Hard Space Opera

Chris Holt, working in his office at the Space Resources Corporation, discovers that one of the asteroids he is surveying for mining is actually not an asteroid at all but a derelict spaceship. The word gets out and soon the world's powers are competing to explore and claim for themselves the secrets that it holds. What they don't know is that across the galaxy, a war has been underway for millennia. A war between alien civilizations that have very different ideas about what should be done about emerging spacefaring civilizations like our own.

Sol has fallen, but the fight continues to rage. Oberon stayed behind, nothing more than a ghost on a radar screen, watching as the Clicks increase their presence on planet Earth. What's going on with the humans left behind? No one knows. Humanity's fleet admiral has survived! And he's issuing orders. Oberon is sent on a mission where it must succeed or die trying. It isn't what any of the crew wants, but it is what they must do.

The colony ship Ragtime docks in the Lagos system, having traveled light-years to bring one thousand sleeping souls to a new home among the stars. But when first mate Michelle Campion rouses, she discovers some of the sleepers will never wake. Answering Campion’s distress call, investigator Rasheed Fin is tasked with finding out who is responsible for these deaths.

What was the light that mazed every mind's sky - and then was gone? Why has it brought a flying tepui mountaintop home from the stars, and sent investigators into the orbital habitats floating above Earth? How is it connected to a "living fossil" fungus of great entheogenic powers? Or to a dead madman? Or to the fate of a planet overpopulated, hypermediated, corporate dominated, and heat-gas insulated? Forces that are socially and politically polarized, both good and evil, selfless and selfish, must search for the answers to these questions.

The third book in the Web Shifter's Library series returns to the adventures of Esen, a shape-shifting alien who must navigate the perils of a hostile universe.

Konran Andacellos has all but given up on his dream to be a starfighter. After botching an airshow maneuver and being reduced to a captaincy on a rock hauler, the ambitious 22-year-old never expected an ambush to sweep in and blow his convoy to dust. With the lives of his crew on the line, Konran leaps into a pitiful one-man defense craft and obliterates the enemy against impossible odds.

John Bandicut and his companions are summoned to a star-cloud called Starmaker, known to humans as the Orion Nebula, to discover what force threatens newborn stars - and possibly every world within a thousand light-years. Their journey takes them not just into the perils of a stellar nursery, but into confrontation with the Mindaru, a billion-year-old AI and adversary of life as they know it. The task is daunting. But with the aid of Deep and Dark, sentient clouds who are perhaps the strangest beings they have met yet in their exceedingly strange journey, there may be hope.

Xenophobia, the fear of that which is alien, different, or strange; it is xenophobia that drove the reptilian natives of Sua’kul into the arms of an alien force even more terrible than that which they feared. Driven by a radicalized ideology and malevolent intervention, the new order on Sua’kul has become a threat to the Empire. In response the half human and half Illani noble family of Valor has been dispatched to subdue the planet before it can become another front in an ever expanding war of alien aggression against the last vestige of human civilization.

As the conflict in the asteroid belt escalates, Luca finds herself seeking out the help of Athena, the QI on Earth. Together they hatch a complex plan to end the power of the Van Heilding family. Meanwhile, resistance to the ongoing power grab by the Xiang Zu Corporation is gaining traction in Elektra, a quadruple asteroid system and the second most populous sector of the Belt. Miranda, Scott, and Cyrus find themselves being dragged into this fight following rumors that the QI, stolen en route to New World One, has resurfaced in the hands of the rebels.

This boxed set contains 3 complete science-fiction novels. This is science-fiction at its best - future engineering, intrigue, first contact. It’s a space opera like none you’ve experienced before. The audiobooks will keep you listening late into the night, and you won't be able to stop....

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 Meteor Shooters Association has protected deep space colonies from the destruction of meteor showers for over 80 years. For the members, it’s a competition to see who the best shooter is. Van Wilcox was behind schedule and struggled to charter a private spacecraft to take him on the final stretch. Thankfully, he found an unorthodox pilot willing to go against protocol, because they needed all shooters armed and on the firing line for this storm.

When Ximon Sabo retires from the Kremniy Republic Scout Force he’s awarded a retired scout ship, the Mantis, but he has to find work to keep her flying. On missions across a dozen solar systems, Ximon and his crew make first contact with an alien species, pull off a daring rescue from a beleaguered outpost, face hostile pirates, and even face a murder mystery. The Mantis team - a female engineer with a drinking problem, a sensor operator who’s also a priest, Ximon’s sexy companion robot, and the ship’s AI computer - must work together to face challenge after challenge.

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!

They came from the poorest cities on Earth. They were promised free food and housing. They didn't know that they, or their children, would never see Earth again. A few years ago, a military doctor walking the corridors of New Jakarta Space Station saved Melati's life. She signed up for the International Space Force to pay back her moral debt to him.

The ITS Santa Maria is a generation ship in the truest sense—her colonial mission to the alluringly habitable TRAPPIST-1 system will span several. Her crew, though, original and descendent both, need not necessarily accept their lot to live and die between the stars. Greased elbows and palms tend to lubricate a path toward longevity. Wealth aboard Santa Maria is measured not in dollars and cents, but in Minutes and Seconds. Work, favors, and shrewdness are paid in Minutesand Minutes are spent in Suspension.

After three people disappear into the mysterious portals that hold the empire together, Culann Penrose is called in to investigate. After he discovers that the ancient system binding the gates is crumbling, he orders them to be shut down. Meanwhile the Druids, still seething at his denunciation of magic 20 years ago, oppose Penrose’s plans.

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.

The Outer Layer is an enigma to its residents. Representatives from countless races and civilizations wander the many territories, hoping to unlock the secrets and progress further into its depths. An anomaly has been detected in space by an artefact from an extinct civilization. Ciqalo, a machine intelligence from the Wanderer civilization, is tasked with investigating and weaponizing the anomaly for a galactic war.

For many, the dying part is hard. For some, the living part is harder. At 16 years of age, Mathius’ life is focused on scrounging bits of food in the midst of a five-way civil war on the planet Novalis III. Two government factions and three rebel factions are all hell-bent on killing one another, and the civilian population is caught in the middle. If Mathius doesn’t find food, he and his father, mother, and sister will go hungry for the day, a not-so-unusual occurrence.