gardener.

Exposure

Audrina Adare lives with her father Damian,who has a strange past, mother Lucietta, aunt Ellsbeth and cousin Vera. Nine years before Audrina was born, her elder sister—who was also named Audrina—was raped and murdered in the woods. Damian convinces the younger Audrina that, by a process of self-hypnosis, she can gain all of the First Audrina''s memories and become just as beloved and special as her dead sister, which is what Audrina wants more than anything else in the world. Audrina is haunted by dreams of her dead sister''s rape and is terrified of sex and men. When she is eight, she meets Arden Lowe and his mother Billie, an amputee. Meanwhile, Lucietta is pregnant yet again. On Audrina''s ninth birthday, Lucietta goes into early labor and dies in childbirth; the baby, a girl, is named Sylvia. More than three years after her birth, Sylvia finally comes home from the hospital and turns out to be mentally challenged. A few years later, Audrina discovers the affair between Lamar and Vera and that Vera is pregnant. In the ensuing confrontation, Vera has a miscarriage. The next day, she leaves town with Lamar. She leaves a note stating that she is Audrina''s paternal half-sister, due to an affair that Ellsbeth had with Damian before he met Lucietta. Shortly after she turns eighteen, Audrina discovers that Damian and Ellsbeth are lovers again; however, tragedy strikes again when Ellsbeth threatens to leave Damian because he will not let her help Vera, who is alone after Lamar committed suicide. The next morning, she is found dead from a mysterious fall down the stairs. Audrina elopes with Arden, hoping to escape her controlling father, and takes Sylvia with her. However, she is still not prepared for sexual intimacy, and her wedding night goes terribly wrong. When the newlyweds return from their disastrous honeymoon, they find that Damian has won over Arden''s mother. He also offers Arden a job at his company. Audrina is upset but goes along with it for the sake of peace. Vera returns suddenly one day and, against Damian''s wishes, stays for a while. It is not long before Vera attempts to seduce Arden. Tragedy strikes again when Billie "falls" down the same steps and dies. Depressed, Audrina pulls away from Arden and Sylvia—Vera and Arden begin an affair. But when Audrina''s love and sexuality finally awakens, she tells Arden that she doesn''t want to lose him and they spend the first happy night of their marriage together. One night, she is pushed down the stairs and falls into a coma. With Sylvia''s help, she awakens and escapes, realizing that she cannot die without learning the secret of First Audrina. Audrina confronts her father and he confesses that the First and Best Audrina never existed. It was Audrina herself who was gang-raped in the woods. The rape left her so traumatized that she attempted suicide. In an attempt to save Audrina from herself, Damian subjected her to electro-convulsive therapy, trying to erase the memory of the rape. Following Damian''s lead, the family conspired to convince Audrina that the rape didn''t happen to her but to an older sister who died before she was born. Eventually the repetition of this story worked. Since the family deliberately changed the clocks in the house and also ripped off calendar days, her sense of time was also altered. Audrina realizes that Arden had been present and witnessed the rape but ran away in fear. She also realizes that Vera was the only other person who knew she would be coming home through the woods that day. However, Vera denies being involved, though her reaction suggests she is in fact guilty. When Vera turns to run, she falls down the stairs, later dying of her numerous injuries. Heartbroken, Audrina decides to take herself and Sylvia away but Sylvia refuses to leave. Audrina realizes that where there is love, there can be forgiveness and the promise of a fresh start. She decides to stay, finally feeling like the loving "First" Audrina she has always strived to be.

My Sweet Audrina

Wheelers chronicles mankind''s first contact with an alien intelligence, a meeting which takes place out of necessity when a rogue asteroid enters the solar system and is set on a collision course with Earth by an advanced and hitherto unknown Jovian species as a way of avoiding a devastating impact to their own world. The story opens with a feeling of anachronism, as two of the novel''s central characters (Charles Dunsmoore, a career archaeologist and his volatile graduate student Prudence Odingo) work in the year 2194 to interpret and preserve artefacts found in the vicinity of the Great Sphinx, which is being disassembled in order to save it from the advancing waters of a clogged and flooding Nile River after the collapse of the Aswan Dam. A lover''s quarrel between the two sends Prudence off in a blind rage, and leaves Dunsmoore the sole caretaker of an important discovery—a position which catapults his career and sets the tension for the novel''s second half. Professionally and personally embittered by the success of Dunsmoore, Prudence begins a life of semi-legal interplanetary exploration (referenced by the book but never fully explained) and makes a living selling cosmic oddities to the highest black market bidder. This dangerous and profitable lifestyle acquaints her with legal authorities as well as the Belters—a group of Zen Buddhists (known as The Order of the Cuckoo) who have populated and mined both Earth''s Moon and the asteroid belt that lies between the terrestrial planets and the Jovian worlds of the outer solar system. Her smuggling career culminates with the discovery of a trove of buried, wheeled, and presumably alien artefacts on Callisto. She takes these ''wheelers'' to earth intending to sell them, but a government investigation headed by Dunsmoore concludes them to be inauthentic. As the story progresses, another main character materializes in the form of the aptly named Moses Odingo, son of Prudence''s sister Charity and animal-handler extraordinaire. His life becomes one of the novel''s several core plots, circumstance and apparent fate conspiring to send him on a worldwide journey of hardship and tribulation. During this time, both Earth-bound scientists and the Belters notice that the innermost moons of Jupiter have mysteriously realigned, altering the trajectory of a once unimportant comet and setting in motion a direct collision with Earth. This is courtesy of the stuffily bureaucratic blimps—intelligent extraterrestrials living in the turbulence of Jupiter''s upper atmosphere whose advanced gravity technology allows them to alter the orbital plane of the planet''s moons and thereby avoid the type of cometary impact which, obliquely, precipitated their exodus from an unknown ''Firsthome'' to Jupiter itself. Left with 12 years until impact and now convinced of the wheelers'' authenticity, Earth''s governmental authorities speed a mission to the Jovian satellites in hopes of contacting the as yet unseen alien lifeforms. Dunsmoore is selected to lead the group, with the assumption that his experience with decrypting anthropological artifacts on earth will aid in establishing communiqué with the Jovians. The years tick by without consequence as Dunsmoore and his team search in vain for evidence of alien life on Jupiter''s moons, convinced by terrestrial scientists that the planet itself is entirely inhospitable to life (he is warned of the danger of this erroneous presupposition by, appropriately enough, contemporary science-fiction authors). As the tension on Earth grows unbearable, Prudence Odingo flies her personal craft out to give Dunsmoore''s team a push in what she believes to be the correct direction. Hacking into one of the probes that Dunsmoore''s been carefully bobbing around the lifeless stratosphere of Jupiter, Odingo''s team sends the RCV into the lower atmosphere, immediately encountering alien lifeforms both advanced and simplistic. Through a quirk of fate and timing, her team manages to save a blimp by the name of Bright Halfholder of the Violent Foam, part of a ''skydiving'' rebel faction known as The Instrumentality. Odingo encourages Moses, now a young man, to make a harrowing high-speed journey out to the moons, hoping to use his uncanny knack for animal communication to establish a rapport with Halfholder. The ploy works, but the Jovians—who live for millions of years and rely on an arcane and tedious system of legal councils—spend too long arguing and contemplating to successfully redirect the comet. The Instrumentality stages a successful coup, but in the end it is Dunsmoore (who has been redeemed by the threat to his home planet) who hijacks the alien gravity technology and pilots Io into a diversionary orbit around the comet itself, barely saving Earth from total annihilation—though millions die as the remnants of the comet and the sulfurous outgassing of ruined Io cascade into Earth.

Wheelers

The novel is split into three main sections. (I) Sunspace: 2021 ... The Bulero family/corporation, inventors and marketers of Bulerite which is used to build the huge cities which house the Earth''s (and colonies) teeming millions, are at the pinnacle of their influence and wealth. Unfortunately, it is discovered - too late - that the substance is inherently flawed, in that after a time it destabilizes and self-destructs with spectacular results. Gradually, all the Bulerite on Earth, and that on and in the space colonies throughout the solar system becomes unstable, causing destruction and megadeath. The devastation precipitates a war with Earth''s colonies on the outer planets, with whom a struggle for control of the solar system existed. Many nuclear-tipped missiles explode on Earth which adds to the Bulerite destabilization. The combination of the Bulerite and the nuclear explosions cause a mysterious shroud of radiation to envelop the Earth. All humans on the planet are assumed dead. Before this final devastation, many refugees manage to escape to the Moon, Mars, and Asterome, an orbiting colony situated inside a hollowed-out asteroid at the Moon''s L5 point. Included amongst the refugees are most of Bulero family who end up on Asterome. The leadership of Asterome are now faced with several severe challenges: Handling the influx of refugees, removing any Bulerite used in the construction of Asterome, consolidating their resources now that the Earth can no longer supply them with finished goods, and preventing increasingly aggressive attempts by the outer colonies and remnants of Earth''s government to take control and plunder Asterome. When a means of providing Asterome with propulsion is discovered, the leadership of Asterome decide that leaving the solar system is the best option available to ensure Asterome''s short-term survival as well as proving a way for Mankind to survive should the solar system be destroyed by the after-effects of Bulerite and war. After overcoming attempts to stop them, Asterome finally manages to leave the solar system, heading for Alpha Centauri, the nearest star. (II) Macrolife: 3000 ... A thousand years later, Asterome has grown by adding concentric layers of shells around itself, and is now host to millions of humans and Humanity II cybernetic organisms. The invention of engines that can surpass the speed of light has made it possible for the colony to explore far and wide; the second part finds them studying a planet orbiting the star Praesepe over 500 light years away. John Bulero, a young clone of one of the original Bulero''s, decides to see what life is like on a planet, and lives for a while amongst the natives, descendants of a human colony that has reverted back to savagery. His experiences, while tragic, enable him to grow as an individual. Eventually, Asterome travels back to the solar system to see how events there have unfolded. Their arrival coincides with the first time humans meet an intelligent alien species which is itself experimenting with Macrolife, and, together, the species begin a process of intermingling and further expansion into the universe. (III) The Dream of Time ... A hundred billion years have passed, and Macrolife is now the dominant culture throughout the universe, which is, at this stage, beginning to contract into its final death throes. Most life is in the form of a Hyperpersonal Aggregate; an amalgam of individuals of all kinds. The aggregate re-individualizes John Bulero again, to help them solve the problem of how Macrolife can survive beyond the death of the Universe. Eventually, they discover many Macrolife survivors from many previous cycles of the universe, who help them to conquer time itself.

Macrolife

When a bomb explodes on a baggage carousel at Heathrow Airport, killing his ex-wife, David Markham tries to unravel the mystery surrounding her seemingly pointless death. But with unresolved questions about himself, his job, and his loving but adulterous wife, he soon finds himself immersed in the deeper waters of middle class revolution. When a protest at a cat show turns ugly and he is beaten up by angry cat lovers, then arrested and tried, Markham enlists in the cause of the rebellious Chelseans - imagining he will uncover the persons and causes responsible for his ex''s murder. Slowly, he succumbs to the call of subversion and gradually finds himself a terrorist functionary. Along the way we meet an assortment of wonderfully ballardian characters: Markham''s wife, who continues to use her arm canes though her leg injuries from an accident with a tram have completely healed. A sociopathic, college film studies lecturer/terrorist cell leader who takes Markham for a lover; a troubled priest and his Chinese girlfriend; a former MI5 bombmaker turned revolutionary. And a kindly pediatrican cum terrorist mastermind. Ultimately, Markham learns the reasons behind his former wife''s murder have a very different logic than he had imagined.

Millennium People

One of the experimental texts Vidal refers to as his "inventions", Duluth describes both a novel written about Duluth (that, bordered on one side by Minneapolis and on the other by Michigan, bears scant resemblance to the real city) and a television series of the same name; when residents of the city die, they end up as characters in the TV show, who can in some cases continue interacting with the living through the TV screen. When members of the cast of Duluth, the TV show, die, they become characters in Rogue Duke, a romance novel serialized in the pages of Redbook, the popular women''s magazine. The author of all three, Rosemary Klein Kantor, is herself a character in the book, making cameo appearances throughout. She generates texts with the aid of a computer, adding to its numerous geographical and historical errors her mangled clichés ("Bellamy Craig II plays hardball...in the fast lane!") and unusual grammatical constructions ("Her handcuffs now handcuffed her hands"). However, there is in the city of Duluth a mysterious cerise flying saucer whose insectoid alien inhabitants, after meddling in the spectacularly corrupt politics of the city, use an accidental tense shift to seize control of the computer, erasing the human race from the face of the earth and bringing the book to an end.

Duluth

Veronica “Ronnie” Miller’s life was turned upside down when her parents divorced and her father, Steve, moved to Wrightsville, North Carolina. Three years later, she remains distant from her parents, particularly Steve, until her mother decides it would be everyone’s best interest if she and her brother spent the summer with him. Resentful and rebellious, Ronnie rejects Steve’s attempts to reach out to her and threatens to return to New York before the summer’s end. But soon Ronnie meets Will, the last person she thought she’d ever be attracted to, and finds herself falling for him, opening herself up to the greatest happiness – and pain – that she has never known. Ronnie finds out that Steve has stomach cancer. She and her brother, Jonah, finish the window that Jonah started with Steve for the church. Jonah goes back to New York with their mother, but Ronnie stays back with Steve until his death. She completes the song on the piano that he began to write. She and Will part after the funeral and she believes that they will never meet properly again, she thought it was over, but after Christmas, he transfers and goes to college in New York, near where Ronnie goes to college, so he can spend more time with Ronnie.

The Last Song

The novel begins in the final days of Nazi Germany with Hitler sheltering in his bunker. Hitler officially commits suicide along with Eva Braun. However, after Eva kills herself, a preselected double takes Hitler''s place and is disposed of along with Braun in the Chancellery yard for the Russians to find. The real Hitler escapes the bunker along with Colonel Günther Brumm, a German commando officer and together with a rag tag team, escape Berlin. Stalin meanwhile has intuitively deduced that the psychological make-up of Hitler is not that of a man who would commit suicide. Hence he sets up a special team of five operatives with wide ranging powers to round up Hitler and bring him back for Stalin''s personal revenge. The novel soon becomes both a thrilling chase and a ruthless game of cat and mouse. Hitler and his protectors make their way across Germany, a charred wasteland where Hitler''s dreams of glory lie in ruins and ashes. Their ultimate goal is Italy (where they have been promised sanctuary) but the Russian team is in hot pursuit. Along the way, Heywood provides an unforgettable historical snapshot of the aftermath of World War II. It is worth noting that many of the German survivors are depicted as admirable, while Red Army and even United States Army personnel are shown to be either timid, short-sighted, or corrupt. In one particularly chilling sequence, US Army Major Rosemary Wilson, a rich older woman, stumbles upon Waller, the beautiful German girl who is carrying the plans for Hitler''s escape. Instead of interrogating the girl or turning her over to the American MP''s, Major Wilson insists on renting a room for Waller and taking her to dinner at a small, dimly lit restaurant nearby. Wholly intent upon a classic lesbian seduction, Rosemary Wilson proves no match for the highly-disciplined German girl. She drinks far too much at dinner and falls into bed in a state of blissful anticipation, only to be found dead the next morning with an SS dagger buried in her breast. The Russians ultimately catch Hitler and bring him back to Stalin. Hitler is secretly imprisoned in a hanging cage in a sub-basement of the Kremlin which is too small for Hitler to either stand or lie fully. He is fed scraps through the bars of the cage and allowed no toilet facilities. Over the years, Hitler changes to a filthy, senile beast who has his right leg amputated above the knee and his left leg amputated above the ankle as gangrene sets in. He is finally executed by Petrov when Stalin is on his death bed and the sub-basement in which Hitler was kept is walled off forever.

The Berkut

The Help is set in the early 1960s in Jackson, Mississippi, and told primarily from the first-person perspectives of three women: Aibileen, Minny, and Skeeter. Aibileen is an African-American maid who cleans houses and cares for the young children of various white families. Her first job since her own 24-year-old son, Treelore, died from an accident on his job is tending the Leefolt household and caring for their toddler, Mae Mobley. Minny is Aibileen''s confrontational friend who frequently tells her employers what she thinks of them, resulting in having been fired from nineteen jobs. Minny''s most recent employer was Mrs. Walters, mother of Hilly Holbrook. Hilly is the social leader of the community, and head of the Junior League. She is the nemesis of all three main characters. Eugenia "Skeeter" Phelan is the daughter of a prominent white family whose cotton farm employs many African-Americans in the fields, as well as in the household. Skeeter has just finished college and comes home with dreams of becoming a writer. Her mother''s dream is for Skeeter to get married. Skeeter frequently wonders about the sudden disappearance of Constantine, the maid who raised her. She had been writing to Skeeter while she was away at college and her last letter promised a surprise upon her homecoming. Skeeter''s family tells her that Constantine abruptly quit, then went to live with relatives in Chicago. Skeeter does not believe that Constantine would just leave and continually pursues anyone she thinks has information about her to come forth, but no one will discuss the former maid. The life that Constantine led while being the help to the Phelan family leads Skeeter to the realization that her friends'' maids are treated very differently from how the white employees are treated. She decides (with the assistance of a publisher) that she wants to reveal the truth about being a colored maid in Mississippi. Skeeter struggles to communicate with the maids and gain their trust. The dangers of undertaking writing a book about African-Americans speaking out in the South during the early ''60s hover constantly over the three women. Racial issues of overcoming long-standing barriers in customs and laws are experienced by all of the characters. The lives and morals of Southern socialites are also explored.

The Help

The protagonist, Larry Dever, is gravely injured resulting in a radical surgical procedure, a hemicorporectomy, in which tissue below the waist is removed. He is outfitted with a set of intelligent mechanical legs, a ''manniquin,'' and is placed into suspended animation until the damaged tissue can be restored. He wakes at a time when cloning technology can replace his legs—for a price. Years before he was awakened, a clone, or ''bud child,'' was created and is now a thriving young boy without language. Horrified by the prospect of his child being sacrificed to provide him with a new lower body, Larry opts to return to suspended animation. His child, ''Dim Dever,'' is selected by the guiding world computer, ''Olga'', to carry his ancient genes to a possible new colony on a planet orbiting Procyon. Larry awakens again in a nightmare future. Far from the highly advanced past, now an enormous human population (possibly in the trillions) covers every inch of the planet. Technology and science have degraded, and all freely breeding species have been exterminated. The ''Hive'' or human population within its computer-supported subterranean culture ruthlessly hunts, kills, and recycles anyone who does not conform. As Larry is trying to adapt to his new life, without most of his own body or his ''cyber'' torso, something re-awakens an ancient, half-derelict cyborg, the Godwhale of the title. This enormous ''rake'' is an ocean-going biota harvester built in part from a genetically-modified blue whale. Initially attempting to rejoin human civilization, the Godwhale (named Rorqual Maru or ''Whale Ship'' in Japanese) eventually teams up with a genetically modified clone of Larry, Larry himself, and an assortment of misfits and refugees from the Hive. Together they set out to try to find out what mysteriously brings ''the marine biota'' back to the previously sterile oceans, while a tiny group from ''the Hive'', the outcasts, and their cyber deities survive and thrive in the face of incredible bungling by the ''Class One'' computer that manages humanity and the various castes of ''Nebish'' humans brought into the fight.

Over 8000 Takeaways For Your Brain!

Read - Listen - Learn

The Little White Bird

By J. M. Barrie

The Sea-Wolf

By Jack London

Exposure

By Mal Peet

My Sweet Audrina

By V. C. Andrews

Wheelers

By Ian Stewart

Macrolife

By George Zebrowski

Millennium People

By J. G. Ballard

Duluth

By Gore Vidal

The Last Song

By Nicholas Sparks

The Berkut

No Author Listed

The Help

By Kathryn Stockett

The Godwhale

By T. J. Bass