Hard Science Fiction Space

Major Richards needs to get out of the Sol System. Demoted by the military and hung out to dry, the media labels her the Butcher of Toro. Despite her soiled record, Tanis still one of the best military counterinsurgency officers in the Terran Space Force. They need her to find the terrorists responsible for trying to destroy the GSS Intrepid, a massive interstellar colony ship in the final phases of construction at the Mars Outer Shipyards.

A wave of death is spreading through the Milky Way galaxy, an expanding sphere of lethal gamma radiation that erupted from the galaxy's core 28,000 years ago. Every world it touched was wiped clean of all life. But it's possible to protect a planet from gamma radiation. Now, guided by the ancient intelligent machines called the Predecessors, men and women from Earth seek out those precious, rare worlds that harbor intelligent species, determined to save them.

The revelations on Mars - a half-million year-old legacy of the vanished star-traveling Builders - have fed the flames of catastrophic war. A beleaguered United States and its Russian and Japanese allies struggle to hold their own against the indomitable forces of the enemy United Nations. The bloody conflict that has swept over the home planet now rages across the blackness of space - with the U.S. Marine Corps in the vanguard, leading the charge as always.

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 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 hitlist. 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. Tombs might possess information about the suicide of an entire alien race.

Two years have passed since comet Anduru skimmed the clouds of Saturn on its way to Earth. Kath and Nolan are looking for answers, trying to find ways to protect Earth from the possibility of an invasive alien species overrunning the planet.

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.

They were sent to build a utopia, but all they found on Mars was death. Frank Kitteridge has been abandoned. But XO, the greedy - and ultimately murderous - corporate architects of humanity's first Mars base made a costly mistake when they left him there: They left him alive. Using his skills and his wits, he's going to find a way back home even if it kills him. Little does he know that Mars isn't completely empty. Just over the mountain, there's another XO base where things are going terribly, catastrophically wrong.

With the Federation losing ground in its war against the Dominion, the galaxy's greatest smugglers, including the beautiful and enigmatic Vash, rendezvous on Deep Space 9. Their objective: a fabled lost orb of the Prophets unlike any other, rumored to be the key to unlocking a second wormhole in Bajoran Space, a second Celestial Temple.

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.

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.

In the best-selling novels Venus and Jupiter, Ben Bova dramatized the latest discoveries about our own solar system in an epic tale of near-future exploration and development. Now Bova turns his attention to one of our system's greatest mysteries, Saturn.

One of the greatest science-fiction epics ever written, John Varley's Titan, Wizard, and Demon comprise a groundbreaking trilogy that will live forever. Human explorers have entered the sprawling mind of the alien Gaea. Now they must fight her will. For she is much too powerful. And definitely insane....

Lee had expertise in different sciences and 24th-century tech due to learning machines that could transfer an expert's knowledge. He had the latest high-tech weapons. He had acquired the latest protective equipment. He was sixteen and got his great-grandfather's A.I., Anna, to find him a planet that had magic. His A.I. hacked a portal to take him there. He might have bitten off more than he could chew.

With the invention of faster-than-light travel there is nowhere that humanity cannot go. New worlds are discovered, but with them come new dangers. At the heart of the discovery is the Fermi, mysterious beings that have survived on alien worlds for longer than humanity has existed. But now the Fermi are awakening, and they do not seem pleased to find humans in their midst. But for Lakshmi Nayak and the crew of the Fighting Chance, danger is a lot closer to home. Their search for answers will take them to places, and worlds, they never expected.

Captain William Sparhawk flies Earth's single starship on a voyage of exploration. His crew of veteran spacers begins the mission with high hopes and the best of intentions, but the universe has other plans. Instead of space merchants and potential allies, they discover Earth's impending doom. Sparhawk must decide whether to hunt down enemy scouts to keep Earth's new starship a secret or to head home to warn Star Guard of the danger. Either way, he's ignited an interstellar war.

Earth builds her first war fleet! The greatest warships ever constructed in known space rise up one by one, soon dominating our skies. They strike fear into the hearts of every citizen and rebel colonist alike. Captain William Sparhawk, the very man who convinced the secretive Council to build this terrifying fleet, now has doubts about the project. What is their exact mission? How could anyone have built these huge ships so quickly? And, most puzzling of all, what's happening out at the isolated laboratory complex on Phobos, Mars' lopsided moon?

Five thousand years in the future, humankind has spread across thousands of worlds, and more than a dozen different governments exist in an uneasy truce. But human beings have found no signs of other life anywhere approaching human intelligence. This changes when scientists discover a sunless planet they name Danann, traveling the void just beyond the edge of the galaxy at such a high speed that it cannot be natural. Its continents and oceans have been sculpted and shaped, with but a single megaplex upon it - close to perfectly preserved.

For astronaut David Dixon, sneaking aboard a Russian space station and stealing a nuclear bomb was the easy part - now he has to survive re-entry on an untested inflatable heat shield and then deal with the aftermath of being the most wanted man on Earth. When a clandestine intelligence agency offers David the chance to return to space and probably not get killed - he finds himself in a world of intrigue when a secret mission takes an unexpected turn.

Two hundred thousand feet up, things go horribly wrong. An experimental low-orbit spaceplane breaks up on reentry, falling to earth over a trail hundreds of miles long. And in its wake is the beginning of the most important mission in the history of spaceflight.