Hard Science Fiction Space

The Republic, the Opters, and a strange Crystalline race of unknown origin all meet in a series of titanic battles. Commodore Straker summons thousands of ships, but he soon learns he’s technologically outclassed by the enemy. With traditional victory impossible, the race is on for each side to destroy the key worlds of the other. Billions die, entire planets are destroyed. Even while the war rages, dark suspicions grow. There are traitors in the midst of the chaos. Straker realizes the worst enemy is the one you believed to be your ally....

Grant Archer merely wanted to study astrophysics, to work quietly as an astronomer on the far side of the Moon. But the forces of the "New Morality", the coalition of censorious do-gooders who run 21st-century America, have other plans for him. To his distress, Grant is torn from his young bride and sent to a research station in orbit around Jupiter, charged with the task of spying on the scientists who work there.

The Breakers find a new home among the stars: Utopia. An engineered planet that is vast beyond comprehension with plenty of room to grow. They set up trade routes and work as mercenaries for their supplies...but trouble lurks. Pirates strike their merchant lanes. Key personnel are captured and enslaved. Straker is called upon to do something, and thus a new conflict is set in motion.

When a colonist dies in tragic circumstances, just a few sols before a major terraforming experiment, Dr. Jann Malbec begins to suspect that all is not what it seems. Her fears begin to grow when every attempt she makes to investigate the death is thwarted by the ruling council on Mars. In desperation, she resorts to secretly recruiting a recently arrived colonist, Mia Sorelli, an ex-cop with a troubled past, to quietly look into the incident. But Mia has some very good reasons why she left her old life on Earth behind.

The struggle for survival sharpens as resources dwindle, technology fails, and the grim reality of life on Donovan unfolds. Supervisor Kalico Aguila has bet everything on a fragile settlement far south of Port Authority. There, she has carved a farm and mine out of wilderness. But Donovan is closing in. When conditions couldn't get worse, a murderous peril descends out of Donovan's sky - one that will leave Kalico bleeding and shattered.

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.

Where does one put a messianic cult of practicing cannibals? That becomes the question when Ashanti appears in Donovan's skies. She was designed for no more than four years in space. It's taken 10. The crew has sealed the transportees onto a single deck - and over the years, the few survivors down there have become monsters. Lead by the messiah, Batuhan, they call themselves the Unreconciled. With the discovery of a wasting disease among the Unreconciled, it's up to Kalico, Dya Simonov, and Mark Talbot to try and deal with the epidemic.

The Valiant is a gripping saga that explores an untold chapter in the life of Jean-Luc Picard - and reveals the making of a captain! Go back in time to when Lieutenant Commander Picard was second officer on the Stargazer and suddenly finds himself and his ship under attack from a hostile alien species - on the wrong side of the Galactic Barrier, cut off from Starfleet!

Adrift in the divide between galaxies and surrounded by the vast emptiness of the intergalactic void, the Tantalus Cluster is the only home humanity has ever known. Desperate and facing starvation, humanity’s only hope is a strange nebula that has suddenly appeared beyond the edge of the cluster. Its shifting clouds may hide a source of salvation for the people of Tantalus, but time is running out.

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.

En un instant, une force inconnue a morcelé la Terre en une mosaïque d'époques, de la préhistoire à l'an 2037. Un gigantesque puzzle qui résume l'évolution de l'espèce humaine. Depuis, des sphères argentées planent sur toute la planète, invulnérables et silencieuses. Ces objets mystérieux, issus d'une technologie prodigieuse, sont-ils à l'origine de ces bouleversements ? La réponse se trouve peut-être dans l'antique cité de Babylone, dont proviennent des signaux radios.

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 stabilized. So corruption is rife, people starve, and the poor are policed by mechanized 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.

LA detective Anna Abbott can see brief, cryptic visions of the future. She just doesn't know it yet. But others do. Others who will stop at nothing to ensure that her abilities never see the light of day. Soon Anna is fighting for her life against an array of powerful adversaries, and not all of them are human. Because a small group of aliens hiding on Earth believe that she can single-handedly alter the course of an interstellar war. One that has raged for thousands of years, but which is completely unknown to humankind. Until now.

Neal Asher has firmly established himself as one of the leading British writers of science fiction. Most of his stories are set in a galactic future-scape called The Polity, and with The Gabble - and Other Stories, a collection of marvellously inventive and action-packed short stories, he takes us further into the manifold diversities of that amazing universe.

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 Forge of God described the destruction of Earth itself by self-replicating robots, Von Neumann machines designed to use the planet's mass to create more robotic creatures and spread throughout the Galaxy. Only a few humans have survived, aided by a mysterious alien race known only as “The Benefactors”, who arrived at Earth too late.

Lee's parents and their business partner, Gordon, found a class A habitable planet. They thought their quest as explorers was over and they'd live a life of ease. But before they could return and register their claim, Lee's parents died doing a survey of the surface. That left Lee two-thirds owner of the claim and their partner Gordon obligated by his word with her parents to raise Lee. She had grown up aboard the ship with her uncle Gordon and he was the only family she'd ever known. Him adopting her was an obvious arrangement to them.

Alone and desperate, Eve sits in the control center of an alien structure. She has lost the other members of the team sent to explore exoplanet Proxima Centauri b. By mistake she has triggered a disastrous process that threatens to obliterate the planet. Just as Eve fears her best option may be a quick death, a nearby alien life form awakens from a very long sleep. It has only one task: to find and neutralize the destructive intruder from a faraway place.

Having successfully repelled the Resistance incursion into the Sol system, Terran Fleet Command must now deal with the far-flung worlds of the Sajeth Collective, which sponsored the attack. Task forces are dispatched to Damara and Lesheera to begin the first human blockades of entire planets. With the only ships fast enough to quickly bring the fight to the enemy's doorstep, TFC must do so alone, leaving only minimal forces behind to safeguard the Earth.

A gripping collection of stories about machines called Berserkers that are programmed to destroy all organic life.