Space Opera First Contact

Thomas Baldwin has been appointed captain of the state-of-the-art cruise ship Constantine, named after his heroic grandfather. When their first diplomatic mission turns deadly, all signs point to the return of a former adversary, one the Concord claims to have defeated five decades earlier. No one has seen Baldwin's commander, Treena Starling, since her previous ship was destroyed in a gruesome battle, leaving her the sole survivor. Can her secret help them rescue one of their crew members from captivity at the enemy's hands?

The Korvil have attacked Earth, setting into motion a full-scale war that humans have little hope of surviving on their own. In the heat of battle, the Shiravans come to their rescue, turning the tide of the enemy invasion. This forms a tentative peace between the two races, but there are many more steps before reaching a full alliance.

Captain Tom Thrush is patrolling the Octagon Rift when his ship is attacked by a black destroyer that seems to predict his every move. Outgunned and outmaneuvered, he flees in a crippled ship to the only sanctuary he can reach—a den of thieves and spies called Lotus Station. His ship will be broken up for scrap. Half the crew are casualties. The rest are scattering, leaving Tom stuck on Lotus. As the black destroyer hunts down local freighters, Tom becomes obsessed with tracking it down and taking revenge.

Branded criminals and on the run from the most powerful corporation in the known universe, Liam Hoffen and the crew of Hotspur have a simple choice to make. They can either cower and hide on the long since abandoned planet Ophir, or continue their mission to set right the wrongs perpetrated by a company willing to trade human suffering and lives for their bottom line. If you've followed their story, you know which choice they'll make.

Abducted. Forced to fight against her will. Darcy has a 10,000-year-old secret buried in her genetic code. The Druid Gene makes her a target, but it may also save her. As a second year medical student, Darcy's life revolves around classes, studying, and her boyfriend Adam - until she treks through the desert, touches some mysterious stacked stones, and a network of glowing blue lines radiates under her skin.

Orson Scott Card, Kevin J. Anderson, and Larry Niven have seen the future. Now you can, too. A constellation of the brightest lights in the science fiction and fantasy firmament have judged these authors to be the best, the brightest, the truest emerging stars in the field.

It is 2076: Lancer, Earth’s first starship, is on a mission to find interstellar civilizations. Although astronaut Nigel Walmsley’s experiences with alien encounters make him the expert, no one believes Nigel’s theory that machines are the dominant intelligent beings left in the galaxy and that their purpose is to annihilate all organic life. Then the explorers discover once-living planets where only machines remain – and ruined worlds where fugitive survivors must evade omnipresent and lethally advanced A.I. warships.

At the end of 2385, in a significant shift of its goals from military back to exploratory, Starfleet sent Captain Benjamin Sisko and the crew of the USS Robinson on an extended mission into the Gamma Quadrant. Tasked with a yearlong assignment to travel unknown regions, they set out to fulfill the heart of Starfleet's charter: to explore strange new worlds and to seek out new life and new civilizations.

In an effort to improve relations with the Earth, the Colonial Union has invited a contingent of diplomats from that planet to observe Ambassador Abumwe negotiate a trade deal with an alien species. Then something very bad happens to one of the Earthings, and with that, the relationship between humanity’s two factions is on the cusp of disruption once more. It’s a race to find out what really happened, and who is to blame. "The Observers" is a tale from John Scalzi's The Human Division, a series of self-contained but interrelated short stories set in the Old Man's War universe.

Captain Picard has never encountered an opponent more powerful than Q, a being from another continuum who is dangerous, obnoxious, mysterious, and seemingly all-powerful. But now, Trelane has tapped in to an awesome power source that makes him more powerful than the entire continuum. Q warns that Trelane has become unspeakably dangerous - this time the stakes are all of creation. Read by John de Lancie.

CT has one goal: to take on the most powerful planet colonization corporation in the world and bring them to their knees. The corporation wasn't worried. After all, CT was just one man with a small crew of beautiful women. They should be worried. They should be very worried.

This hard sci-fi novel is the sixth book in the Stasis Stories, a series of optimistic tales of technological innovation in the near future. They follow Kaem Seba, a young man with extraordinary math talents. With his friends, he’s come up with a device that allows time to be stopped within limited volumes of space-time.

Following her victory against the aliens in Washington, Anya Nowicki has allied herself with the Department of Extraterrestrial Research and Defense: a newly formed organization headed by the shrewd Director MacDougal. Other hosts for the Archive, like Anya, have also joined the DERD, dedicating their time and efforts to honing their supernatural abilities and searching for whatever aliens remain on Earth. The hostile creatures known as gnosiphages have gone into hiding, but they have not remained idle. Hosts have been vanishing overnight, along with many civilians all across the globe.

Bladerunner and a grievously wounded Charlotte Omandi have escaped from Drac’ath, while also having assured Earth’s survival, by gaining its admission into the Galactic Confederation. Omandi and her crew regroup with their Phadex allies on the hidden refuge planet, Rulia. While there, a long awaited message is unlocked and delivered by Rulia’s lost founder, Talus. It sets off a string of unlikely events that brings Charlotte into a shadowy world of assassins. Meanwhile, Linnea Sorenson travels to the legendary planet Aluria, where strange magics are rumored to exist.

Until the Confederation created Allora, it had produced SADEs (self-aware digital entities) for hundreds of years with enormous consistency and harnessed their capabilities to power the society. But this particular young SADE was disturbed by her confinement. Trapped in metal-alloy housing on the bridge of a luxury passenger liner, Allora sought to possess the same freedom enjoyed by humans, who came and went from her starship with abandon.

Human descendants of the Earth colony ship Destiny face an incursion into their area of space by a powerful race. The Imperium Empire, which is ruled by the Krackus, is one wormhole away from the humans, and a rim mining planet, Kilmer, would be the alien race’s first contact. Fear rules the company leader. The Krackus represent danger. They sail powerful battleships. Moreover, the Naiad Council reels from the news that an alien race abuts their space. For centuries, humans in the Axis Crossing region thought they were alone.

Defying NASA, Jane Holloway, the linguist of the Providence expedition, commandeers the alien ship that crew explored. She sets off to return that ship's navigator to his home world, determined to discover who was behind the genocide that destroyed his original crew. But when she gets there, she finds his world devastated by the same plague. The remaining members of his race, uniquely gifted at navigating the stars, are stranded across the galaxy. And someone doesn't want those lost navigators found.

While the occupation of Earth continues, MinSha mercenaries under the command of Major General Drehnayl have assaulted human-held colonies in the outer rim, wiping them out. With the famed Four Horsemen nowhere to be found, the Mercenary Guild’s attempt to instill fear and subvert humanity is perilously close to reality. Tasked with finding the MinSha is Jessica Francis, Earth’s first Peacemaker, but the odds aren’t in her favor. Jessica realizes that finding Drehnayl's forces isn’t enough - she must do something to stop their atrocities and end their reign of terror.

After the events at Camp David, the Terran Alliance faces a crossroads - act upon this tragedy and start a war, or refrain and change the course of history. The choice is not easy. The incident leaves a young captain, Lucy Grimes, in full control of the Alliance, thrust against her will into leadership of the most powerful organization known to man.

After Sol’s construction of Tridents - Omnian-designed warships - Earthers possess the ability to transit quickly among the stars. The desire to know what happened to Earth’s colony ship, the Honora Belle, sent to the stars a millennium ago is resurrected. An Omnian Trident and the vessel Rêveur accompany three Sol Enclave Tridents in search of the Belle’s colonists. Swiftly, the Omnians and the Earthers become enmeshed in a centuries-old conflict enveloping a vast area of space inhabited by alliance races. The enemy is the Colony: a giant insectoid species.