Hard Science Fiction Space

Corporate assassin Tamarland Benteen's last hope is the survey ship, Vixen. With a load of scientists aboard under the supervision of Dr. Dortmund Weisbacher, Vixen is tasked with the first comprehensive survey of the newly discovered planet called Donovan. Given that, back in Solar System, Boardmember Radcek would have Benteen's brain dissected, he's particularly motivated to make his escape. The transition that should have taken Vixen years is instantaneous. Worse, a space ship is already orbiting Donovan and human settlements have been established on the planet.

With the alien Dhryn cutting a pathway through the inhabited spaceways - bringing about the annihilation of many of the races who have the misfortune to lie along the star trail they are following - time is running out for all sentient life-forms. Can biologists Mackenzie Connor and Emily Mamami solve the riddle of the Dhryn before their part of the galaxy becomes as dead as the mysterious region known as the Chasm?

Their nemesis lies in wait.... Orlandine has destroyed the alien Jain super-soldier by deploying an actual black hole. And now that same weapon hoovers up clouds of lethal Jain technology, swarming within the deadly accretion disc’s event horizon. All seems just as she planned. Yet behind her back, forces incite rebellion on her home world, planning her assassination.

There is a milestone in the evolution of every sentient race, a Tech Singularity Event, when the species achieves transcendence through its technological advances. Now the creatures known as humans are near this momentous turning point. But an armed threat is approaching from deepest space, determined to prevent humankind from crossing over that boundary - by total annihilation if necessary.

It is the distant future. The world known as Virga is a fullerene balloon three thousand kilometers in diameter, filled with air, water, and aimlessly floating chunks of rock. The humans who live in this vast environment must build their own fusion suns and "towns" that are in the shape of enormous wood and rope wheels that are spun for gravity. Young, fit, bitter, and friendless, Hayden Griffin is a very dangerous man. He's come to the city of Rush in the nation of Slipstream with one thing in mind: to take murderous revenge for the deaths of his parents six years ago.

Rika is mech-meat, a cyborg killing machine, created by the Genevian military and cast aside when the war was lost.This volume contains the first three novels of the Rika’s Marauders series: Rika Outcast, Rika Redeemed, and Rika Triumphant.

The Argus Space Station looks down on a nightmarish Earth. And from this safe distance, the Committee enforces its despotic rule. There are too many people and too few resources, and they need 12 billion to die before Earth can be stabilised. So corruption is rife, people starve, and the poor are policed by mechanised overseers and identity-reader guns. Citizens already fear the brutal Inspectorate with its pain inducers. But to reach its goals, the Committee will unleash satellite laser weaponry, taking carnage to a new level. This is the world Alan Saul wakes to.

The Technician, the Theocracy has been dead for 20 years, and the Polity rules on Masada - but it is an order that the rebels of the Tidy Squad cannot accept, and the iconic Jeremiah Tombs is top of their hit list. Tombs, meanwhile, has escaped his sanatorium. His insanity must be cured, because the near-mythical hooder, called 'the Technician', that attacked him all those years ago did something to his mind even the AIs fail to understand.

When John Bandicut sets out across the surface of Triton, he's hardly ready for the storm of chaos that's about to blow through his life. The alien Quarx that soon inhabits his mind is humanity's first contact with an alien life. The Quarx, part of an ancient galactic civilization that manipulates chaos theory to predict catastrophic events, seeks to prevent a cometary collision that could destroy the Earth. But it must have help. If Bandicut chooses to trust the Quarx, he must break all the rules - indeed, sacrifice his own life.

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.

Nearly 100,000 years after first contact with the machines that dominate the universe, only a few hundred humans survive. Trapped on Snowglade, a barren world near the center of the galaxy, Killeen and his child, Toby, of the Bishop Tribe, are primitive scavengers, homeless and hunted by the ruling “mechs”. Then suddenly, a strange cosmic entity – neither organic nor cybernetic or living matter – reaches out from a black hole to speak with Killeen.

It's the beginning of a new golden age of space exploration. Finally, humanity is taking the commercialization of space to the next level-mining asteroids. The new gold rush of the commercial space era has begun. Another commercial venture, an attempt to put a hotel on the Moon, is seeking the space tourism gold of the ultra wealthy. And it seems as if the dream of finally sending people to Mars is finally going to happen using a ship propelled by a powerful nuclear rocket. But space travel isn't cut and dry, and there is nothing routine about it.

The savage ocean planet of Spatterjay draws visitors with very different agendas. Erlin is immortal and seeks a reason to keep living. Janer hosts a hive mind, which paid him to find this planet. And Keech is an agent of Earth who’s been dead for 700 years – but still hunts a notorious criminal. On Spatterjay’s vast waterscapes, only the Old Captains risk the native life forms and their voracious appetites. However, they are now barely human. And somewhere out there Keech’s target – the Skinner – runs wild.

It was that transitional time of the world when man first brought the clang of iron and the reek of smoke to the lands which before had echoed only with fairy voices. In that dawn of man and death of magic, there yet remained one last untouched place - the small forest of Ealdwood - which kept the magic intact and protected the old ways. And there was one who dwelt there, Arafel the Sidhe, who had more pride and love of the world as it used to be than any of her kind.

There is a world that hangs suspended between triumph and catastrophe, between the dismantling of the Wall and the fall of the Twin Towers, frozen in the shadow of suicide terrorism and global financial collapse. Such a world requires a firm hand and a guiding light. But does it need the Concern: an all-powerful organization with a malevolent presiding genius, pervasive influence and numberless invisible operatives in possession of extraordinary powers?

The year is AD 7000. The human species is extinct - for the fourth time - due to its fragile nature. Krina Alizond-114 is metahuman, descended from the robots that once served humanity. She’s on a journey to the water-world of Shin-Tethys to find her sister Ana. But her trip is interrupted when pirates capture her ship. Their leader, the enigmatic Count Rudi, suspects that there’s more to Krina’s search than meets the eye.

When Boba Fett stumbles across evidence implicating Prince Xizor in the murder of Luke Skywalker's aunt and uncle, Fett makes himself an enemy even he fears: the unknown mastermind behind a monstrous deception, who will kill to hide his tracks. Fett also finds himself in possession of an amnesiac young woman named Neelah, who may be the key to the mystery--or a decoy leading Fett into a murderous ambush.

The sky is not the limit. From an alley in New York to an interstellar wormhole, the path to the future looks different for everyone. These cosmic short stories from some of today’s most influential Black authors reveal a universe of possibilities.

Orson Scott Card, Kevin J. Anderson, and Larry Niven have seen the future. Now you can, too. A constellation of the brightest lights in the science fiction and fantasy firmament have judged these authors to be the best, the brightest, the truest emerging stars in the field.

Three stars, three worlds, three civilizations...one massive war. In a triple star system, not all planets are equal. When the Demon Star swings closest in her orbit, the Insectoids always invade. They raid the inner worlds with grim regularity, riding hordes of stealth ships in ever-growing waves. Their mission is to destroy all opposition - alien, human or otherwise. Cody Riggs, lost among an endless chain of interstellar rings, flies his task force of starships into the middle of an eternal struggle for survival.