Beyond the Rift [Paperback]

Skillfully combining complex science with finely executed prose, these edgy, award-winning tales explore the always-shifting border between the known and the alien.

The beauty and peril of technology and the passion and penalties of conviction merge in stories that are by turns dark, satiric, bold, and introspective. A seemingly humanized monster from John Carpenter’sThe Thingreveals the true villains in an Antarctic showdown. An artificial intelligence shields a biologically-enhanced prodigy from her overwhelmed parents. A deep-sea diver discovers that her true nature lies not within the confines of her mission but in the depths of her psyche. A court psychologist analyzes a psychotic graduate student who has learned to reprogram reality itself. A father tries to hold his broken family together in the wake of an ongoing assault by sentient rainstorms.

Gorgeously saturnine and exceptionally powerful, these collected fictions are both intensely thought-provoking and impossible to forget.

Praise forBeyond the Rift

2017 Grand Prix de lImaginaire Nominee

“Known for his pitch-black views on human nature, and a breathtaking ability to explore the weird side of evolution and animal behavior, Watts is one of those writers who gets into your brain and remains lodged there like an angry, sentient tumor.”
—io9.com(Fall 2013 Must-Read Pick)

Despite a career of more than 20 years, Peter Watts has published only a handful of novels and a not much larger handful of stories, which nevertheless have given him a solid reputation as a sharp and incisive stylist with a rather tragic, if clear-eyed, view of human nature, and the capacity for some remarkable hard-SF inventions.
—Locus

“Possessing the stern moral acuity of James Tiptree, he [Peter Watts] also exhibits the intellectual zest of Arthur C. Clarke.... His killer opening sentences ( First Cl³º