What would you do if life were a video game? Set in the year 2022, Sword Art Online (SAO) is a Mass Multiplayer Virtual Online Roleplaying Game (MMVORG), where you put on a helmet, and the surroundings around you evolve into a video game world. Taylor is a small town girl, quiet and shy, who doesn’t interact with her friends in the real life much. Her only means of escape – is Sword Art Online, where she plays as a boy character as a beta-tester. Why? Boys typically play video games more than girls, and Taylor decided that people wouldn’t play much attention to her if she were a guy. But then, things go too far on the public launch of the game. The game creator not only removes Taylor’s mask as a girl, but he also removes the “logout” option, the player’s only means of escape from the real world. Things are real. To Taylor, SAO is exactly like the real world, and she has to learn to face her fears as she makes new friends. But what she fails to realize in time, the most important thing in the game. If your HP dies in SAO, your character dies in the game, thus, ending your life in the real world. And Taylor has to figure out, just how real that is.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER -- In Cory Doctorow’s wildly successful Little Brother, young Marcus Yallow was arbitrarily detained and brutalized by the government in the wake of a terrorist attack on San Francisco—an experience that led him to become a leader of the whole movement of technologically clued-in teenagers, fighting back against the tyrannical security state. A few years later, California's economy collapses, but Marcus’s hacktivist past lands him a job as webmaster for a crusading politician who promises reform. Soon his former nemesis Masha emerges from the political underground to gift him with a thumbdrive containing a Wikileaks-style cable-dump of hard evidence of corporate and governmental perfidy. It’s incendiary stuff—and if Masha goes missing, Marcus is supposed to release it to the world. Then Marcus sees Masha being kidnapped by the same government agents who detained and tortured Marcus years earlier. Marcus can leak the archive Masha gave him—but he can’t admit to being the leaker, because that will cost his employer the election. He’s surrounded by friends who remember what he did a few years ago and regard him as a hacker hero. He can’t even attend a demonstration without being dragged onstage and handed a mike. He’s not at all sure that just dumping the archive onto the Internet, before he’s gone through its millions of words, is the right thing to do. Meanwhile, people are beginning to shadow him, people who look like they’re used to inflicting pain until they get the answers they want. Fast-moving, passionate, and as current as next week, Homeland is every bit the equal of Little Brother—a paean to activism, to courage, to the drive to make the world a better place.

The drive for competitive gaming is dead for Ren Hernandez, after being cheated in a nationwide gaming tournament. He disconnected from the game he loved, his friends, until he found another game. Restore faith in the midst of the unfair lives! Reconnect to friends, families, and relatives. Reinstall that burning passion!

Xavier Brooks is one of the best hackers in the world. Too bad the government wants him dead. Welcome to a world where your every movement is watched. Welcome to a world were your every step, your every act, your every word, is cataloged and tracked. Welcome to a world where you are just one mistake away from an instant and painful death. Welcome to Cronos. Say hello to your future. In a totalitarian world where every aspect of society is controlled by a sentient super-computer, teenage thief and outcast Xavier Brooks has learned to live his life outside of the law. Survival comes naturally to him, and he has learned to keep out of the way of those that would wish him harm. But one day, Xavier makes that one mistake. Caught in the act and stabbed in the back, Brooks finds himself slammed with the harshest of punishments: Blacklisted by the government and sentenced to public execution. With no where to turn and death staring him in the face, Xavier is forced to cooperate with a group of mysterious, powerful criminals that present him with a simple choice: join them or die. But with nothing being is as it seems, Xavier becomes tangled up in an incredible conspiracy that threatens to destroy the very fabric of society - forever. Blacklist: The Network is a high-paced, slam-bang sci-fi thriller that dares to ask how much of ourselves should we be willing to give up to do what is right, and how far is too far to save the ones that we love? Cover art by: @JLanger Blacklist: The Network is not a fan-fiction and its plot is unrelated to the show "The Blacklist" © 2012 - 2014 by: XtraCredit All Rights Reserved