Science Fiction Exploration

Admiral Jack Romanoff and his people have located the system the Tardans are using as their command post for the invasion of the Confederation. Only they can't simply attack militarily because of the stellar terrain, so they need to improvise. When the stakes are high, leave no option unexplored. With direct action off the table, they must infiltrate the system and get the information they need to defeat the Tardans and their Locust minions.

Dalton Thorne just wanted his cargo ship back. Maybe a bowl of noodles. Definitely some peace and quiet on humanity's newly liberated fragment of Earth. But when Little Earth's miraculous transformation starts turning deadly, he discovers that saving the world was the easy part. Now he has to survive in it. Which would be a lot easier if a faction of powerful beings known as Chi Hunters weren’t hell bent on hunting him down.

Naval Officer Jack Samson thought a posting to the frontier of human-inhabited space was the death blow to his career. He couldn't have been more wrong. A routine inspection of a small merchant vessel leads to devastating loss and the discovery of strange, fascinating objects. As astonishing discoveries unfold, a mysterious and hostile ship proves that Samson has a competitor in unlocking the secrets of an ancient alien civilization and that humanity might not be alone in the galaxy after all.

Ellie Masters comes out of a coma to find herself the only inhabitant of an eerily empty moon station. She’s not on Earth any more; she’s not even in the right solar system. So when someone reaches out to her, tells her he’s her friend, she’s happy to believe it. The alternative is to be stuck alone with an enemy. Renn Sorvihn has been chasing a rogue Tecran ship for over a month. But when Renn follows the Tecran ship into an uncharted sector, and realizes the Tecran have been working their way to a secret moon base, he suddenly understands things are not as they seem.

Mage-Captain Roslyn Chambers is trapped behind enemy lines on the allied world the Royal Martian Navy failed to save from the alien Reezh. Her official mission is to wait because her Mage-Queen has given her word: Chimera will be free.

James Decker, captain of the living starship Farrago, has a mission: locate the seven symbiotes scattered across space. This mission will bring him credits beyond his imaginations, but it could also save the universe. He has found three, but there are still four more out there. All the while, the strange, faceless man from the Cloud Sea is never far away. He has his eye on this side of the void, and Captain James Decker might be the only one who can stop him.

Equipped with the entirety of human knowledge, a sentient ship is launched on a last-ditch journey to find a new home for civilization. Trillions of miles. Tens of thousands of years. In the space between, the AI has plenty of time to think about life, the vastness of the universe, everything it was meant to do, and—with a perspective created but not limited by humans—what it should do.

Long after Earth's destruction, Humanity is an endangered species ... When freighter pilot Dalton Thorne reunites with his old friend Kota at Little Earth's best noodle shop, he's expecting a straightforward job. Instead, he finds himself embroiled in a centuries-old mystery that could change humanity's place in the universe forever. Little Earth is a decaying city carved into an alien planet where humans live as refugees. Beneath its neon-lit streets and crowded markets lies a secret: fragments of Earth's past, preserved by a mysterious race of aliens and hidden from the ruling Consortium.

A well-deserved vacation turns disastrous when Marius arrives in a strange white room. As reality sinks in, there's a culprit he never expects: aliens. Highly advanced aliens rip him from Earth to level up in the Semo Universe. A place where wormhole portals, spaceships, energy beamers, and enhancement attributes are common. Loaded with debt, a small shuttle, and a sultry AI, he braves the vast universe one mission at a time.

Humanity is struggling to hold out against a hostile takeover by an alien race that claims to be on a religious mission to bring all sentient life to its God at the End of Time. But while billions of cocooned humans fill the holds of the Olyix's deadly arkships, humankind is playing an even longer game than the aliens may have anticipated. From an ultra-secret spy mission to one of the grandest battles ever seen, no strategy is off the table. Will a plan millennia in the making finally be enough to defeat this seemingly unstoppable enemy?

Hiro and the gang get dragged into rescuing the daughters of an elf patriarch and receive a warm welcome from the elven home planet. The elves here are nothing like Hiro imagined--they know nothing of modern science and rely on magic rather than technology. As Hiro and the girls sample local delicacies, enjoy the sights, and get a crash course in elven fashion, they find that Hiro seems to wield a power much like the elves' magic...

Get ready to experience two more origin stories in the Backyard Starship universe.

Mary Robinette Kowal continues the grand sweep of alternate history begun in The Calculating Stars. The Fated Sky looks forward to 1961, when mankind is well established on the moon and looking forward to its next step: journeying to, and eventually colonizing, Mars. Of course the noted Lady Astronaut Elma York would like to go, but there’s a lot riding on whoever the International Aerospace Coalition decides to send on this historic - but potentially very dangerous - mission. Could Elma really leave behind her husband and the chance to start a family to spend several years traveling to Mars?

Nothing brings change like war. A surge of new tech. New weapons. New tactics. To lead a crew to victory, a captain must understand change. He must understand command and that it is a test. A test most men fail. He must be brilliant. Resourceful. Every second. Of every day. And at night during scarce moments of rest, he must sleep the sleep of the righteous. The time has come for Commander Tad Thatcher to look in the mirror. The time has come to ask himself...am I that kind of man?

Stranded on a dead planet with her mortal enemy, a spy must survive and uncover a conspiracy in the first book of an epic space opera trilogy by an award‑winning author. She's a revolutionary. Humanity is running out of options. Habitable planets are being destroyed as quickly as they're found...

In celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing, the endlessly-mysterious moon is explored in this reprint short science fiction anthology from award-winning editor and anthologist Neil Clarke (Clarkesworld, The Best Science Fiction of the Year).

On the Ark, a colonyship bound outward across the stars, not everyone is a volunteer - or even human. Lovelock is a capuchin monkey engineered from conception to be the perfect servant: intelligent, agile, and devoted to his owner. He is a "witness", privileged to spend his days and nights recording the life of one of Earth’s most brilliant scientists via digital devices implanted behind his eyes. But Lovelock is something special among witnesses. He’s a little smarter than most humans: smart enough to break through some of his conditioning, smart enough to feel the bonds of slavery - and want freedom.

Take the most sophisticated AI-designed mind that has ever existed, encase it in over 50 million cubic kilometres of diamond nano-rods and send it off on a 20-thousand-year odyssey towards the centre of the galaxy. Then screw it all up by allowing 32 million humans to go along for the ride.

The strong races rule the galaxy, doing as they please. The weak are enslaved or driven from their homeworlds or simply exterminated by the ruling powers. The Solar Union's only hope of survival is to master GalTech and improve upon it before the Galactics realize the human race is no longer trapped on a primitive world, at the mercy of any spacefaring race who stumbles across it. But GalTech keeps its secrets close, and time is not on humanity's side.

Reeve has continued his war against the gods, building his empire and gathering his forces against the storm to come. They have built new ships, developed new technologies, and brought in new recruits. His friends and budding family are now in a better position than ever to create a galaxy safe for their own—even if that means conquering it in its entirety. Even with the developments on the material and science fronts, Reeve has been found lacking in his war against the gods and their machinations for the total annihilation of the universe.