319 pages | Tor Books (March 1995) | ISBN: 0312856415 | PDF | 1.1 MB

The second installment in the Chaos Chronicles dispatches genetically altered earthling John Bandicut to a massive planet-like place called Shipworld to help the alien Ik find his friend. In lieu of a preface, John\'s history and earlier adventures are revealed via one of Carver\'s several futuristic beings?a chaos-manipulating Quarx that lives inside the protagonist\'s head. Readers, too, might hope for the Quarx\'s clarifying assistance: characters\' motivations are somewhat hazy here?Why must John battle Shipworld\'s malevolent elements? What is Ik\'s secret agenda??and an assortment of odd keystrokes that supposedly identify the speakers in a series of inner and outer voices proves confusing. Also, Carver is slow to deliver on his implicit promise to deliver hard science. Still, his story is capably told, with welcome infusions of humor periodically bolstering the complex narrative.

325 pages | Tor Books (April 1994) | ISBN: 0312856407 | PDF | 1.1 MB

In this promising series kickoff about an astronaut exploring the surface of Neptune’s moon, Triton, Carver ( Dragons in the Stars ) masterfully captures the joy of exploration, although the story itself follows a fairly standard save-the-world plot. Pilot John Bandicut has been cut off from his internal link to the “datanet” by faulty technology, leaving him subject to maddening “silence-fugues.” His need for contact makes him a perfect candidate for a symbiotic relationship with the alien quarx, who are trying to save humanity from a mysterious disaster threatening Earth. The quarx, creations whose understanding of Terran culture comes mostly from monitoring old TV and radio programs, have a certain gee-whiz quality, although their interactions with the datanet are intriguing. A rather adolescent love story combines amusingly with an unlikely case of xenophobia, and a fiery conclusion sets Bandicut up for further adventures in yet another alien world, where Carver may find greater room to employ his gift for the fine rendering of difficult scientific concepts.

432 pages | Tor Books (October 28, 2008) | ISBN: 0312864531 | PDF | 1.6 MB

The long-anticipated fourth entry in Carver’s Chaos Chronicles (after 1996’s The Infinite Sea) is space opera at its most agreeably and classically science fictional. Someone or something is plotting murder on an interstellar scale, and a small company of exiles led by human John Bandicut may be the galaxy’s only chance of salvation. The prospective victims are sentient stars living in the Orion Nebula; half the challenge is simply opening communications. Luckily, Bandicut’s allies and sponsors include robots, noncorporeal symbiotes and the incredibly ancient multidimensional entity Deeaab. With such a large cast and a parallel plot involving a threat to Earth itself, character development is necessarily sketched broadly. Some may find the narrative overly stage-managed, but Carver skillfully rotates viewpoints and weaves the choreography directly into the plot. This installment is a cut above the earlier books and will be entirely accessible to any reader who appreciates high-powered stellar and n-dimensional physics blended with old-school space-faring.

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The Design of Modern Steel Bridges /by Sukhen Chatterjee (Author) .Bridges are great symbols of mankind’s conquest of space. They are a monument to his vision and determination, but these alone are not enough. An appreciation of the mathematical theories underlying bridge design is essential to resist the physical forces of nature and gravity.
The object of this book is to explain firstly the nature of the problems associated with the building of bridges with steel as the basic material, and then the theories that are available to tackle them.
The book covers:
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