Search Worlds Without End

In a near-future dystopia, a limited nuclear strike has destroyed portions of Europe, bringing the remaining nation-cities under control of the Second Alliance, a frighteningly fundamentalist international security corporation with designs on world domination. The only defense against the Alliance's creeping totalitarianism is the New Resistance, a polyglot team of rebels that includes Rick Rickenharp, a retro-rocker whose artistic and political sensibilities intertwine, and John Swenson, a mole who has infiltrated the Alliance. As the fight continues and years progress, so does the technology and brutality of the Alliance... but ordinary people like the damaged visionary Smoke, Claire Rimpler on FirStep, and Dance Torrence and his fellow urban warriors on Earth are bound together by the truth and a single purpose: to keep the darkness from becoming humankind's Total Eclipse - or die trying!

An omnibus of all three novels-revised by the author-of the prophetic, still frighteningly relevant cyberpunk masterpieces: Eclipse, Eclipse Penumbra, and Eclipse Corona. With an introduction by Richard Kadrey and biographical note by Bruce Sterling.

Book one of John Shirley's pre-holocaust series, A Song Called Youth.

The Russians didn't use the big nukes.

The ongoing Third World War leaves parts of Europe in ruins. Into the chaos steps the Second Alliance, a multinational eager to impose its own kind of New World Order.

In the United States ... in FirStep, the vast space colony ... and on the artificial island Freezone -- the SA shoulders its way to power, spinning a dark web of media manipulation, propaganda, and infiltration.

Only the New Resistance recognizes the SA for what it really is: a racist theocracy hiding a cult of eugenics.

Enter Rick Rickenharp, a former rock'n'roll cult hero: a rock classicist -- out of place in Europe's underground club scene, populated by "wiredancers" and "minimonos" ... but destined to play a Song Called Youth that will shake the world.

The guerilla war against the Second Alliance and its plans for a European apartheid intensifies in this second volume of John Shirley's A Song Called Youth trilogy. From its beginning, thwarting the Second Alliance has been the first priority of the New Resistance; now the SA has decided it was time to return the favor, Resistance could not be allowed to interfere with the progress of the SA's master plan. Eliminating the rebels will clear the way for Project Total Eclipse, which in turn would stretch the SA's shadow over every remaining outpost of humanity--selecting scapegoats, directing violence, and creating an immutable new order. And the penumbra of the Eclipse would establish complete SA control over the Grid, the space colony and the survivors of the war... and also it to decide the fate of humanity.

The power of the Second Alliance has coalesced and terrorism institutionalized. New concentration camps bring the horrors of "Ethnic Cleansing" to a terrifying intensity. The SA stands poised to conquer the ruins of Europe with brutality. Media manipulation has become mind control--and mind control, an art. Secret treaties have been made in back rooms, on the Internet, and in hidden laboratories. Your only hope is the New Resistance. People like Dance Torrence and his fellow urban warriors on Earth; Claire Rimpler on the L5 colony, FirStep; Smoke, the damaged visionary; and Alouette, a precocious cyber-jacked little girl on the cutting edge on a strange new frontier of human collective-consciousness, the Entelechy. Ordinary people bound together by the truth and a single purpose: to keep the secret darkness from becoming humankind's Total Eclipse--or die trying.