Fantasy First Contact

The only favor the aliens do for Clint Beecham when they abduct him is give him a shirt that says "Do Not Eat" on it in their language. He’s told that as a physicist, he is to be reserved, along with five other scientists, for a mysterious purpose. But 50,000 other humans on board the interstellar scout ship are scheduled to be butchered and frozen, a food supply for the long journey to the alien homeworld. Clint and the other Reserves can’t stand by and let that happen.

Annie Collins emerged from the wreckage of the last invasion of Sorrow Falls with a spaceship in her garden, a loud alien idea in her head, and—because returning to college was out of the question—a lot of free time. What she chose to do with the idea, the spaceship, and all that free time, kickstarted a worldwide technological boom. Now, nine years later, it seems as if not a day passes without the announcement of a new breakthrough in something, be it quantum computing, nuclear energy, neurobiology, or some other esoteric corner of cutting-edge science.

Intel from the Alliance raises the alarm: Earth is teetering on the brink of an impending attack. Quintos, reluctantly pulled back into service by the EUNF, finds himself up against untenable odds. The one bright spot is USS Franklin, awaiting his command, an Omninought-Class behemoth armed with the latest cutting-edge technology.

For decades, the governments of our world have been fighting a desperate and secret battle to keep hordes of alien invaders away from our planet. When the guardian of the United States falls, a new champion must be chosen. Sadly, the choice of a champion isn’t ours to make, and the Galactic Conflict Authority selects a human, seemingly at random, to lead the United States of America’s efforts at holding back the tide.

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.

When a spaceship landed in an open field in the quiet mill town of Sorrow Falls, Massachusetts, everyone realized humankind was not alone in the universe. With that realization everyone freaked out for a little while. Or almost everyone. The residents of Sorrow Falls took the news pretty well. This could have been due to a certain local quality of unflappability, or it could have been that in three years the ship did exactly nothing other than sit quietly in that field, and nobody understood the full extent of this nothing the ship was doing better than the people who lived right next door.

The final volume of the Uplift trilogy by Hugo and Nebula Award winner David Brin, Heaven’s Reach brings readers back to the planet Jijo one last time. The starship Streaker is still on the run with its dangerous cargo of ancient artifacts when the prophesied Time of Changes rocks the galaxy. As each race battles for control and chaos reigns, the truth about the Five Galaxies and The Progenitors finally comes to light.

When out-of-shape IT technician Roen wakes up and starts hearing voices in his head, he naturally assumes he’s losing it. He isn’t. As of last night, he has a passenger in his brain - an ancient alien life-form called Tao, whose race crash-landed on Earth before the first fish crawled out of the oceans. Over the millennia his people have trained human heroes to be great leaders, to advance our species at a rate far beyond what it would have achieved on its own. Split into two opposing factions - the peace-loving, but under-represented Prophus, and the savage, powerful Genjix - the aliens have been in a state of civil war for centuries.

CDF Lieutenant Harry Wilson has been loaned out to a CDF platoon tasked with secretly removing an unauthorized colony of humans on an alien world. Colonial Ambassador Abumwe has been ordered to participate in final negotiations with an alien race the Union hopes to make allies. Wilson and Abumwe’s missions are fated to cross - and in doing so, place both missions at risk of failure.

We Only Need the Heads is a tale from John Scalzi's The Human Division.

Dalton Greaves is a hero. He’s one of humankind’s first representatives to Unity, a pan-species confederation working to bring all sentient life into a single benevolent brotherhood. That’s what they told him, anyway. The only actual members of Unity that he’s ever met are Boreau, a giant snail who seems more interested in plunder than spreading love and harmony, and Boreau’s human sidekick, Neera, who Dalton strongly suspects roped him into this gig so that she wouldn’t become the next one of Boreau’s crew to get eaten by locals while prospecting.

Lise Adams is a young woman attempting to uncover the mystery of her father's disappearance ten years earlier. Turk Findley is an ex-sailor and sometimes-drifter. They come together when an infall of cometary dust seeds the planet with tiny remnant Hypothetical machines. Soon, this seemingly hospitable world will become very alien indeed--as the nature of time is once again twisted, by entities unknown.

Ataegina was an isolated world of medieval castles, varied cultures, and conquests, vibrant until the demons rose and spread relentless destruction. Swarms of lethal creatures with black husks, murderous claws, barbed tails, and dreaded “tooth-tongues” raged through the lowlands, killing 90 percent of the planet’s population. Terrified survivors fled to hidden mountain keeps where they eke out a meager existence. When a trio of young warriors discovers a new weapon, they see a chance to end this curse. To save humanity, they must fight.

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.

What could be more commonplace than grass or a world covered over all its surface with a wind-whipped ocean of grass? But the planet Grass conceals horrifying secrets within its endless pastures. And as an incurable plague attacks all inhabited planets but this one, the prairie-like Grass begins to reveal these secrets - and nothing will ever be the same again.

An exhilarating thriller from best-selling author Dayton Ward set in the universe of Star Trek: The Next Generation, following Captain Jean-Luc Picard and his crew as they explore the previously uncharted and dangerous Odyssean Pass.

Single mom Cynthia Pace has her hands full with her uniquely gifted child. She has no idea how or why Maddie does the things she does, and neither does her daughter. But there is an answer, discovered by mother and child only after tragedy strikes.

In an alternate America marked by volatile class warfare, Blake Maslin is traveling with his teenage twin daughters when their car is ambushed. Their attackers appear sickly yet possess inhuman strength, and they transport Blake's family to an isolated compound. There, the three captives discover that the compound's residents have a highly contagious alien disease that has mutated their DNA to make them powerful, dangerous, and compelled to infect others.

Humanity has reached an uneasy truce with the Empire—but unless the allies bring the fight to the enemy, extinction is all but assured. In preparation for the inevitable next war, Commander Stephen Michaels is at the helm of the Archangel Squadron, and his orders are simple: go rogue. Disguised as mercenaries, Commander Michaels and the Archangels seek valuable intelligence on their imposing foe. Their mission takes them deep into uncharted territory, where they make inroads with the Empire, fiercely guarding their true identities and purpose.

A spaceship from Earth accidentally crossed through a hole in space-time to a universe where the force of gravity is one billion times as strong as the gravity we know. Somehow the crew survived, aided by the fact that they emerged into a cloud of gas surrounding a black hole, which provided a breathable atmosphere. Five hundred years later, their descendants still struggle for existence, divided into two main groups. The Miners live on the Belt, a ramshackle ring of dwellings orbiting the core of a dead star, which they excavate for raw materials.

I was abducted by the alien puppy pound. Thrown into a cage and sold as a galactic pet. An alien captain has made me his beloved pet. Things have happened that I can’t live with. Things too terrible to mention here.