Mr Timothy P Butcher

Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, veterans of many battles, return in this novel to the seas where they first sailed as shipmates. But Jack is now a senior captain, commanding a line-of-battle ship sent out to reinforce the squadron blockading Toulon, and this is a longer, harder, colder war than the dashing frigate action of his early days.... A sudden turn of events takes him and Stephen off on a hazardous mission to the Greek islands. All his old skills of seamanship - and luck when fighting against odds - come triumphantly into their own as the story concludes with some fierce and thrilling action.

In the year 1689, a cabal of Barbary galley slaves, including one “Half-Cocked Jack” Shaftoe, devises a daring plan to win freedom and fortune. A great adventure ensues that will place the intrepid band at odds with the mighty and the mad, with alchemists, Jesuits, great navies, pirate queens, and vengeful despots across vast oceans and around the globe.

This is high action, ideas driven noir SF of the highest order. Morgan has already established himself as an SF author of global significance. Takeshi Kovacs has come home. Home to Harlan's World. An ocean planet with only 5 percent of its landmass poking above the dangerous and unpredictable seas. Try to get above the weather in anything more sophisticated than a helicopter and the Martian orbital platforms will burn you out of the sky. And death doesn't just wait for you in the seas and the skies.

Packaged in a carnival bundle of timeless truths and Joycean high camp, The Golden Apple serves as a perennial instruction manual for life on Earth in which you'll be lucky enough to learn: the Guerrilla Ontology of Markoff Chaney; the secret history of Atlantis; why gorillas and dolphins don't ordinarily talk to humans; the conspiracy against sex; the origins of the Trojan War (starring Eris, the namesake of our solar system's newest planet); the startling truth about UFOs.