Hard Science Fiction Space

Kylara Vatta is the only daughter in a family full of sons, and her father's only child to buck tradition by choosing a military career instead of joining the family business. For Ky, it's no contest: Even running the prestigious Vatta Transport Ltd. shipping concern can't hold a candle to shipping out as an officer aboard an interstellar cruiser. It's adventure, not commerce, that stirs her soul. And despite her family's misgivings, there can be no doubt that a Vatta in the service will prove a valuable asset. But with a single error in judgment, it all comes crumbling down.

The year is AD 7000. The human species is extinct - for the fourth time - due to its fragile nature. Krina Alizond-114 is metahuman, descended from the robots that once served humanity. She’s on a journey to the water-world of Shin-Tethys to find her sister Ana. But her trip is interrupted when pirates capture her ship. Their leader, the enigmatic Count Rudi, suspects that there’s more to Krina’s search than meets the eye.

Red Moon is a magnificent novel of space exploration and political revolution from New York Times bestselling author Kim Stanley Robinson. It is thirty years from now, and we have colonized the moon. American Fred Fredericks is making his first trip, his purpose to install a communications...

The truth of discovery is on mankind's horizon, a Red Horizon. For nearly four long years, the world's superpowers have mobilized their people and resources in preparation for the next discovery, Mars. The race against one another pales in comparison to the inherent dangers of travelling through the vastness of the cosmos, going where mankind has never gone before.

Nearly 100,000 years after first contact with the machines that dominate the universe, only a few hundred humans survive. Trapped on Snowglade, a barren world near the center of the galaxy, Killeen and his child, Toby, of the Bishop Tribe, are primitive scavengers, homeless and hunted by the ruling “mechs”. Then suddenly, a strange cosmic entity – neither organic nor cybernetic or living matter – reaches out from a black hole to speak with Killeen.

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.

Humanity's last encounter with aliens saw 16.2 billion people killed in a war with the Merkiaari that had spanned decades. Two hundred years later, the Alliance is cautiously exploring beyond its borders again, but the survey corp is considered a mere gesture by some. General Burgton of the 501st Infantry Regiment believes a lack of expansion is leading the Alliance into stagnation. So when one small ship discovers a new alien race, it should be an easy decision to make contact, but what if the aliens are like the Merkiaari?

Rachel Adams beobachtet das All mit Hilfe des Chandra-Röntgensatelliten. Als ihr Kollege Shawn Whitfield sie bittet, ein kosmisches Phänomen zu untersuchen, sagt sie zu – nicht ahnend, dass das Routine-Projekt ihr Leben dramatisch verändern wird. Denn schnell stellt sich heraus, dass Shawn keinen simplen Asteroiden gefunden hat – das Objekt scheint keinen natürlichen Ursprung zu haben. Rachels Neugier ist geweckt, und selbst, als man ihr das Projekt als nationale Verschlusssache wegnimmt, ist sie nicht zu bremsen. Und dann bewegt sich das Objekt auch noch auf die Erde zu!

An oppressive world. An untested spacecraft. A perilous gamble. Can her journey preserve humanity's freedom? Cristina Flores speaks her mind. But in a totalitarian surveillance state where privacy is a thing of the past, her critical thinking and outspoken nature have marked her for death. So when rebel scientists recruit the math genius for a covert plan to start anew on Mars, she accepts the chance to control her own destiny. But space is a harsh sanctuary, and freedom is never purchased cheaply.

Im Jahr 2330 steht die Menschheit vor einer historischen Entdeckung: Ein unbekanntes Objekt tritt in das Sonnensystem ein. Klar ist: Es korrigiert selbstständig seine Flugbahn und sendet Strahlung aus, wie es kein natürliches Objekt könnte. Militärs und Politiker sind bereit, alles auf eine Karte zu setzen – notfalls mit Gewalt. Während die Regierungen der Erde in Machtspielen versinken, wird Holmgren auf eine gefährliche Aufklärungsmission geschickt. Was als Suche nach Informationen beginnt, entwickelt sich schnell zu einem Albtraum und endet in einer Katastrophe.

This volume contains two novels. Perilous Dreams: Tamisen the Dreamer is trained to walk through her dreams to other places, other worlds. But when she is asked by the crippled star traveler Lord Starrex to take him into a dream world where he can regain his legs and his life, something goes terribly wrong. Knave of Dreams: For Ramsay Kimble, sleep means nightmares, and he avoids it whenever possible. But now a car accident has catapulted him into the very world he most dreads: the horror world of his own dreams.

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.

After the mysterious discovery of an alien mech inside a comet, Darkstream Security has finally completed its own design. They assign Chief Gabriel Roach with the task of whittling down hundreds of bright young recruits to form a team of elite mech pilots, which he will command. Their mission: protect human colonies from the almighty Quatro. A single Quatro can take down an entire squad of traditional soldiers. But Roach is the perfect one for the job.

The Theocracy has been dead for 20 years, and the Polity rules on Masada - but it is an order that the rebels of the Tidy Squad cannot accept, and the iconic Jeremiah Tombs is top of their hitlist. Tombs, meanwhile, has escaped his sanatorium. His insanity must be cured, because the near-mythical hooder, called "the Technician", that attacked him all those years ago, did something to his mind even the AIs fail to understand. Tombs might possess information about the suicide of an entire alien race.

Living in the Fellowship meant fighting one space battle after another. Every civilization was aggressive, hostile, and impossible to live with in peace. A Welken task force stumbles upon a massive Myot ship building complex and every Welken warship is destroyed in the ensuing battle before they can warn the home world of the Myot's location. One escape pod manages to escape the battle and the Myot know it must be prevented from making it back to Welken territory.

For five centuries, human life has been restricted to Earth, while posthuman descendants called alloys freely explore the galaxy. But when the Earthlike planet of Meru is discovered, two unlikely companions venture forth to test the habitability of this unoccupied new world and the future of human-alloy relations. For Jayanthi, the adopted human child of alloy parents, it’s an opportunity to rectify the ancient reputation of her species as avaricious and destructive, and to give humanity a new place in the universe.

Alex has decided they must be stopped and takes steps to do just that. Meanwhile, Earth runs up against the Imperium again and they don't like what happens next.

The first eight novellas of Blaze Ward's Science Officer series collected together for the first time!

Adrift in the divide between galaxies and surrounded by the vast emptiness of the intergalactic void, the Tantalus Cluster is the only home humanity has ever known. Desperate and facing starvation, humanity’s only hope is a strange nebula that has suddenly appeared beyond the edge of the cluster. Its shifting clouds may hide a source of salvation for the people of Tantalus, but time is running out.

When John Bandicut sets out across the surface of Triton, he's hardly ready for the storm of chaos that's about to blow through his life. The alien Quarx that soon inhabits his mind is humanity's first contact with an alien life. The Quarx, part of an ancient galactic civilization that manipulates chaos theory to predict catastrophic events, seeks to prevent a cometary collision that could destroy the Earth. But it must have help. If Bandicut chooses to trust the Quarx, he must break all the rules - indeed, sacrifice his own life.