First Contact Fiction

As a child Rose Franklin made an astonishing discovery: a giant metallic hand buried deep within the earth. As an adult she's dedicated her brilliant scientific career to solving the mystery that began that fateful day: Why was a titanic robot of unknown origin buried in pieces around the world? Years of investigation have produced intriguing answers - and even more perplexing questions. But the truth is closer now than ever before when a second robot, more massive than the first, materializes and lashes out with deadly force.

Johnnie Rico never really intended to join up—and definitely not the infantry. But now that he’s in the thick of it, trying to get through combat training harder than anything he could have imagined, he knows everyone in his unit is one bad move away from buying the farm in the interstellar war the Terran Federation is waging against the Arachnids. Because everyone in the Mobile Infantry fights. And if the training doesn’t kill you, the Bugs are more than ready to finish the job.

The gods have been angered. Hell will rain down. After Wic and the Phantom’s successful operation on Karkin Four, the team learns of the enemy’s plans for a swift retaliation: an all-out assault on New York City. Together, Wic must rally the team’s resources to plan an emergency counter-assault that will push the Phantoms to their limits. With help from unexpected places, mission success seems all but assured. But when a new terrifying technology emerges, Wic must face the most challenging choice of all: sacrifice his teammates for the fate of Earth.

In 1558, during the reign of Bloody Queen Mary, Earth is visited by extraterrestrials who initiate first contact. Their mission is to gather samples of life on Earth and observe but not interact with humanity. After witnessing a brutal execution, their patience is tested beyond breaking point... First Contact is a series of standalone novels that explore humanity's first interaction with extraterrestrial life.

With less than a month left to prepare the Earth for what is about to happen, Silas must pull out all the stops to save as many people as possible. Of course, if one system wasn't bad enough, Earth has been declared a contested world. Now, it isn't just the Earth competing any longer but at least two systems trying to gain control of the Earth.

Nearly 100 years before the events of Orson Scott Card's bestselling novel Ender's Game, humans were just beginning to step off Earth and out into the Solar System. A thin web of ships in both asteroid belts; a few stations; a corporate settlement on Luna. No one had seen any sign of other space-faring races; everyone expected that First Contact, if it came, would happen in the future, in the empty reaches between the stars. Then a young navigator on a distant mining ship saw something moving too fast, heading directly for our sun.

After years of searching, Nathan Briggs is finally on the verge of making an incredible discovery. Unfortunately, the aliens have other plans. When Nathan stops a brutal attack on an unsuspecting victim, he gets more than he bargained for and sets into motion events that will change his life forever. They told him he should've run away, and maybe they were right. Nathan is about to embark on an adventure of a lifetime.

Having magical powers makes you less than human, a resource to be exploited. Half-unicorn Gary Cobalt is sick of slavery, captivity, and his horn being ground down to power faster-than-light travel. When he's finally free, all he wants is to run away in his ancestors' stone ship. Instead, Captain Jenny Perata steals the ship out from under him so she can make an urgent delivery. But Jenny held him captive for a decade, and then Gary murdered her best friend...who was also the wife of her copilot, Cowboy Jim. What could possibly go right?

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.

Zara Maples wants to escape her lackluster life and find her soulmate, so she applies to the interstellar Narovian Matchmaking Service which finds people’s soulmates based on genetics. Korjh a Narovian cyborg retired from battle, once a full human, longs a family of his own like the one he lost as a boy in an alien invasion. Retired to a backwater colony of Modonne where he can’t get a date because he is cyborg, he applies to the Matchmaking service to find his genetic complement, his soulmate, because unlike Narovian felines he cannot recognize his fated mate. After two years they find...

When Russ Wesley finds an unusual artifact in his grandfather’s collection of rare antiquities, the last thing he expects is for it to draw the attention of a ferocious alien from a distant planet. Equally surprising is the adventurous team of intergalactic exterminators dispatched to deal with the alien threat. They’re a little wild, and a little reckless. Worse yet, they’re so impressed with Russ’s marksmanship that they insist he join their squad . . . whether he wants to or not.

Cole Riker is a Slip Runner. A contractor tasked with finding alien salvage in exchange for credits. For an ex-smuggler like Cole, there’s a catch: Don’t break the terms of parole. That means doing things by the book. Find salvage, turn it in, get paid. But everything changes when a retrieval mission lands him in a previously unknown sector. There, he finds the material he’s been sent to recover, along with something more. A brand-new form of ancient alien life.

Jack Kernigan is having a bad day...a bad year...a bad life. After being booted out of MIT, he’s back in his Ohio hometown, working for the family business, facing a life of mediocrity. Then one day, out on a delivery, his truck hits...something. Something big...something furry...something invisible. And, it turns out, something not of this Earth. Fate can play funny tricks. Which is why Jack suddenly finds himself the planet’s best hope to unravel a conspiracy of galactic proportions that could spell the end of the human race.

Intergalactic Mail Order Bride Agency offers young women escape from war ravaged Earth if they will marry an alien sight unseen. Selena finally accepts her only chance of survival for her and her family remains in that offer and she agrees to become a maid order bride. After a long journey, she finally arrived to Sumirion, the planet where her new husband awaits for her. He is nothing like what she had expected, but she can’t help feeling immediately attracted by him. The passion between them was immediate and powerful and all seemed to go better than her wildest dreams when a woman from ...

In the future, nuclear war has destroyed nearly all humankind. An alien race intervenes, saving the small group of survivors from certain death. But their salvation comes at a cost. The Oankali are able to read and mutate genetic code, and they use these skills for their own survival, interbreeding with new species to constantly adapt and evolve. They value the intelligence they see in humankind but also know that the species—rigidly bound to destructive social hierarchies—is destined for failure.

Just when I thought I was safe from deportation, I wasn't. Earth wasn't looking to get rid of me. My homeworld wasn't trying to pull me back. But of course there is no force on Earth or Dlamias that is quite like the power of angry academics on the loneliest planet. The center of learning and the symbol of a peace and unity that was more fragile than anyone wanted to admit...and I... their student, had proved myself a disruptive element, shaking the table on which a delicate house of cards sat that might tumble at any moment. I had to prove my worth, the value of my work, and that adding a ...

The epic and highly anticipated conclusion to the listener-favorite series that had countless Audible listeners (and employees) hooked from the very first Bob - featuring, as always, a flawless performance from the inimitable Ray Porter. Being a sentient spaceship really should be more fun. But after spreading out through space for almost a century, Bob and his clones just can't stay out of trouble. They've created enough colonies so humanity shouldn't go extinct.

The Ultimate Science Fiction Mega Collection contains 24 of the greatest science-fiction works ever written.

Light is almost everywhere, but what is it, really? How does it work? What does it experience as it zips along at the universe's ultimate speed limit? Light features heavily in this, the 8th book in the Voided Man series. Alan Franklin, who was once known as Maestro, narrates the volume. In Book 8 we learn... Of Alan's early years in the City... Of what's been happening with Andromeda and others back on the Potato... More about what the society made up of quadrillions of humans in the distant future is like... What happened when Banner Dawson found Pioneer 10 past the orbit of Pluto... All ...

Light years from Earth, an alien planet forced their queen from power and cast her into space. For millions of years, the queen's ship wandered the cosmos, until it crashed on Earth. As a child, Michael Hems first lost his mother to cancer, and then his father to the bottom of a bottle. Growing up in a small town, Michael's friends became his life. The only one he knew. The only one he wanted. But the night he found the ship, everything he loved was thrown into jeopardy.