Space Opera Science Fiction

A strange body that refuses to obey you; a weird game you can't quit until your contract expires; a world teeming with powerful and very real enemies. The game in which your reputation and faction relationship are the only things that matter. These are the conditions of the agreement Ruslan signs without reading. The only thing he remembers is that he's been contracted to command a space fleet in a brand-new game he knows nothing about. Objective: to survive for six months.

Donovan is a world of remarkable wealth that comes at a high price. When Supervisor Kalico Aguila's ship arrives, she discovers a failing colony, its government overthrown, the few remaining colonists gone wild. Donovan could make her career - or kill her. Planetside, Talina Perez is one of three rulers of the Port Authority colony - the only law in the one remaining town. With the Corporate ship demanding answers about the things she's done, Perez could lose everything, including her life. For Dan Wirth, Donovan is a last chance. A psychopath with a death sentence looming over his head, he will make a desperate play for power. No matter who he has to corrupt, murder, or destroy. Captain Max Taggart is the Corporation's enforcer. But is it too late to seize control of Donovan?

Following the success of their Locus Award-winning anthology

The New Space Opera, editors Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan up the ante with

The New Space Opera 2, in which more of the most beloved names in science fiction spin stunning tales of interstellar adventure and wonder.

Five intergalactic criminal masterminds raid the tranquil world of Mount Pleasant, leaving behind only ruin and slaughter - and the orphaned child Kirth Gersen, who comes to manhood swearing to take bloody revenge. Now Gersen roams the galaxy, bringing vengeance to the Demon Princes one by one, in Jack Vance's classic series of hardboiled space opera.

While the crew of the UN Expeditionary Force's pirate starship Flying Dutchman are enjoying a luxury vacation cruise (not!), UNEF troops are still stranded on an alien-controlled planet. Major Emily Perkins and her team are busy picking up the pieces, and it's not easy, because there is trouble on Paradise...

Acclaimed best-selling author Peter F. Hamilton has taken the science fiction world by storm with his stunning, grand-scale epic: The Reality Dysfunction, The Neutronium Alchemist, and The Naked God. Now, with this collection of six stories and a short novel, Hamilton spans more than five centuries in the future history of bitek, affinity genes, Edenists, Adamists, xenocs, the Saldanas, and the starship Lady Macbeth.

It is the year 12,020 GE and Emperor Cleon I sits uneasily on the Imperial throne of Trantor. Here in the great multidomed capital of the Galactic Empire, 40 billion people have created a civilization of unimaginable technological and cultural complexity. Yet Cleon knows there are those who would see him fall - those whom he would destroy if only he could read the future.

When the Ornu came, they took Earth in a single night. Humanity never stood a chance. Now, they force us to crew their ships and fight their wars for them. They hold Earth hostage, and if we refuse to do their bidding, they’ll lay waste to our precious blue marble. Slaughtering the billions who live there. But when Captain Bill Henderson is sent to claim a small moon for his masters, he finds something they never accounted for. An ancient warship – a behemoth abandoned for millennia by a species that reached its peak at the dawn of the universe.

Without any solid leads from the Ranger Corps, Fin spearheads his own audacious investigation into the sinister black-market weapons ring run by criminal syndicate Acheron. As the syndicate's new leaders unveil their diabolical scheme, they hope to dissuade the Rangers from chasing after them by wielding an important hostage—Fin’s beloved golden retriever, Jacques.

The galaxy’s worst bounty hunter just might be its most relentless hero. Esper Richelieu is a wizard with a mission: To make the galaxy a better place one lost soul at a time. Donning the trappings of an interstellar bounty hunter, she delves into the galaxy’s underworld to search out those most in need of help. Whether it’s a teenage runaway or an actor kidnapped by cultists, the victim comes first. Money is an afterthought. That confuses a lot of clients. But sometimes the best way to get someone to accept the help they need is to convince them to pay for it.

The Aftermath of a stunning victory—especially an unexpected, complete, and final victory—should be high-fives all around, listening to politicians give boring congratulatory speeches, and a well-deserved rest for the Merry Band of Pirates. Yes, the galaxy is still a freakin' mess, but that is nothing new, and for a change, that can be someone else's problem. Until, you know, something really bad happens, and only the Pirates can deal with the problem... Or not.

A ship under siege. A world on the brink of civil war. A distraught people seeking a new beginning. A battle weary crew that can barely hold it together. Even a legend can use a little help from time to time. The crew of the Aurora, the Karuzari, and the Corinairans must find a way to work together, or else they may all perish.

Micah Cole has been in deep space for three years while his parents chase their obsession with finding intelligence to the far corners of the universe, but Micah dreams of the friends he left behind and counts the days until they return home. When a devastating meteor shower nearly destroys their ship, Micah is separated from his family and stranded on Sovereign, a vast planet of raging rivers, towering forests, and deadly creatures. If Micah ever wants to see his family or his home again, he’ll have to learn to how to survive on a hostile alien world, all alone.

A company of Army Rangers is sent on an interstellar colony ship to secure a foothold on a dangerous, alien planet through violence of action. Leaving behind a warring Earth flung headfirst into a conflict of mutual assured destruction, the Rangers and the accompanying crew of first colonists are guided on a 40-year journey by an unprecedented artificial intelligence. But when they emerge from the frigid embrace of cryosleep, they awake to a nightmare, finding themselves greeted by the same ruthless enemy that brought about the ruin of Earth.

Humanity has colonized the planets - interstellar travel is still beyond our reach, but the solar system has become a dense network of colonies. But there are tensions - the mineral-rich outer planets resent their dependence on Earth and Mars and the political and military clout they wield over the Belt and beyond. Now, when Captain Jim Holden's ice miner stumbles across a derelict, abandoned ship, he uncovers a secret that threatens to throw the entire system into war.

Kylie Rhoads is a junker. She makes her living traveling the stars, salvaging abandoned ships left over from pirate attacks on the edge of the Gedri system. Some of the hulls are legal for the taking, most aren't. When a salvage job goes bad, Kylie finds herself on the wrong end of a gun. The hand holding that gun? The SA Space Force, just the people Kylie wants to avoid. To avoid prison, Kylie makes a deal to go deep into the Gedri System and rescue a simple girl. But out on the fringe, nothing is as it seems.

Chuck Ramsey is a traveling con man fronting as a comedian. After a gig on Earth, he picks Mordecai The Brown, a hitchhiking wizard on the run from his own kind. Chuck's ship, the Radio City, is a Winnebego of the stars, serving as both home and transport as he schemes and scams across the galaxy with his family. The pair form an unlikely bond, and "Mort" becomes a part of that family. The Ramseys, wizard in tow, embark on a journey of criminal hijinks, magical mayhem, and evasion of consequences for both.

Major Jimjoy Earle Wright, secret agent of the Empire, is intelligent and highly trained. But he succeeds all too well in overthrowing a military dictatorship - and the result is a new government inimical to the Empire and disgrace for Jimjoy. After surviving two assassination attempts, Jimjoy realizes that it's his own imperial superiors who want him dead; that, in fact, his worst enemies could become his best friends. He fights his way to safety on the planet Accord, where the Ecolitan Institute wins his loyalty and changes his identity.

On Arrakis, now called Rakis, known to legend as Dune, 10 times 10 centuries have passed. The planet is becoming desert again. The Lost Ones are returning home from the far reaches of space. The great sandworms are dying, and the Bene Gesserit and the Bene Tleilax struggle to direct the future of Dune. The children of Dune's children awaken as from a dream, wielding the new power of a heresy called love.

More than 3,000 years have passed since the first events recorded in Dune. Only one link survives with those tumultuous times: the grotesque figure of Leto Atreides, son of the prophet Paul Muad'Dib, and now the virtually immortal God Emperor of Dune. He alone understands the future, and he knows with a terrible certainty that the evolution of his race is at an end unless he can breed new qualities into his species.