"Watts has expanded his focus without diminishing the obsessive drive of his plotting or his prose. [His] vision of the near future offers scant reason for hope. What makes his novel exhilarating instead of depressing is the conviction and control he brings to his material -- I have no hesitation in recommending both books to readers interested in up-to-date science fiction with a seriously paranoid edge.

- The New York Times

"A sequel of considerable merit. [Maelstrom] becomes something quite different from Starfish, and quite fascinating as well... A unique version of cyberspace rendered beautifully with literary skill and a technological sophistication admirably verging on mystical speculation... an excellent and, on balance, quite literarily-successful science fiction novel."

- Norman Spinrad, Asimov's

ßehemoth ... is the most gripping and the most thought-out [book that Watts has yet written] ... Like Greg Egan's "Reasons to be Cheerful", Watts is arguing for an entirely different way of understanding and presenting character, one that reconfigures both how personality is constructed and how actions are to be understood. This seems to me a unique and particularly science-fictional contribution ... For all Watts's dark humor, and for all the incidental thrills of his future, ßehemoth caps a series which is one of the two or three most challenging works I've read in the last decade.

- Graham Sleight, The NY Review of Science Fiction

Written in 1792 it is one of the earliest works on "the woman question". The controversial life of its author caused the earliest feminists to distance themselves from the work. Some major themes include education for girls, the debased position of women in society, the necessary equality of men and women, and the right of women to work.

By the time Dickens set out for America in 1842, he was already a well known author and celebrity. His illuminating book American Notes is his depiction of the New World, a place with both admirable (well run hospitals, prisons, law courts) and despicable (slavery, unsavoury manners) qualities. When first published, his accounts and opinions incited hostile reactions on both sides of the Atlantic.