Hard Science Fiction Space Opera

Bren Cameron, acting as the representative of the atevi's political leader, Tabini-aiji, as well as translator between humans and atevi, has undertaken a mission to the human enclave of Mospheira. Both his presence on the island and his absence from the continent have stirred old enemies to realize new opportunities. Old hatreds. Old grudges. Old ambitions. The situation has strengthened the determination of power-seekers on both sides of the strait. Bren knows most of them very well, but not all of them well enough.

It's coming up on Cajeiri's birthday. The boy has been promised he can have the young human children he knew from his voyage sent down from the space station for a two week stay. But there's a far darker business going on in the background - a major split compromising the Assassins' Guild, which furnishes security and law enforcement to the whole continent. Tabini's consort's own father has been barred from court, and may be involved in a new conspiracy against him.

When a hideous accident kills the senior officers of the UNS Hibernia, it leaves a terrified young officer to save 300 colonists and crew aboard a damaged ship on a 17-month gauntlet to reach the colony of Hope Nation. With no chance of rescue or reinforcement, Nicholas Seafort must overcome despair, exhaustion, and guilt. He must conquer malfunctions, mutiny, and an alien horror beyond human understanding. And he must save lives, and take them - in the name of duty.

Warden Torin Kerr has put her past behind her and built a life away from the war and everything that meant. She's created a place and purpose for others like her, a way to use their training for the good of the Confederation. She has friends, family, purpose. Unfortunately, her past refuses to grant her the same absolution. Big Yellow, the ship form of the plastic aliens responsible for the war, returns. The Silsviss test the strength of the Confederation. Torin has to be Gunnery Sergeant Kerr once again and find a way to keep the peace.

Civil war on the world of the atevi is over, but diplomatic disputes and political infighting continue unabated. Bren Cameron, brilliant human diplomat allied with the dominant Western Association, has just returned to the capital from his country home. But his sojourn was anything but restful, for Bren and his associates have had a small war of their own to contend with, ending with rebel leader, Machigi, joining the atevi congress representing the rebels as a member state.

Old Captain Orbus commandeered a ship to flee Spatterjay, desperate to escape the violent planet. Orbus’ alien enemy, the Prador Vrell, is also moving on. The Spatterjay virus mutated him into something even more dangerous. And he’s hunting the Prador King himself - who sought to kill him, to bury the secret of their similar transformations. Orbus and Vrell clash in the Graveyard, a lawless zone where the Prador have seized a key space station. Official action by humanity or Prador would end peace, as a centuries-long cold war simmers.

NASA finally made it. The very first human has just set foot on the surface of our neighbor planet. This is the start of a long research expedition that sent four scientists into space. But the four astronauts of the NASA crew are not the only ones with this destination. The privately financed "Mars for Everyone" initiative has also targeted the Red Planet. Twenty men and women have been selected to live there and establish the first extraterrestrial settlement.

Hope ran deep when Smith left humanity’s first generation ship to lay roots with his wife and son in the open air of a new planet. When the colony ship broke apart on entry, however, countless lives were lost, including Smith’s beloved wife. He now fights to keep his son and his colony alive, all the while fighting off alien-induced hallucinations. Meanwhile, Smith’s apprentice Tashon seeks to discover what happened to his beloved mentor and the colony. He soon learns that the expedition’s leaders are focused on a much more imminent danger.

They’re here. They’ve arrived. And they’re all eyes. The Voltarian scouting party - illegal aliens extraordinaire - on a top-secret expedition led by one Jettero Heller, Royal Officer of the Fleet. His mission: rescue the planet from pollution - and make it safe for the upcoming invasion. His problem: The planet may not want to be saved - and the invasion may just be a trick.

Habitats is the seventh in a series of near future sci-fi/thrillers, whose young heroine Ell Donsaii has a nerve mutation which has made her a genius as well as an athletic phenomenon. In Habitats, she is continuing to find uses for the quantum-entangled wormholes she discovered. These wormholes aren’t big enough to send people through, yet they are making huge changes in our world.

Star humans were engineered to exist within the mantle of a star, mere tools of their Earth-evolved makers in a war against the Xeelee, owners of the universe. Stephen Baxter's third novel in his magnificent Xeelee Sequence is an exotic and endearing story of an abandoned people. Abandoned to their fate, their history lost along with contact with their makers, Star people survive in an environment that is possibly the strangest in science fiction.

A man battles for his life, two AIs vie for supremacy and a civilization hangs in the balance.... Several forces now pursue rogue artificial intelligence Penny Royal, hungry for revenge or redemption. And the Brockle is the most dangerous of all. This criminal swarm-robot AI has escaped confinement and is upgrading itself, becoming ever more powerful in anticipation of a showdown. Events also escalate aboard the war factory.

In the middle of climate-change crises, there is no mood for space-exploration stunts - but Reid Malenfant, elderly, once a shuttle pilot and frustrated would-be asteroid miner, decides to go take a look anyway. Nothing more is heard of him. But his ex-wife, Emma Stoney, sets up a trust fund to search for him the next time the Kernel returns...By 2570 Earth is transformed. A mere billion people are supported by advanced technology on a world that is almost indistinguishable from the natural, with recovered forests, oceans, ice caps.

Corta Hélio, one of the five family corporations that rule the moon, has fallen. Its riches are divided up among its many enemies, its survivors scattered. Eighteen months have passed. The remaining Hélio children, Lucasinho and Luna, are under the protection of the powerful Asamoahs, while Robson, still reeling from witnessing his parents' violent deaths, is now a ward - virtually a hostage - of Mackenzie Metals. And the last appointed heir, Lucas, has vanished from the surface of the moon.

It is the dawn of the 21st century, and America is in trouble. Public schools breed apathy and ignorance, and politics has become the art of the quick fix. There is one woman, though, who has both the vision and the money to leverage change. Mariesa Gorley van Huyten, heiress to one of the great American fortunes, is determined to bring America, and the rest of the world, back on track. She founds an educational subsidiary in hopes of raising a new, less cynical generation.

Fifty years after Steve Stuart and his friends captured an alien starship, the Solar Union is a thriving interstellar power while Earth is increasingly backward and falling into barbarism. For two youngsters from Earth, the Solar Union offers the only chance they will ever have to make something of their lives.

Wormhole technology has revealed that our sun will die in 5,000,000 years. A race of superbeings, the fabulous Xeelee, owners of the universe, are thought to be responsible. The bizarre and wealthy cult, the Superet, funds two projects aimed at combatting the force that will murder the sun.

In Neal Asher's Hilldiggers, during a war between two planets in the same solar system - each occupied by adapted humans - what is thought to be a cosmic superstring is discovered. After being cut, this object collapses into four cylindrical pieces, each about the size of a tube train. Each is densely packed with either alien technology or some kind of life. They are placed for safety in three ozark cylinders of a massively secure space station.

Onboard an ancient starship, Killeen and the Bishop tribe escape the mech-ruled world of Snowglade. Seeking refuge on a faraway planet, they discover vast wonders: an organic life-form as large as a world, a planet-coring cosmic string, a community of humans ruled by a brutal tyrant, and ultimately an alien race more awesome than any they have encountered. As they battle for survival against these myriad dangers, Killeen and his crew will gain an unforeseen ally - one that may determine humanity’s true destiny.

Rapid colonization of the moon is pushing both national space agencies and powerful corporations to negotiate a New Lunar Accord in an effort to prevent escalating conflicts over valuable resources and territory. But hope that this treaty will bring stability to the nascent lunar civilization is suddenly dashed when a high-energy solar storm causes a cascade of destruction to the vast satellite constellations that orbit Earth. Now it’s only a matter of weeks before the ever-increasing debris cloud makes travel back to the home planet impossible.