Hard Science Fiction Space Opera

The Galactic Star Alliance has been alive and well for millions of Earth years. Hundreds of thousands of worlds and trillions of beings move across the many home worlds of the Alliance. This revelation invites many questions: How is faster-than-light speed travel possible, and could cohesive, interstellar civilizations exist without it? Is it conceivable to govern a coalition not of different countries but of different species?

Lem’s a mace-wielding teen space-ninja in a universe of sentient insectoids, purple jungles, and insane electromagnetic fields. She solves most problems by hitting harder, and never plays by her enemy's rules - until Jared Diebol captures her. Diebol is the rising leader of an army uniting the galaxy by force. He believes that the violent energy being Njande has “contaminated” Lem and her friends from another dimension to conquer the matter-based universe. Diebol’s army usually kills contaminated people - but he vows to cure Lem.

Kraken, the first colony of Earth - an Earth-twin that never suffered the dinosaur extinction meteor strike and subsequent entry into radical cycles of climate. A world that should have been paradise for those first colonists is on the brink of war...with its own motherland. Kraken citizens are split in their loyalty. Hostile acts against the colony by a desperate motherland are rising. Jankin Decatur takes a desperate peace mission to Earth to appeal to the NAU Senate on what may be their final hope for survival.

A quarter of a millennium ago, before the nuclear apocalypse forced the inhabitants of earth to flee their home planet, few humans could have imagined the course their path would take. Now, the orbital colonies are the final sanctuary of humanity and life is more dangerous than ever before. The colonists fear the return of their dreaded enemies, the Paratwa – ferocious warriors who are genetically engineered to exist in two bodies which remain telepathically connected.

Melati escaped New Jakarta Space Station when it fell into Allion's hands. Her family was left behind the enemy lines. She signed up for active duty with the International Space Force in the hope they would liberate the station. Instead, they chose to maintain a crippling siege that has lasted for 10 months.

How do you end a war you want no part of? Cass and Ken just want to get back to their plans for exploration. That doesn't seem to be in the cards, though, so now it's time to think outside the box. If the leaders of Artemis won't listen, maybe it's time for new leaders. New tools, new crews, new challenges, but the same Cass and Ken: they're not going to let anything stop them!

The Outer Worlds are engulfed in conflict. The Solar Assembly are preparing to send troops to intervene, a move which threatens to thrust the entire Solar System into civil war. On Mars, Emile Chandraskher and his Formist Faction, are preparing the final stages of their decades-long plan for ultimate control. In the midst of this, an unlikely group of dissenters and misfits emerge. And they have a score to settle!

In a future where humanity has scattered itself across the stars and Earth itself is now a dimly remembered place of legend, two worlds of near-supernatural strangeness challenge two naive but courageous heroes.

Humanity has conquered the Solar System. What’s more, death itself has been vanquished. Wellstone - programmable matter - insures that no one need ever die, or indeed, age past adulthood. But for the children of immortal parents, life remains a constant state of arrested development. And a prince shall remain a prince forever, never inheriting the throne. So what is a minor royal to do?

Julie E. Czerneda's acclaimed Web Shifters series continues with the story of Esen - the last survivor of a unique alien race. Able to take on the form of any creature she observes, Esen has long since broken the cardinal rule of her species: noninterference.

Geoff and his friends live in Phocaea, a distant asteroid colony on the Solar System's frontier. They're your basic high-spirited young adults, enjoying such pastimes as hacking matter compilers to produce dancing skeletons that prance through the low-gee communal areas, using their rocket-bikes to salvage methane ice shrapnel that flies away when the colony brings in a big (and vital) rock of the stuff, and figuring out how to avoid the ubiquitous surveillance motes.

The Science Officer has done the impossible and stolen the Last Flagship. With the help of his friends, Javier will take his private war to Valko Slavkov and the pirates with a theft so audacious, so brazen, nobody could predict it. And so big that the Concord itself takes a personal interest. Book seven in the Science Officer series and part one of the Hammerfield saga. To be concluded in The Hammerfield Payoff. Part of the Alexandria Station universe.

She disappeared more than 80 years ago. Lost forever to myth and legend like Excalibur tossed into the waters. When the Science Officer leads the crew to the last flagship of the Neu Berne fleet, they must risk awakening a sentient warship if they want to go after the man who destroyed Storm Gauntlet. Just how derelict is the last flagship? Could it be a trap as well? The Last Flagship may just be the most daring caper for Javier Aritza, Suvi, and the crew of Storm Gauntlet.

It seemed like a legitimate heist when someone hired Storm Gauntlet and her crew to go hijack some cargo. Pirate ships did that sort of thing. However, whoever hired them didn't count on the Science Officer's sneakiness. Paranoia. Whatever. The situation didn't make sense. No one would deliver cargo to a dead planet. It had to be a trap. Someone had set them up. But who? And why?

The unthinkable has happened: An Akkadian assassin has helped broker peace between her star nation and the Alliance. Micah Case and Task Force Blue watch the peace talks with guarded optimism - but they know one thing the rest of the settled worlds don't: Clint Janus has vanished with the Alliance's most closely held secret. And Micah Case holds the key.

Das Raumschiff Shepherd-1 ist unterwegs zum sonnennächsten Stern. Auf halbem Weg gelingt es der Besatzung, mithilfe der Gravitationslinsen-Technologie scharfe Bilder vom Ursprung des Universums anzufertigen – und damit die Antwort zu erhalten, die verrät, wie der Kosmos entstanden ist und ob ein Gott dabei seine Hand im Spiel hatte oder nicht. Doch kaum teilt die Crew das der Erde mit, verstummt die Funkverbindung, obwohl das Schiff offenbar funktionsfähig ist.

Teenage Breq escapes the grim streets of a resource-low, near-future world to take a job as a "corpse diver" in a massive online sci-fi game, Bane. Breq finds himself in a dangerous, life-threatening adventure within the game as he searches for the reason for the death of his best friend. With landscapes and settings that evoke the sci-fi classics, our hero must level up his character as fast as he can, so as to be able to take on and defeat a sinister, masked figure. Especially as the threat posed by the unknown character is not limited to events within the game.

Earth’s first colony ship finally reaches the target world. The excitement of planetfall is indescribable, but quickly transforms into sick disappointment when they find the atmosphere is a roiling mass of hydrochloric acid, carbon dioxide, and other deadly poisons. They fly onward, seeking better planets. They find them, but none are ideal. The search goes on for a century, then longer still. As they move farther from Earth, aliens discover the intruding ship, and they begin to investigate humanity. They find our species unacceptable.

As the post-attack chaos forces Earth's governments to realize they no longer have the ability to maintain order, the destiny of mankind falls to a select group of human and artificial intelligence to prepare a defense against annihilation by the Nubl hives.

A captain who'll take any job if there's enough money in it. A pilot with an agenda of her own. And a mechanic with an eye on the pilot. The crew of the Fives Full are just trying to make enough money to keep themselves in the black while avoiding the attention of a government so paranoid it's repealed Moore's Law. They're not looking for adventure in the stars...but they're not going to back down just because something got in their way.