What began as a technothriller continues as high adventure in the newly savage ruins of civilization. In late 2024, Daybreak, a movement of post-apocalyptic eco-saboteurs, smashed modern civilization to its knees. In the losing, hopeless struggle against Daybreak, Heather O’Grainne played a major role. That story was told in Directive 51. Now Heather’s story continues in Daybreak Zero. In the summer of 2025, she leads a tiny organization of scientists, spies, scouts, entrepreneurs, engineers, dreamers, and daredevils based in Pueblo, Colorado. Both of the almost-warring governments of the United States have charged them with an all but impossible mission: find a way to put the world back together. But Daybreak’s triumph has flung the world back centuries in technology, politics, and culture. Pro-Daybreak Tribals openly celebrate ending the world as we know it. Army regiments have to fight their way in and out of Pennsylvania. The Earth’s environment is saturated with plastic-devouring biotes and electronics-corroding nanoswarm. A leftover Daybreak device drops atom bombs from the moon on any outpost of the old civilization it can spot. Confined to her base in Pueblo to give birth to her first child, Heather recruits and monitors a coterie of tech wizards, tough guys, and modern-day frontier scouts: a handful of heroes to patrol a continent. All the news is bad: Tribals have overrun Indiana and Illinois; the last working aircraft carrier sits helplessly out in the Indian Ocean, not daring to come closer to land; the crash of one of the last working airplanes kills a vital industrialist; Tribals try to force appeasement on the Provi government while the Temper government faces a rebellion of religious fanatics; seventeen states are lost to the Tribals as California drifts into secession andhereditary monarchy, and everywhere, Provis and Tempers lurch toward civil war. Heather’s agents have exceptional courage, initiative, skill, intelligence, and daring, but can they be enough? For the sake of everything from her newborn son to her dying nation, can she forge them into a the weapon that can at last win the world back from the overwhelming, malevolent force of Daybreak? Her success or failure may change everything for the next thousand years, beginning from Daybreak Zero

View our feature on John Barnes’s Directive 51. The first book in a new post-apocalyptic trilogy from “a master of the genre” Heather O’Grainne is the Assistant Secretary in the Office of Future Threat Assessment, investigating rumors surrounding something called “Daybreak.” The group is diverse and radical, and its members have only one thing in common-their hatred for the “Big System” and their desire to take it down. Now, seemingly random events simultaneously occurring around the world are in fact connected as part of Daybreak’s plan to destroy modern civilization-a plan that will eliminate America’s top government personnel, leaving the nation no choice but to implement its emergency contingency program… Directive 51

Un début de guerre nucléaire libère dans l’atmosphère d’immenses volumes de méthane enfoui sous les fonds marins polaires. Or le méthane est un gaz à effet de serre. Il va faire chaud, partout sur la planète déjà torride, l’été prochain, en 2028. Des ouragans gigantesques vont parcourir les océans, se transformer en tornades au-dessus des continents, faire naître des vents supersoniques et soulever des marées de tempête de cent mètres de haut. Et autant de passions humaines, de l’amour à la panique. John Barnes réunit, dans ce somptueux roman-catastrophe, une science approfondie de la météorologie et de l’écologie, un sens aigu du suspense et un talent impressionnant qui lui permet de dresser le tableau d’une planète entière balayée par la mère des tempêtes. Au-delà d’une fiction, Barnes nous prévient de ce qui nous attend, sur une Terre déjà menacée par le réchauffement planétaire

It is 2028. A strike to destroy an illegal Arctic weapons cache has a catastrophic side effect. Massive amounts of energy are liberated from the polar ice, suddenly and radically warming the Earth’s climate. In the middle of the Pacific, a gigantic hurricane thousands of miles across is forming, larger than any in human history. A storm with winds of supersonic speed. A storm that changes direction at whim. A storm that refuses to die. A storm so vast it spawns dozens more in its wake. Blinded by intrigue, expedience, and greed, the world’s politicians and power brokers ignore the killer storm’s threat until it’s too late. The death toll climbs to the tens of millions as it savages the Pacific coast, and the smaller storms it spawns are wreaking havoc across the planet. While the survivors scramble for advantage, a handful of courageous men and women undertake a desperate plan to save humanity from total destruction—a plan so visionary it may alter forever the future of the human race

For more than a year, Heather O’Grainne and her small band of heroes, operating out of Pueblo, Colorado, have struggled to pull the United States back together after it shattered under the impact of the event known as Daybreak. Now they are poised to bring the three or four biggest remaining pieces together, with a real President and Congress, under the full Constitution again. Heather is very close to fulfilling her oath, creating a safe haven for civilization to be reborn. But other forces are rising too. Some people like the new life better… In a devastated, splintered, postapocalyptic United States, with technology thrown back to biplanes, black powder, and steam trains, a tiny band of visionaries struggles to re-create Constitutional government and civilization itself, as a new dark age takes shape around them. An author who “excels at combining the tension of the chase with the elements of science fiction,” John Barnes delivered a fascinating and frightening scenario about the collapse of America’s political and social infrastructure following the destruction of modern technology. Now, the author of Directive 51 and Daybreak Zero continues his story of the wild postapocalyptic frontier—and humanity’s last desperate attempt to re-civilize their world…

This fourth volume of the year's best science fiction and fantasy features thirty stories by some of the genre's greatest authors, including Jonathan Carroll, Neil Gaiman, Kij Johnson, Kelly Link, Paul McAuley, RJ Parker, Robert Reed, Rachel Swirsky, Catherynne M. Valente, and many others. Selecting the best fiction from Asimov's, F&SF, Strange Horizons, Subterranean, Tor.com, and other top venues, The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy is your guide to magical realms and worlds beyond tomorrow

In the new millennium, what secrets lay beyond the far reaches of the universe? What mysteries belie the truths we once held to be self evident? The world of science fiction has long been a porthole into the realities of tomorrow, blurring the line between life and art. Now, in The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Ninth Annual Collection the very best SF authors explore ideas of a new world. This venerable collection brings together short stories from award winning authors and masters of the field such as Robert Reed, Alastair Reynolds, Damien Broderick, Elizabeth Bear, Paul McAuley and John Barnes. And with an extensive recommended reading guide and a summation of the year in science fiction, this annual compilation has become the definitive must-read anthology for all science fiction fans and readers interested in breaking into the genre. In this collection of thirty-five science fiction stories from 2011, Gardner Dozois once again identifies the best stories of the year