Pace - Halpern, K M

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Résumé :
A mysterious Front, originating in Scotland and slowly expanding outward, threatens humanity's existence. In defiance of the known laws of physics, it only kills humans and is otherwise undetectable. Panic-stricken nations struggle against both the advancing menace and a tide of civil unrest. Desperate individuals must find their own paths, and find them quickly. Although very slow, the Front can be deceptively difficult to escape. Mankind has only a few years to pool its rapidly dwindling resources and save itself from extinction. Amid growing chaos, the novel follows the choices made by a Glaswegian shopkeeper fleeing her rioting city, two National Guardsmen facing an impossible situation in the mountains of Colorado, a young girl whose family is disintegrating around her, and a desperate Chinese prisoner facing the unknown. A last ditch effort by a brilliant scientist and her inexperienced protege may represent humanity's only hope. Through the lens of these lives, and a variety of other stories, essays, and TV transcripts, we experience a world struggling to come to grips with its impending mortality. Prisoners are sacrificed, governments bomb their own people to halt the waves of refugees, suicidal sports form, and life becomes a race for survival against the slowest but surest of enemies.

Biographie:
K.M. Halpern was born in New York and, after spending far too much time there, finally returned to the Cambridge, MA he knew and loved from graduate school. Unfortunately, all that remained was a large Starbucks, several thousand bank branches, and two small universities whose names he forgets. He divides his time between ill-considered technical endeavors and ill-considered literary ones. His current projects include a fourth book of very short works (*The Late Worm*), the second novel in *The Tale of Rin* series, a book of pretentious and largely dystopian short stories (*You May Feel a Small Prick*), and a stage-play about a man whose wife vanishes.K.M. also spends a disturbing amount of time coping with physicsitis, a disease characterized by massive lacunae in one's math knowledge. Oddly enough, for each gap filled three new ones appear. No doubt, this phenomenon easily could be explained through copious hand-waving, a quick and dirty approximation, and a brief, uninformative review of basic math everyone should know but somehow never learned in high school. Unfortunately, K.M. is too busy misunderstanding other areas of math to attend to that.K.M. holds a PhD in theoretical physics from MIT, more commonly known as 'that odd cluster of concrete buildings on the Charles River.' He may be found at...

Sommaire:
A mysterious Front, originating in Scotland and slowly expanding outward, threatens humanity's existence. In defiance of the known laws of physics, it only kills humans and is otherwise undetectable. Panic-stricken nations struggle against both the advancing menace and a tide of civil unrest. Desperate individuals must find their own paths, and find them quickly. Although very slow, the Front can be deceptively difficult to escape. Mankind has only a few years to pool its rapidly dwindling resources and save itself from extinction. Amid growing chaos, the novel follows the choices made by a Glaswegian shopkeeper fleeing her rioting city, two National Guardsmen facing an impossible situation in the mountains of Colorado, a young girl whose family is disintegrating around her, and a desperate Chinese prisoner facing the unknown. A last ditch effort by a brilliant scientist and her inexperienced protege may represent humanity's only hope. Through the lens of these lives, and a variety of other stories, essays, and TV transcripts, we experience a world struggling to come to grips with its impending mortality. Prisoners are sacrificed, governments bomb their own people to halt the waves of refugees, suicidal sports form, and life becomes a race for survival against the slowest but surest of enemies....