Hard Science Fiction Space

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.

The Wilding is the long-awaited sequel to C.S. Friedman's epic, In Conquest Born. The Braxaná were created to become the ultimate warriors. The Azeans were raised to master the power of the mind. The two civilizations are fighting an endless war over a long-forgotten cause. Now, after a century and a half, the legacy of their greatest military leaders threatens to tear apart both empires.

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.

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.

Still reeling from a former teammate's betrayal, Commonwealth operative Simon Kovalic and his band of misfit spies have no time to catch their breath before being sent on another impossible mission: to pull off the daring heist of a quasi-mythical alien artifact, right out from under the nose of the galaxy's most ruthless crime lord. But their cold war rivals, the Illyrican Empire, want the artifact for themselves. And Kovalic's newest recruit, Specialist Addy Sayers, is a volatile ex-con with a mean hair-trigger who might put the whole mission at risk.

2788. Only the handicapped live on Earth. While everyone else portals between worlds, 18-year-old Jarra is among the one in a thousand people born with an immune system that cannot survive on other planets. Sent to Earth at birth to save her life, she has been abandoned by her parents. She can't travel to other worlds, but she can watch their vids, and she knows all the jokes they make. She's an 'ape', a 'throwback', but this is one ape girl who won't give in.

Commander Scott McNabb, of the science vessel Hermes, is three years into a five-year-long survey of the asteroid belt. It’s an excruciatingly dull mission, yet it keeps him far away from the agencies that are chasing him down. However, his fortunes change, along with the other four crew members, when they discover a derelict spaceship in orbit around a binary asteroid. Scott’s share of the salvage would be enough to clear his name and start a new life.

Esen's back! And the dear little blob is in trouble, again. Things began so well. She and her human friend Paul Ragem are ready to celebrate the first anniversary of their greatest accomplishment, the All Species' Library of Linguistics and Culture, by welcoming his family back. He hopes. Having mourned his supposed death years ago, understandably, feelings are bent. Instead, they’ve unexpected guests, starting with an old acquaintance.

It's been six months since the events on Europa. During that time, Tanis and the crew of the Kirby Jones have been working to uncover who was behind her betrayal and the oligarch's near assassination. When a routine intel handoff with the Jovians takes a turn for the worse, Tanis finds herself deeper in the spy game than she ever wanted to be. Now, on a short timetable to get to Earth, Tanis is forced to make a stop at Saturn. When she arrives, she finds things to going just like they always are. Crazy.

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.

The Eternity War series is an explosive tale of elite marines, deep-space exploration and warring galactic empires. The soldiers of the Simulant Operations Programme are mankind's elite warriors. Veterans of 1000 battles across 100 worlds, they undertake suicidal missions to protect humanity from the insidious Krell Empire and the mysterious machine race known as the Shard. Lieutenant Keira Jenkins is an experienced simulant operative and leader of the Jackals, a team of raw recruits keen to taste battle.

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.

Contains books one and two of The Stasis Stories: A Pause in Space-Time (Book 1) and The Thunder of Engines (Book 2). Kaem Seba is a sickly and financially destitute young man with extraordinary math skills. With the help of Arya Vaii, a business student, he has developed a theory and an electronic device that allows him to stop time within limited volumes of space-time.

Earth's Zero Asset citizens no longer face extermination. Thanks to Alan Saul, the Committee's despotic network is in ruins, and its robotic enforcers lie dormant. But the ruthless Serene Galahad sees an opportunity to grab power. On Mars, Var Delex fights for Antares Base's survival while the Argus Space Station hurtles towards the red planet. And Var knows whoever, or whatever, trashed Earth is still aboard. She must not only save the base but deal with the first signs of rebellion.

What was the light that mazed every mind's sky - and then was gone? Why has it brought a flying tepui mountaintop home from the stars, and sent investigators into the orbital habitats floating above Earth? How is it connected to a "living fossil" fungus of great entheogenic powers? Or to a dead madman? Or to the fate of a planet overpopulated, hypermediated, corporate dominated, and heat-gas insulated? Forces that are socially and politically polarized, both good and evil, selfless and selfish, must search for the answers to these questions.

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.

Ghost ship Impris, lost during the War of a Thousand Suns, is the stuff of legend. Her very name conjures the perils of interstellar travel. But no mere legend, she is real - glimpsed on occasion in the hyperdimensional Flux and then gone. Her passengers and crew live on in a strange limbo, their fate hopelessly caught up in quantum defects in space-time, interstellar piracy, and galactic coverup.

In the mid-23rd century, Darwin, Australia, stands as the last human city on Earth. The world has succumbed to an alien plague, with most of the population transformed into mindless, savage creatures. The planet’s refugees flock to Darwin, where a space elevator—created by the architects of this apocalypse, the Builders—emits a plague-suppressing aura.

The truth of discovery is on mankind's horizon, a Red Horizon. For nearly four long years, the world's superpowers have mobilized their people and resources in preparation for the next discovery, Mars. The race against one another pales in comparison to the inherent dangers of travelling through the vastness of the cosmos, going where mankind has never gone before.