First Contact Horror

The story begins when a mysterious, system-wide event inserts a perfect, elegant proof for the complex mathematical problem. R(5,5)=43 into every human computer system. Commander Katarina Volkov, a military officer whose instincts were honed by a past tragedy, assembles a team of specialists on Ares Station to decipher the message from the unknown intelligence, dubbed "The Collective". The team includes Dmitri Petrov, a synesthetic mathematician who perceives logic as music; Yelena Kozlov, a brilliant but rigid logician driven by a fear of chaos ; and Anastasia Novak, an unnervingly quiet ...

Sally Jansen was NASA's leading astronaut, until a mission to Mars ended in disaster. Haunted by her failure, she lives in quiet anonymity, convinced her days in space are over. She's wrong. A large alien object has entered the solar system on a straight course toward Earth. It has made no attempt to communicate and is ignoring all incoming transmissions. Out of time and out of options, NASA turns to Jansen. For all the dangers of the mission, it's the shot at redemption she always longed for.

The crew of the deep-sea exploration rig Leaguer discovers oil sweeter, purer, and easier to refine than the fields in Saudi Arabia. To confirm their own analysis of their trillion dollar find, a test barrel is flown from the drill site off the coast of Papua/New Guinea to Houston Analytical Laboratories (HAL).

In the depths of the Arctic, where the ice never melts and silence reigns supreme, lies Station Nine—a place forgotten by time, yet haunted by secrets too vast to contain. It was here that humanity’s reach exceeded its grasp, where ambition and curiosity collided with forces older than the stars themselves. This is the story of Subject Zero—once a man named Eli, now a vessel for an alien intelligence that defies comprehension. It is a tale of creation and destruction, of the thin line between life and something far stranger, and of the price paid when we attempt to play god with the ...

For Flight Engineer Cynthia Han and her fellow astronauts aboard the International Space Station, Expedition 81 has proved as mundane as space travel ever gets. Yes, this would be Cynthia’s final NASA mission, for reasons she has so far kept from the rest of the crew; and yes, the latest billionaire “space tourist” has managed to irritate everyone on board. Still, none of them could have asked for a smoother experience. Until the morning they wake up to silence. All communication with Earth, gone.

"The Sleeper Awakens" is a thrilling science fiction epic that takes readers on a journey from the red sands of Mars to the very edge of reality itself. When Dr. John Cartwright and his team embark on a mission to explore Mars, they never imagined they would uncover secrets that would shake the foundations of human understanding. As they delve deeper into the mysteries of the Red Planet, they discover an ancient alien civilization with technology beyond their wildest dreams. But their groundbreaking find quickly turns into a fight for survival as they awaken cosmic entities known as the ...

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.

Jenna is stalked by a sinister man in a mask on the eve of her eighteenth birthday in The Man in the Window. What does he want, and is he even real? Two astronomers make first contact with another life form, forever changing both of their lives in The Andromeda Girl. In Jade, a writer at a comic book convention buys an illustration of a beautiful woman he has seen in real life. He becomes obsessed with finding out who this mysterious woman is. Sixteen-year-old babysitter Gina Zeneski takes the kids for a day at the amusement park and gets more than she bargained for in Rollercoaster, a ...

In the deepest, darkest depths of space, the stars are cold, malevolent eyes looking across a vast graveyard of the unknown, the unnameable, and the undead. Here the planets are tombs and the moons haunted catacombs. And here are extraterrestrial nightmares beyond imagining. There is no benevolent first contact. No utopian worlds. Only alien horrors.

An alien invasion comes to one man’s doorstep in the form of a story-creature, followed by death and rebirth in a transformed Earth, in this Tor.com Original science fiction tale from Jeff VanderMeer, the New York Times best-selling author of the Southern Reach trilogy.

Logline: In this series not just about "How the West was Won", but also about "The Things" The West Was Won From", Marshall Carleton & his family recount their days in The Old West - Pelesit, Wyoming - from 1851 through the turn of the 20th century and their struggles. Men, Women & Children, armed only with the weapons of their time, the greatest of these their heart, soul, wit, and will, tamed "The West" amidst the horrors of Wars and their aftermaths — Indian, Mexican-American, Civil; . . . harsh environments; outlaws; . . . ; Ghosts; Demons; Things That Seeped From The Stars; . . . ...

A watch commander at the U.S. Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command Operational Center finds himself at the heart of a first contact situation with an alien species and desperately working to prevent a war between humans and the aliens over the same benign assumption about one another.

Zilfaquir is having a bad day. Shin-Sho Corporation dispatched his emergency engineering team (EET) to the remote ice planet, Xiao 2, to investigate a communications blackout. The Xiao 2 facility, composed of three subsurface ocean stations, awaits his team below hundreds of meters of ice and kilometers underwater. Upon arrival, he discovers the Xiao 2 facility has experienced an epidemic, leaving most of the station’s personnel either dead or dying. Or transforming. Worse, the stations are in danger of imploding due to sabotage.

X doesn’t have a name. He thought he had one—or many—but that might be the result of the failing memories of the personalities imprinted within him. Or maybe he really is called X. He’s also not as human as he believes himself to be. But when he discovers the existence of another—above ground, outside the protection of the Warren—X must learn what it means to be human, or face the destruction of their two species.

Something Watched the Baby Monitor by G.J. Fene When Marlene Grace moved into her quiet suburban home with her newborn daughter, she thought the scariest thing she’d face would be sleepless nights and teething pain. But then the baby monitor began whispering. At first, it was just faint static. A rhythm. A hum. Then words—spoken in no language Marlene knew. Then Leah, her six-month-old daughter, began humming it back. As strange lights flicker outside the nursery window and scorched circles appear in the lawn, Marlene begins to realize: the monitor isn’t picking up interference. ...

The epic conclusion to the trilogy that redefines what it means to transcend Five years after humanity stepped through the portals, consciousness itself is evolving—and something vast is coming to judge whether they deserve to survive. Thomas Millwright exists across seventeen dimensions as humanity's bridge to cosmic awareness. But their reality network is fracturing under explosive growth: spontaneous worlds erupting from collective dreams, consciousness evolving beyond recognition, and an ancient entity approaching with the power to erase civilizations. The Cosmic Gardener tends ...

Earth is being invaded by the shetani - spirit creatures so small and stealthy that only one man knows about the increasing peril. The potential savior is an African elder named Olkeloki who is capable of fighting evil both in this world and the spirit one. But to be successful he must recruit the help of two others: government agent Joshua Oak, and a feisty young woman named Merry Sharrow. Only the three of them can keep the shetani from destroying reality as we know it.

🌌 In the dark, we whispered. In the silence, we were judged. The universe is a graveyard — ancient, watchful, and merciless. When humanity made its presence known to the stars, it broke the sacred law of survival: stay silent, or perish. Silent Requiem marks the beginning of the saga: Dr. Nia Raine and Commander Ellis Vorn lead the Artemis Ascendant into the mythic Orion Expanse, awakening an ancient intelligence within the Dark Forest. A fragile peace is forged... but at a terrible cost. In War Without Stars, centuries later, new explorers stumble upon the forest once again — and ...

Dak Korasa believed he was a galaxy-exploring archaeologist and expert in alien antiquities. But his body is merely a vessel, grown in a laboratory to find and play host to an alien parasite species known as the chok’tal. Possessed by this entity, Dak was granted superhuman abilities as well as the consciousness of the chok’tal’s previous host: special forces soldier Jekra Modri. Now, he’s a Purifier, one of the deadliest predators in the universe. But to survive, Dak must earn “kill points” in combat—or the chok’tal within his body will kill him.

Nothing much ever happens in Millville, a small, secluded middle-American community - until the day Brad Carter discovers he is unable to leave. It's not just the nearly bankrupt real estate agent who's being held prisoner; every other resident is also being confined within the town's boundaries by an invisible force field that cannot be breached. As local tensions rapidly reach a breaking point, a set of bizarre circumstances leads Brad to the source of their captivity.