Scott Hale

Is it wrong to kill a human ... when you're not human yourself? It's been two hundred years since the Trauma, a catastrophic event of a now forgotten origin, wreaked havoc upon the Earth, reducing the human population from billions to thousands, and leaving the survivors as prey to humanoid hunters. Vrana of the Raven is one of these hunters. Her tribe has made killing humans, now known as the Corrupted, its purpose-to "keep the balance"-to ensure that the Corrupted do not rise to power and lay the Earth to ruin once more. But, one night, in the great northern city-state of Geharra, over ten thousand Corrupted disappear. And if so many can disappear so quickly, what's to stop it from happening again elsewhere, or to Vrana's own? Geharra, however, is not the only place to suffer from strange happenings. In Caldera, Vrana sleeps fitfully, dreaming of a Void and the Witch trapped within. When she is called upon to travel with Serra, Lucan, and Deimos to the abandoned city, she accepts, but only to get away from Caldera, because the Witch that haunts her nightmares has begun to haunt her days.

The Bones of the Earth

"Through hell, we find heaven. Vrana, now a grotesque shadow of her former self, has been enslaved by the Witch and forced into the Void. Meanwhile, the Corrupted involved in the genocide of Geharra and the birth of the Red Worm have begun to impose their worldviews on others. King Edgar is abandoned in the Nameless Forest and forced into a murderous mission that not only reveals the origins of the vermillion veins, but the unholy events that have led to his rule of Eldrus. Atticus, the undying gravedigger, seeks revenge against the king for the death of those he loves, while finding a way through the Black Hour itself to resurrect the dead. Felix, the Holy Child, plagued by visions of Vrana in his sleep, tries to find a way to liberate her from her torment. Unsure who he can trust, he is pulled further into the darkness and treason all around him. Taking place before, during, and after Vrana's journey, The Three Heretics explores those three Corrupted who have, through subterfuge and slaughter, righteousness and reluctance, manipulated the world to their liking, while inadvertently bringing it closer to another Trauma."--Back cover.

The Three Heretics

Peter John

Taha Yasseri

Helen Margetts

Political Turbulence: How Social Media Shape Collective Action

As people spend increasing proportions of their daily lives using social media, such as Twitter and Facebook, they are being invited to support myriad political causes by sharing, liking, endorsing, or downloading. Chain reactions caused by these tiny acts of participation form a growing part of collective action today, from neighborhood campaigns to global political movements. Political Turbulence reveals that, in fact, most attempts at collective action online do not succeed, but some give rise to huge mobilizations—even revolutions. Drawing on large-scale data generated from the Internet and real-world events, this book shows how mobilizations that succeed are unpredictable, unstable, and often unsustainable. To better understand this unruly new force in the political world, the authors use experiments that test how social media influence citizens deciding whether or not to participate. They show how different personality types react to social influences and identify which types of people are willing to participate at an early stage in a mobilization when there are few supporters or signals of viability. The authors argue that pluralism is the model of democracy that is emerging in the social media age—not the ordered, organized vision of early pluralists, but a chaotic, turbulent form of politics. This book demonstrates how data science and experimentation with social data can provide a methodological toolkit for understanding, shaping, and perhaps even predicting the outcomes of this democratic turbulence.

Scott Hale

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