A collaboration between over a dozen companies worldwide, nearly every piece of the Spin Light Bike is made of carbon fiber, from the frame to the brakes and even the cranks. As you'd expect, few of these parts are available at your LBS, meaning custom components had to be made to order, so don't be disappointed when we can't give you a price. And for those poor souls griping about carbon fiber's perceived lack of longevity, know this: the Spin's collaborators have logged between 12,000 and 15,000 miles since it's initial build.

Arguably the most widely read science fiction of the 1980s, though rarely recognized as such, were the military techno-thrillers that topped the bestseller lists in that decade—novels like those written by Tom Clancy, Stephen Coonts, Dale Brown, Payne Harrison and Ralph Peters. The genre attracted little attention from serious critics in its heyday, and with the decline in its popularity it has received less attention of all kinds. Nonetheless, the place of these novels in a much longer history of such writing, and its connections with the science fiction tradition more broadly, are both well worth a look.

A penny dreadful (also called penny horrible, penny awful,[1] penny number and penny blood) was a type of British fiction publication in the 19th century that usually featured lurid serial stories appearing in parts over a number of weeks, each part costing a penny. The term, however, soon came to encompass a variety of publications that featured cheap sensational fiction, such as story papers and booklet "libraries." The penny dreadfuls were printed on cheap pulp paper and were aimed primarily at working class adolescents.

With the growth of education in the later part of the 19th century, (Universal education started in England in 1871) demand was growing for reading material aimed at the juvenile market. While the first known edition of what would later become known as a "story paper" was The Young Gentleman's Magazine, published in 1777 the first story paper to make an impact was The Boys' and Girls' Penny Magazine, first published in September 1832. One of the first publications aimed at boys alone was Every Boy's Magazine in 1863. In 1866, Boys of England was introduced as a new type of publication, an eight page magazine that featured serial stories as well as articles and shorts of interests and was printed on cheap paper.

Dime novel, though it has a specific meaning, has also become a catch-all term for several different (but related) forms of late 19th-century and early 20th-century U.S. popular fiction, including “true” dime novels, story papers, five- and ten-cent weekly libraries, “thick book” reprints, and sometimes even early pulp magazines.[1] The term was being used as late as 1940, in the short-lived pulp Western Dime Novels. Dime novels are, at least in spirit, the antecedent of today’s mass market paperbacks, comic books, and even television shows and movies based on the dime novel genres. In the modern age, "dime novel" has become a term to describe any quickly written, lurid potboiler and as such is generally used as a pejorative to describe a sensationalized yet superficial piece of written work.