Hard Science Fiction Space

The company that Arya Vaii and Gunnar Schmidt founded to commercially develop Arya's time-stopping discovery is making money hand over fist. Currently, their profits come from their use of the phenomenal physical properties of a time-stopped segment of space-time to build rockets. But now, they’re building their space tower. Taking off at a 30-degree angle from Eastern Virginia, it’s 200 kilometers long and 100 kilometers high.

Humanity's last encounter with aliens saw 16.2 billion people killed in a war with the Merkiaari that had spanned decades. Two hundred years later, the Alliance is cautiously exploring beyond its borders again, but the survey corp is considered a mere gesture by some. General Burgton of the 501st Infantry Regiment believes a lack of expansion is leading the Alliance into stagnation. So when one small ship discovers a new alien race, it should be an easy decision to make contact, but what if the aliens are like the Merkiaari?

Sable Keech is a walking dead man. Was he resurrected because he was infected by the Spatterjay virus, or it took place late in a tank of seawater? Taylor Bloc wants to know the truth. He also wants more – adulation, power, control – and will go to any lengths to achieve them. An ancient hive mind has sent an agent to this uncertain world. Does it merely want to obtain the poison 'sprine' that is crucial to immortality? Erlin, still faced with the ennui of immortality, is interrupted by an angry whelkus titanicus, and begins a strange journey.

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.

The future doesn’t just happen.... Somebody has to build it. Martin L. Shoemaker, author of "Today I Am Paul", presents stories of ordinary people doing extraordinary work. Planning, exploring, constructing...living and growing and dying...across the Solar System.

A hidden corner of space is swarming with lethal alien technology, a danger to all sentient life. It's guarded by Orlandine, who must keep it contained at any cost - as it has the power to destroy entire civilizations. She schemes from her state-of-the-art weapons station, with only an alien intelligence to share her vigil. But she doesn't share everything with Dragon....

Space inventor Parks Vambolent pursues a vision of using space resources to benefit humanity but is ill-prepared for the non-technical challenges. Friends and allies join along the way, as he builds toward his ultimate goals. Yet, from project to project, troubles follow. Meanwhile, a clever rival advances, and their competition raises the stakes. Powerful players become involved, accelerating progress while creating complexity. How can Vambolent and his people steer space resource technology to be profitable and beneficial to humanity?

When the miners on Mars form a trade union and call a planet wide strike, the president of the Council of Economic Unions orders the federal forces on Mars to take a firm hand.

Geoff and his friends live in Phocaea, a distant asteroid colony on the Solar System's frontier. They're your basic high-spirited young adults, enjoying such pastimes as hacking matter compilers to produce dancing skeletons that prance through the low-gee communal areas, using their rocket-bikes to salvage methane ice shrapnel that flies away when the colony brings in a big (and vital) rock of the stuff, and figuring out how to avoid the ubiquitous surveillance motes.

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.

As Captain Navarre, the science officer rescued his greatest enemy and destroyed her captors. Now, someone else wants to hire the ruthless pirate Navarre, and Javier must take Sykora with him to help. Their mission? To raid the most luxurious starship in space: Shangdu, The Pleasure Dome.

Javier sometimes enjoys being a pirate, but he never forgets they made him a slave. Trapped in a forgotten mine field left over from an ancient war, he must work with the people he hates to survive. Even if it means saving them as well. When they find an unbelievable treasure at the center of the mine field, all bets are off.

Javier is still a slave, still paying off a life debt to Zakhar Sokolov and his pirate crew. Then Wilhelmina returns, asking for his help. Now, Javier must rescue his worst enemy, the ship's Dragoon, Djamila Sykora. Will Javier's honor or his hatred rule, when he has the chance to get his revenge as well his freedom?

Few writers have successful blended hard science and speculation with fully realized characters as Gregory Benford has in his critically acclaimed novels. Now he draws us into a vortex of mystery and danger at the heart of the galaxy in his dazzling epic drama, Furious Gulf.

Millennia of conflict between humans and mechs have driven the human race to near-extinction. Now, as the fierce AI mechs begin their final assault on mankind, it soon becomes apparent that three men – three generations in a family of voyagers – are their targets. Toby Bishop, his father, Killeen Bishop, and his grandfather, Nigel Walmsley, each carry a piece of the lethal secret that can destroy their enemies. But hunted through space and time by relentless assassins, they have no idea that they possess the only weapon that can save humanity.

First, vampires in space. And now...zombies. Really? Jebediah and the others are trying to get over the horrors they faced in deep space, and now this. When a mysterious ship from space arrives on Resolve, it unleashes a horde of undead that might spell the end of the survivors and their dreams of peace. Will the specters of the past save them, or seal their fate?

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.

The Science Officer has done the impossible and stolen the Last Flagship. With the help of his friends, Javier will take his private war to Valko Slavkov and the pirates with a theft so audacious, so brazen, nobody could predict it. And so big that the Concord itself takes a personal interest. Book seven in the Science Officer series and part one of the Hammerfield saga. To be concluded in The Hammerfield Payoff. Part of the Alexandria Station universe.

She disappeared more than 80 years ago. Lost forever to myth and legend like Excalibur tossed into the waters. When the Science Officer leads the crew to the last flagship of the Neu Berne fleet, they must risk awakening a sentient warship if they want to go after the man who destroyed Storm Gauntlet. Just how derelict is the last flagship? Could it be a trap as well? The Last Flagship may just be the most daring caper for Javier Aritza, Suvi, and the crew of Storm Gauntlet.

It seemed like a legitimate heist when someone hired Storm Gauntlet and her crew to go hijack some cargo. Pirate ships did that sort of thing. However, whoever hired them didn't count on the Science Officer's sneakiness. Paranoia. Whatever. The situation didn't make sense. No one would deliver cargo to a dead planet. It had to be a trap. Someone had set them up. But who? And why?