Hard Science Fiction Space

By the middle of the 21st century, humanity has managed to overcome a series of catastrophic events and maintain some sense of stability. Space exploration has begun again. Science has led the way. But then one day, the sun goes out. Solar panels are useless, and the world begins to freeze. Earth begins to fall out of its orbit. The end is nigh. Someone has sent us a sign.

The sparsely populated moon, Io, is destroyed in a terrorist attack. Hundreds are dead in the cataclysmic explosion. Thousands become refugees as the shattered remnants of the moon threaten the Jupiter Alliance. Billions throughout the solar system are wondering, "Where next?" Those responsible must be found and brought to justice. The explorer ship Erebus is reassigned from its mission and sent to Jupiter to investigate this atrocity with Trent's international team onboard.

Copilots Msizi and Tariro are testing a newly constructed wormhole jump that presumably leads to unsettled habitable worlds. Then an explosion sends them off course, far from where they started and with little chance of ever making it back. Now they’re stranded on their new home for the diaspora. It’s called Malcolm X-b. But they’re beginning to wonder how many light-years from civilization they really are.

Deep in the heart of an alien mountain range, I.C.C. has lain dormant, its ships silent, for eons. Now, after 100,000 years, the AI is awakening. Someone is roaming the convoy's halls - someone that isn't human. This planet, Noumenon - created by the megastructure known as the Web - is too young and brutal to have evolved intelligent life. Its surface is bombarded by unusual meteors. Crystal trees abruptly and violently arise from its bedrock. Its solar system is surrounded by a frightening space-time anomaly. So where did these visitors come from? What do they want?

The Wilding is the long-awaited sequel to C.S. Friedman's epic, In Conquest Born. The Braxaná were created to become the ultimate warriors. The Azeans were raised to master the power of the mind. The two civilizations are fighting an endless war over a long-forgotten cause. Now, after a century and a half, the legacy of their greatest military leaders threatens to tear apart both empires.

Chronicler Tsai Yini monitors the tachyon communication system, which transmits data faster than the speed of light. When classified results from an astrobiologist's research are leaked to her, she cannot believe what she reads. The report reveals that intelligent life forms exist on a tropical planet in the Gliese system. Their civilization is still in its infancy but revolves around an artifact of unknown origin that seems to influence their body chemistry.

Captain Graciela is where she wants to be, far from her controlling mother, in a rented solar sail cargo ship, trading and gambling throughout the heliosphere. It can be lonely in the void, but the crew on the H2LiftShip, the LunaCola, is all the help she needs: Jack, a talking dog with a nose for Earth jerky, Tang, a poker-obsessed orangutan, and Octopus, in his watery navigation station, are her constant companions on her journey.

Sable Keech is a walking dead man. Was he resurrected because he was infected by the Spatterjay virus, or it took place late in a tank of seawater? Taylor Bloc wants to know the truth. He also wants more – adulation, power, control – and will go to any lengths to achieve them. An ancient hive mind has sent an agent to this uncertain world. Does it merely want to obtain the poison 'sprine' that is crucial to immortality? Erlin, still faced with the ennui of immortality, is interrupted by an angry whelkus titanicus, and begins a strange journey.

All That Outer Space Allows: Booktrack Edition adds an immersive musical soundtrack to your audiobook listening experience! It is 1965 and Ginny Eckhardt is a science fiction writer. She’s been published in the big science fiction magazines and is friends with many of the popular SF authors of the day. Her husband, Walden, will soon be an Apollo astronaut. Although the realities of spaceflight fascinate Ginny, her genders bars her from the United States space programme. Her science fiction offers little in the way of consolation - but perhaps there is something she can do about that....

Commander Scott McNabb, of the science vessel Hermes, is three years into a five-year-long survey of the asteroid belt. It’s an excruciatingly dull mission, yet it keeps him far away from the agencies that are chasing him down. However, his fortunes change, along with the other four crew members, when they discover a derelict spaceship in orbit around a binary asteroid. Scott’s share of the salvage would be enough to clear his name and start a new life.

A propulsive science fiction tale of murder and memory, all set on a futuristic space station. Hundreds of miles above Earth, the space station Ciudad de Cielo - the City in the Sky - is a beacon of hope for humanity's expansion into the stars. But not everyone aboard shares such noble ideals. Bootlegging, booze, and prostitution form a lucrative underground economy for rival gangs, which the authorities are happy to turn a blind eye to until a disassembled corpse is found dancing in the microgravity.

No one has ever ventured deeper into space than the astronauts of Shepherd-1. The aim of their mission: to witness the creation of the cosmos and to see who had a hand in it. The answer never reaches Earth. Shepherd-1 looks functional but abandoned. Former crew member Benjamin sets off and sends his consciousness to the spaceship. Although an enemy throws clubs between his legs, he finds the culprit. The fact that there appears to be no remedy whatsoever does not remain his only problem: The ship, which is about to be destroyed, suddenly receives radio signals from interstellar space.

Devastated early in the war, the United Systems Alliance has retaken several key systems lost to the Galactic Union. But getting even isn’t good enough for General Hella. Determined to end the costly war and destroy the Union, Hella launches a daring offensive against the planet Kuut, a key military base deep in Union space. At the tip of the spear, Lieutenant Mark Rizer and the Marines of Orcus Company find themselves in the mud and blood of a planetary ground invasion.

The most wanted salvage marine in the universe thought he was done fighting. For Samuel Hyst the nightmare was over, left behind upon dead worlds and within the derelict ships drifting through space, he and his family having fled to the edges of the frontier to begin a new life of peace. In the aftermath of a violent raid by slave traders, the long-suffering marine discovers that a relic of the ancient machine civilization has been left at the doorstep of his pristine forest homestead. He feels the menace radiating from it, and knows that the various powers and factions that rule necrospace will soon come for all of them.

Tanis Richards has had enough with people manipulating her; unfortunately, the only way out is to go through. Her mission takes her to Earth to abduct a high-ranking Scattered Disk officer on the orders of the Jovian Oligarch. Meanwhile, Harm must do the unthinkable to escape his captor and come to Tanis' aid. Tanis doesn't know it yet, but if she doesn't succeed, her failure will spark the third Solar War....

With the alien Dhryn cutting a pathway through the inhabited spaceways - bringing about the annihilation of many of the races who have the misfortune to lie along the star trail they are following - time is running out for all sentient life-forms. Can biologists Mackenzie Connor and Emily Mamami solve the riddle of the Dhryn before their part of the galaxy becomes as dead as the mysterious region known as the Chasm?

A huge space station orbits the Earth, holding the last of humanity. It's broken, rusted, falling apart. We've wrecked our planet, and now we have to live with the consequences: a new home that's dirty, overcrowded, and inescapable. What's more, there's a madman hiding on the station. He's about to unleash chaos. And when he does, there'll be nowhere left to run.

My name is Zane Zimmer. To most folks, I live a seemingly charmed life as a Regal lord and the heir apparent to the powerful, wealthy House Zimmer, and the gossipcasts breathlessly follow my every swaggering move across the Archipelago Galaxy. I’m also a powerful psion capable of telekinesis, telepathy, and telempathy, and my deadly skills and prowess with my stormsword have made me the golden boy of the Arrows, the Imperium’s elite fighting force. But even golden boys have bad days, and the truth is I have more hard problems than I can solve.

On a far-future Earth, a linked system of artificial intelligences called the cybercosm runs the planet and the universe far more efficiently than any flesh and blood ruler ever could, in essence rendering the human race obsolete. On the Earth's moon, genetically engineered Lunarians carrying the DNA of Dagney Beynac - a descendant of the legendary Anton Guthrie, founder of the powerful and visionary Fireball Enterprises - struggle to preserve their lives, their freedom, and their satellite's resources in the face of threats posed by encroaching humans and controlling machines.

The revelations on Mars - a half-million year-old legacy of the vanished star-traveling Builders - have fed the flames of catastrophic war. A beleaguered United States and its Russian and Japanese allies struggle to hold their own against the indomitable forces of the enemy United Nations. The bloody conflict that has swept over the home planet now rages across the blackness of space - with the U.S. Marine Corps in the vanguard, leading the charge as always.