Fantasy First Contact Science Fiction

Mickey7 is an Expendable: a disposable employee on a human expedition sent to colonise the ice world Niflheim. Whenever there's a mission that's too dangerous - even suicidal - the crew turns to Mickey. After one iteration dies, a new body is regenerated with most of his memories intact. Mickey signed on to escape from both bad debts and boredom on Midgard. After six deaths, Mickey7 understands the terms of his deal...and why it was the only colonial position unfilled when he took it.

War heroes aren't usually called out of semi-retirement and sent to the far reaches of the galaxy for a routine investigation. So when Colonel Carl Butler answers the call from an old and powerful friend, he knows it's something big - and he's not being told the whole story. A high councilor's son has gone MIA out of Cappa Base, the space station orbiting a battle-ravaged planet. The young lieutenant had been wounded and evacuated - but there's no record of him having ever arrived at hospital command.

As part of the fabled S4, Lance Warder is stationed on Mars when first contact is made. The Galio have arrived. Lance is selected to act as diplomatic security and all appears to be going well between the two species until a radical group known only as the Veles rear its ugly head and decide conflict must follow.

Following his mission on Cappa, Colonel Carl Butler returns to a mixed reception. To some, he is a do-or-die war hero. To the other half of the galaxy, he’s a pariah. Forced into retirement, he has resettled on Talca Four where he’s now Deputy VP of Corporate Security, protecting a high-tech military company on the corporate battlefield - at least, that’s what the job description says. Really, he’s just there to impress clients and investors. It’s all relatively low risk - until he’s entrusted with new orders.

Before Hr'ent Golramm became a legendary Enforcer for the Peacemaker Guild, he was a mere candidate. Granted, he was a particularly unusual candidate - only six Oogar had ever successfully graduated from the Peacemaker Academy on Ocono, and Hr'ent would be the seventh. Every candidate must pass a commissioning mission in order to graduate, though, and Hr'ent's is unsolvable. The Pushtal of Vorrhurna were once one of the Mercenary Guild's 37 races.

Zac has managed to secure his island for the time being, growing into a true powerhouse through his endless struggles. However, becoming the strongest man in the world does not come without complications. A target has been placed on his back. Natives, aliens - everyone has their eye on the throne. Even the System itself seems intent on forcing him into one desperate situation after another. Zac knows he is running against the clock in his mission to find his family, prompting him to set out to New Washington in search of answers.

On a serene night in 1953, Sally Mason, a dedicated wife and mother of two, drives a twisting road on her way home from night school. Suddenly, a mysterious bluish-white light descends over the road. Terrified, Sally slams on the brakes. After a flash of bright light nearly blinds her, she passes out, awakening to the persistent knock of a police officer on her car window. When she sees the officer and remembers her frightening experience, she screams and faints, and is rushed to the hospital.

Ethan Bryant was supposed to fall asleep on a ship leaving Earth and wake up 50 years later with his family on the planet Minea. Instead, after the ship's caretaker - the lone human in charge of monitoring the ship's vital systems - suddenly died, the ship's computer locked Ethan out of his stasis chamber and gave him the job. That was five years ago. Five years of checking to make sure everything ran smoothly on a ship Ethan knows almost nothing about.

Someone born to maintain, fix, and correct any and every issue that could go wrong in the Habitat that he lives in to make sure he and his fellow humans can remain on display and entertain their owners as any good human pet would. Or at least, that's what he was born to be. Now, after getting a second chance along with a superpower that lets him alter anything and everything in regard to his own body, he's trying to fix his life. To live his life for himself with the goal of actually enjoying it, all while being thrust ever deeper into a situation he didn't expect.

Earth has been invaded by a species that takes over the minds of human hosts while leaving their bodies intact. But Melanie Stryder refuses to fade away.

In the midst of an interstellar war, Yun Tianming found himself on the front lines. Riddled with cancer, he chose to end his life, only to find himself flash frozen and launched into space where the Trisolaran First Fleet awaited. Captured and tortured beyond endurance for decades, Yun eventually succumbed to helping the aliens subjugate humanity in order to save Earth from complete destruction.

It begins with Peter, a devoted man of faith, as he is called to the mission of a lifetime, one that takes him galaxies away from his wife, Bea. Peter becomes immersed in the mysteries of an astonishing new environment, overseen by an enigmatic corporation known only as USIC.

At first, only a few things are known about the celestial object that astronomers dub Rama. It is huge, weighing more than ten trillion tons. And it is hurtling through the solar system at inconceivable speed. Then a space probe confirms the unthinkable: Rama is no natural object. It is, incredibly, an interstellar spacecraft. Space explorers and planet-bound scientists alike prepare for mankind's first encounter with alien intelligence.

Ten thousand city-state habitats orbit the planet Yellowstone, forming a near-perfect democratic human paradise. But even utopia needs a police force. For the citizens of the Glitter Band that organization is Panoply, and the prefects are its operatives. Prefect Tom Dreyfus has a new emergency on his hands. Across the habitats and their hundred million citizens, people are dying suddenly and randomly, victims of a bizarre and unprecedented malfunction of their neural implants.

Alan Dean Foster is the acclaimed author of movie tie-ins for Star Wars, Alien and Transformers. He was awarded the IAMTW Grand Master Scribe Award in 2008. He is also a best-selling science fiction and fantasy author in his own right, including the popular Pip & Flinx novels and the Founding of the Commonwealth series.

Jimmy Martin has a sore head. He's used to smuggling illegal data in his headspace. But this is the first time it has started talking to him. The data claims to be a distinguished academic, author and civil rights activist. It also claims to be a bear. A bear named Honey. Jimmy has nothing against bioforms–he's one himself, albeit one engineered out of human stock–and works with them everyday in Hell City, building the future, staking mankind's claim to a new world: Mars.

Following their successful mission to destroy the slaver ring in New York City, Wic and the members of Phantom Team pass through the Antarctic’s origin ring and find themselves deep in the heart of the Androchidan Empire. But as the scope of the alien specie’s operation becomes apparent, Phantom Team realizes they can’t standby as humanity is culled into submission. Efforts must be made to slow the enemy’s progress, if not stop it altogether.

An interstellar colony ship on Earth prepares for take-off. Before reaching their first stop—Proxima b Centauri—they are awoken from their cryo pods early, only to learn there's been an alien invasion on Earth. But it's too late. Can the crew find a safe refuge from the invaders and track down colonists from other ships?

At the turn of the 22nd century, scientists make a breakthrough in human spaceflight. Through a revolutionary method known as somaforming, astronauts can survive in hostile environments off Earth using synthetic biological supplementations. With the fragility of the body no longer a limiting factor, human beings are at last able to journey to neighboring exoplanets long known to harbor life. A team of these explorers, Ariadne O’Neill and her three crewmates, are hard at work in a planetary system 15 light-years from Sol, on a mission to ecologically survey four habitable worlds.

A Fire Upon the Deep is the big, breakout book that fulfills the promise of Vinge's career to date: a gripping tale of galactic war told on a cosmic scale. Thousands of years hence, many races inhabit a universe where a mind's potential is determined by its location in space, from superintelligent entities in the Transcend, to the limited minds of the Unthinking Depths, where only simple creatures and technology can function.