Space Science

Neal Asher takes on first contact, Polity style. This original novel recounts the first contact between the aggressive Prador aliens, and the Polity Collective as it is forced to retool its society to a war footing. The overwhelming brute force of the Prador dreadnaughts causes several worlds and space stations to be overrun. Prador Moon follows the initial Polity defeats, to the first draws, and culminates in what might be the first Polity victory, told from the point of view of two unlikely heroes.

Misanthropic psychologist Dr. Grace Park is placed on the Deucalion, a survey ship headed to an icy planet in an unexplored galaxy. Her purpose is to observe the thirteen human crew members aboard the ship - all specialists in their own fields - as they assess the colonization potential of the planet, Eos. But frictions develop as Park befriends the androids of the ship, preferring their company over the baffling complexity of humans, while the rest of the crew treats them with suspicion and even outright hostility.

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?

Celebrate the greatest saga ever told: All of us who are deeply influenced by the epic saga of Star Wars have our favorite moments. Each time the screen goes black and you see those words - "a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away" - the music blasts through you, and you're a kid again. Ken Napzok, expert appreciator of Star Wars, counts down each one of those special moments that makes this series not just the best movies of all time, but the greatest saga ever told.

In the 21st century, the perfection of faster-than-light travel and the rise of a prodigious artificial intelligence known as the Eschaton altered the course of humankind. New civilizations were founded across the vastness of space. Now, the technology-eschewing world known as the New Republic is besieged by an alien information plague. Earth quickly sends a battle fleet - but is it coming to the rescue, or is a sinister plot in motion?

Pyre's humans suffer multiple cultural shocks. They discovered the Messinants dome, an ancient construction that houses a quantum-coupled gate. More shocking, they find that sentient alien races utilize a network of these domes to journey between their far distant worlds in pursuit of alliance matters. If humans wish to join this elite collection of sentients, they must contribute significantly in trade, tech, or something of equal value.

On humanity's first extra-solar mission, the exploration vessel Magellan, or, as she prefers, "Maggie", discovers an alien artifact. Deciding that finding advanced alien life is too important to ignore, Captain Allison Ridgeway chooses to return to Earth while ordering her crew to reverse engineer technology far beyond anything back home. Meanwhile, at mission control, the governments struggle to maintain the existence of aliens a secret while also combating bureaucracy, the military industrial complex, and everyone else who wants a piece of what could skyrocket humanity into a new technological age.

High above the windswept plains of Kazakhstan, three astronauts on board a Russian Soyuz capsule begin their reentry. A strange shimmer in the atmosphere, a blinding flash of light, and the capsule vanishes in a blink as though it never existed. Daniel Rice is a government science investigator. Marie Kendrick is a NASA operations analyst. Together, they must track down the cause of the most bizarre event in the history of human spaceflight. They draw on scientific strengths as they plunge into the strange world of quantum physics.

Major Rodger Y. Murphy should have died when his helicopter crashed off the coast of Mogadishu in November, 1993. Instead, he woke up in August, 2125, in a binary star system 152 light years from home. Without any memory of the otherworldly abductors who spirited them away in cold sleep, Murphy and 100 other “Lost Soldiers” have been retrieved and awakened by officers of the Consolidated Terran Republic. Promising to return to the 55 Tauri B system after completing a distant mission, they leave the twentieth century castaways with a daunting objective.

Thorn is back. He's lost one civilization, and is still trying to fix two others. But fixing something when you don't know how it broke is never as simple as you'd think. The future is threatened by his own past, and to fix everything, he thinks he has to undo what he's already done. But what if what you did cannot be undone, and the future has more riding on it than anyone knows? Yesterday's Spacemage was the cause. Today's Spacemage was the effect. But can tomorrow's Spacemage save everyone?

With wonder, wit, and flair - and in record time and space - geophysicist David Bercovici explains how everything came to be everywhere, from the creation of stars and galaxies to the formation of Earth's atmosphere and oceans to the origin of life and human civilization. Bercovici marries humor and legitimate scientific intrigue, rocketing listeners across nearly 14 billion years and making connections between the essential theories that give us our current understanding of topics as varied as particle physics, plate tectonics, and photosynthesis.

The Trouble with Physics argues that a limited notion of time is holding physics back. It's time for a major revolution in scientific thought. The reality of time could be the key to the next big breakthrough in theoretical physics. What if the laws of physics themselves were not timeless? What if they could evolve? Time Reborn offers a radical new approach to cosmology that embraces the reality of time and opens up a whole new universe of possibilities.

Sera leads a simple life. A little smuggling, some drinking contests, and captaining her star freighter, Sabrina. But when she picks up a mysterious shipping container on Coburn Station, things begin to go wrong. She finds herself at odds with The Mark, a dangerous pirate organization that wants the cargo on her ship. Inside the container she not only finds a woman, but a secret thought lost millennia ago.

Who are we, and how did we get here? These are two of the most fundamental and far-reaching questions facing scientists and cosmologists alike and have rested at the center of human intellectual endeavor since its beginning. They are questions that stretch across numerous disciplines. Philosophy, theology, evolutionary biology, and mathematics are just some of the fields looking to explain the emergence of human life.

It's 2040. After decades of research, scientists of the European Union believe that they have at last conquered humankind's most pernicious foe: old age. For the first time, technology holds out the promise of not merely slowing the aging process but actually reversing it. The first subject for treatment is 78-year-old philanthropist Jeff Baker. After 18 months in a rejuvenation tank, Jeff emerges looking like a 20-year-old. And the change is more than skin deep. From his hair cells down to his DNA, Jeff is 20 - with a breadth of life experience.

The first interstellar war, a generation ago, left humanity enslaved. Now humans fight in the armies of their masters to save themselves from annihilation. At least, that's what the propaganda insists is true. What the layers of lies keep hidden is how badly the new war is going for the people of earth. Now it's Dylan Kane's turn to blast into the heavens and join the battle, but what his masters don't know is that by putting a weapon in his hands, they're giving him the key to unlocking his hopes of freedom.

On the edge of a war-weary and devastated galaxy, charismatic Lewis Orne has landed on Hamal. His assignment: To detect any signs of latent aggression in this planet's population. To his astonishment, he finds that his own latent extrasensory powers have suddenly blossomed, and he is invited to join the company of "gods" on this planet - and the people here place certain expectations on their gods.

The second entry in the Riverworld series, The Fabulous Riverboat tells of a world where all of humanity has been mysteriously resurrected on the banks of one mighty river. Samuel Clemens (a.k.a.Mark Twain) is tasked with finding a fallen meteorite and using its ore to build a massive riverboat. But in order to succeed, he'll have to outwit some of history's most nefarious villains.

Recovering from their first mission, the crew of the Vorpal Blade - humankind's first interstellar craft - is called into emergency action when an alliance gate colony is attacked. Who was the lethal alien enemy? What exactly happened at the colony? And dare the Vorpal Blade's battle-weary misfits engage a potentially superior force?

From the master of alternate history comes an epic of the second Civil War. It was an epoch of glory and success, of disaster and despair. 1881: A generation after the South won the Civil War, America writhed once more in the bloody throes of battle. Furious over the annexation of key Mexican territory, the United States declared total war against the Confederate States of America in 1881.