Space Fantasy

Damien Montgomery is as much a nobody as a Mage of the star-spanning Protectorate of Mars can be. Trained as a Jump Mage, one of the elite who teleport ships across interstellar space, he lacks the connections to find a ship that will take him. Until pirates and politics strand Captain David White of the jump freighter Blue Jayin his home system. The two men's matching needs birth a choice and a partnership that will take them from high-end orbitals to prisons to alien graveyards in forgotten star systems.

In the galactic prison system, she’s listed as an ‘Organic Weapon of Mass Destruction’… too bad she’s your new cellmate. Grant didn’t sign up for interstellar incarceration. One minute he’s brawling with lizard freaks behind his pickup, next, he wakes up paralyzed in a space supermax. Tagged. Scanned. Sentenced without trial. All because he tried to stop his girlfriend from getting probed by a UFO.

Joe Colsco boarded a flight from San Francisco to Chicago to attend a national chemistry meeting. He would never set foot on Earth again. On planet Anyar, Joe is found unconscious on a beach of a large island inhabited by humans where the level of technology is similar to Earth circa 1700. He awakes amid strangers speaking an unintelligible language and struggles to accept losing his previous life and finding a place in a society with different customs, needing a way to support himself and not knowing a single soul.

Captain Elya Nevers and the Furies face a different kind of danger back home as they bid farewell to fallen comrades, wade into the murky realm of Solaran politics, and hunt for knowledge about the Telos relics—while being hunted themselves. Overmind X is still at large. She’s hungry to get her talons on the next artifact of alien power. Will she find it before the Solarans get their own house in order? And what terrifying existential threat to the galaxy does she become if they’re too late?

Earth is conquered. Sol is lost. One ship is tasked to free them. One Captain to save them all. When an alien armada destroys the United Earth Space Force and takes control of the human homeworld, newly reinstated Captain Annette Bond must take her experimental hyperspace cruiser Tornado into exile as Terra's only interstellar privateer. She has inferior technology, crude maps, and no concept of her enemy, but the seedy underbelly of galactic society welcomes her so long as she has prizes to sell and money to spend.

The Starship Atlantis takes you on an unforgettable journey through the extraordinary. From alien civilizations and rogue AI to desperate missions on the brink of collapse, these stories will transport you across the stars into the heart of the unknown. This anthology features six never-before-published novellas and short stories, plus two exclusive bonus tales.

On a remote, gas-wreathed outpost of a human colony on Jupiter, a man goes missing. The enigmatic Investigator Mossa follows his trail to Valdegeld, home to the colony’s erudite university―and Mossa’s former girlfriend, a scholar of Earth’s pre-collapse ecosystems. Pleiti has dedicated her research and her career to aiding the larger effort towards a possible return to Earth. When Mossa unexpectedly arrives and requests Pleiti’s assistance in her latest investigation, the two of them embark on a twisting path in which the future of life on Earth is at stake.

In a universe run by corporations, where profit matters more than life, how can an orphan with no skills, no money, and no prospects survive? When Ishmael Wang's mother dies in a senseless accident, he's given a choice: leave the planet on his own, or the company will remove him. To avoid deportation Ishmael finds work as a mess deck attendant on an interstellar freighter.

Kay’s life is pretty boring. She goes to school, spends quiet evenings at home with her foster mom, and has the occasional brush with mischief thanks to her best and only friend Will. But everything is about to change. One night, Kay tags along on another one of Will’s adventures, and they both end up recruited by a talking fox to become Netherjacks, protectors of all the worlds. Once they arrive at the training academy, though, Will is paired with a legendary Netherwing mount and quickly rises in the trainee ranks, leaving Kay behind with barely a glance.

As an engineer on the arkship Pilgrim-9, bound for the Tau Ceti solar system, Morgan Hall thought his life would revolve around maintaining and repairing the ship and supporting the needs of the five thousand colonists aboard. But when he’s roused early from a 240-year stasis, he’s confronted with chaos. Along with his shipmates, Morgan is brought down to a planet teeming with peril. Forced to fight for their survival without any of their tech to hand, they must adapt quickly to overcome countless threats in a world where magic is as real as science.

Except the Pirates were too late, and now not one but two of the enemy are loose in the galaxy. And they are equipped with starships more powerful than Valkyrie. A direct fight would be hopeless, so the Pirates must rely on wacky ideas from the mushy brain of a monkey—and some serious sketchiness.

Merritt Alder is done with Earth. The planet is polluted and overpopulated, and its people are hungry. Earth's first colony, Galena, is a pioneer world 10,000 light years away. It has clean air, unpolluted water, and continents of arable land. Anyone can start a new life…if they can get there. For Merritt, the journey is only the beginning. Obstacles arise every step of the way, forcing compromise and sacrifice. And not everyone on his ship is pure of heart. The bonds he forges on the journey will be the key to surviving on another world—a world anyone has yet to fully explore.

Captain James Decker has lived a life of hunting, killing, and earning credits. To some, it hasn’t amounted to much, but to him, it’s led to him captaining the SC Fortune, a space cruiser with a competent crew that he’s grown fond of. After accepting a bounty hunting mission with a beautiful blonde woman as the mark, Decker finds himself soon without a ship and a crew. But as luck would have it, this same mission gives him back what he lost: a new ship and a new crew.

When a bunch of interstellar scavengers approach Earth intending to abduct a few dozen humans and sell them into slavery in the darkest, they make the mistake of picking on Steve Stuart and his friends, ex-military veterans all. Unprepared for humans who can actually fight, unaware of the true capabilities of their stolen starships, the scavengers rapidly lose control of the ship - and their lives.

The Ember War, book 1: The Earth is doomed. Humanity has a chance. In the near future, an alien probe arrives on Earth with a pivotal mission: to determine if humanity has what it takes to survive the impending invasion by a merciless armada. The probe discovers Marc Ibarra, a young inventor who holds the key to a daring gambit that could save a fraction of Earth's population. Humanity's only chance lies with Ibarra's ability to keep a terrible secret and engineer the planet down the narrow path to survival.

In war, there is no second place. To ensure victory, planetary governments employ private armies to help fight their battles. And the Berserkers are the best. As the galaxy's preeminent mercenary force, they are hired by governments and corporations to do jobs that are too tough, too messy, or too deadly for their own forces. Expertly trained and equipped with the most advanced weaponry, they are willing to do whatever it takes to fulfill a contract - if the price is right.

The return of humanity's oldest enemy... An alien prophecy that predicts our species' downfall... And a captain who's the only thing standing in the way of his starship getting mothballed. Wait, what? Imagine Captain Keyes’ surprise when the fate of the galaxy turns out to depend on him, his decrepit ship, and his oddball crew.

How do you stage a mutiny when you're only awake one day in a million? How do you conspire when your tiny handful of potential allies changes with each job shift? How do you engage an enemy that never sleeps, that sees through your eyes and hears through your ears, and relentlessly, honestly, only wants what's best for you? Trapped aboard the starship Eriophora, Sunday Ahzmundin is about to discover the components of any successful revolution: conspiracy, code - and unavoidable casualties.

Fleet of Worlds takes a closer look at Human-Puppeteer (Citizen) relations and the events leading up to Niven's first Ringworld novel. Kirsten Quinn-Kovacks is among the best and brightest of her people. She gratefully serves the gentle race that rescued her ancestors from a dying starship, gave them a world, and nurtures them still. If only the Citizens knew where Kirsten's people came from.

When petty criminal Cal Carver is locked in a cell with a deranged, semi-naked cannibal, he suspects his life has hit its lowest point. He is mistaken. Abducted by aliens and whisked across the galaxy, Cal is thrown into a team of misfits and criminals and sent on a top secret mission for the president of Space. And that's when everything starts to go very, very wrong....