Space Exploration Fiction

Out of the blue, a young Space Fleet officer's dream becomes reality: He's made captain of a starship. Just in time for the return of humanity's most terrible enemy, after 50 years of peace. To survive against this enemy, Captain Tad Thatcher will have to do more than learn how to become an effective commander, or how to wrangle his wayward crew. He will need to reinvent space combat. From scratch.

The Amazon rainforest holds a world-changing secret—a ship lost to time from another world. College student Will Kaufman unearthed the biggest archaeological discovery in human history… he just needs to find a way back to Earth to tell people about it. Four thousand years ago, a Federation bounty hunter Void ship crashed on a remote and primitive planet. There it remained until Will found it and accidentally reactivated it, launching him light-years away.

Raised fatherless in a galactic Brinktown, Joe Pikeman only ever wanted to escape. The Galactic Guard offered that escape, with the promise of regular meals to boot. Now Joe is a full Guardsman, with his own ship and a snide partner bot who hates humans almost as much as he hates other bots. To the pirates he hunts, Joe is known as the Butcher. His bloody reputation has landed him in the center of a sweeping conspiracy that threatens to stamp out the galaxy’s last surviving human settlements.

Caleb Mitchell gave up everything to protect his home. Shunned by friends and family for abandoning the pacifist beliefs of their religion, abandoned by the love of his life, he left his home world of Canaan to go to the Commonwealth Military Academy on Earth and train to fight in the looming war against the implacable alien threat of the Tahni Imperium. When a training mission with a crew of cadets winds up caught in the middle of one of the worst battles of the war, Cal and his fellow students are officially declared dead.

After a long and bloody battle, legendary Hell Diver Xavier Rodriguez reigns as the dutiful but reluctant new king of the islands. Advised by a council of former sky citizens as well as Cazadores, he works to assimilate the two societies peacefully. But not all Cazadores have accepted the new order. While X tries to ease tensions at home, a rookie team of divers, led by Michael Everhart, returns to the skies in Discovery, formerly the ITC Deliverance. Their mission: To locate other human survivors throughout the world and rescue them.

John Perry did two things on his 75th birthday. First he visited his wife's grave. Then he joined the army. The good news is that humanity finally made it into interstellar space. The bad news is that planets fit to live on are scarce—and alien races willing to fight us for them are common. So: we fight. To defend Earth, and to stake our own claim to planetary real estate. Far from Earth, the war has been going on for decades: brutal, bloody, unyielding. Earth itself is a backwater.

Three years after her best friend Peggy went missing, Harper Starling is lost. Lost in her dead-end job, lost in her grief. All she has are regrets and reruns of her favorite science fiction show, Infinite Odyssey. Then Peggy returns and demands to be taken to the Argonaut, the fictional main character of Infinite Odyssey. But the Argonaut is just that … fictional. Until the TV hero himself appears and spirits Harper away from her former best friend. Traveling through time, he explains that Peggy used to travel with him but is now under the thrall of an alien enemy known as the Incarnate.

After a series of victories, the Imperial forces are on the back foot once more. The power of Chaos is rising, the Traitors gain ground, and all hope seems lost. Can Terra endure?

Blackhawk: a wanderer, a man running from a dark and sinister past. A genetically-engineered warrior, a capable and accomplished killer, he is also a lost soul, a man who has fled to the deepest reaches of space seeking his true identity. The Far Stars: the farthest extent of human habitation in the galaxy, a sector of a hundred inhabited worlds, it is a dangerous expanse full of pirates, mercenaries, and cutthroats.

The human race is running out of time on overcrowded Earth, and only one man has the courage to do what is necessary to save it. Colony ship Ark is the greatest project the human race will ever attempt, a self-contained world 100 years in the building, launched on a 10,000-year voyage to carry the seeds of civilization to the stars. It is humanity's final gamble for escape from a desperate world, but the price of hope is measured in lives.

They won't settle for mere victory. They want to exterminate us. Every last one of us. A surprise attack has sent the Star Alliance fleeing for its life. A remnant of a remnant, their meager fleet—all that remains alive—flees to what seems like a safe harbor: a forgotten backwater planet called Earth. Join ace fighter pilot Chase as he teams up with the modern-day militaries of Earth and fights the last battle for the universe.

The Interdependency, humanity’s interstellar empire, is on the verge of collapse. The Flow, the extra-dimensional conduit that makes travel between the stars possible, is disappearing, leaving entire star systems stranded. When it goes, human civilization may go with it - unless desperate measures can be taken. Emperox Grayland II, the leader of the Interdependency, is ready to take those measures to help ensure the survival of billions. But nothing is ever that easy.

A Fire Upon the Deep is the big, breakout book that fulfills the promise of Vinge's career to date: a gripping tale of galactic war told on a cosmic scale. Thousands of years hence, many races inhabit a universe where a mind's potential is determined by its location in space, from superintelligent entities in the Transcend, to the limited minds of the Unthinking Depths, where only simple creatures and technology can function.

Terminal Lance Lucky Lee Savage likes his life. Sure, doing PT hungover is a pain, but no one can dodge responsibility like he can - or sweet-talk the cooks into giving out double rations.

For nearly a decade Garak has longed for just one thing—to go home. Exiled on a space station, surrounded by aliens who loathe and distrust him, going back to Cardassia has been Garak's one dream. Now, finally, he is home. But home is a world whose landscape is filled with death and destruction. Desperation and dust are constant companions and luxury is a glass of clean water and a warm place to sleep.

On a cold spring night in 1952, a huge meteorite fell to earth and obliterated much of the East Coast of the US, including Washington, DC. The ensuing climate cataclysm will soon render the Earth inhospitable for humanity, as the last such meteorite did for the dinosaurs. This looming threat calls for a radically accelerated effort to colonize space and requires a much-larger share of humanity to take part in the process. Elma York’s drive to become the first lady astronaut is so strong that even the most dearly held conventions of society may not stand a chance against her.

Pyre is a volatile planet. Its surface belches heat and noxious gases, forcing downsiders to inhabit domes. But Pyre's instability isn't limited to its geology. The colonists, who were marooned in the system hundreds of years ago, have endured a tumultuous history. Exploring Triton, Pyre's third moon, spacers inadvertently activate an alien dome. Nearly a year later, the Belle's bridge crew, who monitors the alien site, is alarmed, when they witness a bright blue light shoot from the dome's platform and merge with the shield.

Captain Jessie Cinders faces a hazardous choice. The murderer of the governor's nephew stands before him. But, the frightened teenager, Aurelia Garmenti, doesn't resemble the commandant's description of the vicious, hardened killer his security forces seek.

Everyone wants the Star of Erebus. Space-pirate Nyx Marcus is no exception. With it, she can prove to her father that she is worthy of his legacy. But she’s come up empty-handed aboard the space-ship Thanatos and now Malcam, her father’s first officer, is mutinying. As Nyx flees with a loyal skeleton crew, she discovers that the planet-killing weapon, named after one of the seven gods, is more than what it seems. Erebus isn’t a simple weapon. It’s an ancient AI and a technological god.

Legend tells of a foolhardy expedition, led by the radical Magos Telok, that ventured out into the unknown space beyond the Halo Worlds in search of the 'Breath of the Gods' - an arcane device with the power to unmake and reshape the very stars themselves. Thousands of years later, the ambitious Lexell Kotov musters his Adeptus Mechanicus Explorator fleet and sets out to follow in mad old Telok's footsteps.