Hard Contact

Humanity stands on the precipice of a great change. Cassie Voges has made it back to Earth, but her return opens a Pandora’s box that will irrevocably change humankind. The world is in the grip of a new pandemic that may be alien in origin. Politicians, researchers, and soldiers grapple with this new reality. If a solution cannot be found, will it herald a new age, or will it be the end of civilization?

Alpha Station, orbiting the world of the atevi, has taken aboard 5,000 human refugees from a destroyed station in a distant sector of space. With supplies and housing stretched to the breaking point, it is clear that the refugees must be relocated down to the planet, and soon. But not to the atevi mainland, rather to the territory reserved for humans: the island of Mospheira. Tabini-aiji, the powerful political head of the atevi, tasks his brilliant human diplomat, Bren Cameron, to negotiate with the Mospheiran government.

Copilots Msizi and Tariro are testing a newly constructed wormhole jump that presumably leads to unsettled habitable worlds. Then an explosion sends them off course, far from where they started and with little chance of ever making it back. Now they’re stranded on their new home for the diaspora. It’s called Malcolm X-b. But they’re beginning to wonder how many light-years from civilization they really are.

A monstrous apparatus has been found on the surface of the moon. It devours and destroys in ways so incomprehensible to humans that a new language must be invented to describe it and a new kind of thinking to understand it. So far, the human guinea pigs sent there in hopes of unraveling the murderous maze have all died terrible deaths - except the last, now on suicide watch. The ideal candidate won't go insane, even as he feels the end approaching. And now they think they've found their man. Al Barker has already stared into the face of death - he can handle it again.

An alien being has escaped to Earth. The portal is occupied by American troops, and the only humans who have ever set foot on the alien planet are in CIA custody. To make matters worse, a hostile force is now threatening both Xibalbá and Earth. Can Tyler and Adriana save their new friends on the other side of the portal—and save their home planet from invasion at the same time?

Finally reunited on an advanced, alternate Earth where the mighty Roman Empire never died, James, Hannah, and Wolf now stand at the precipice of an interdimensional war threatening to obliterate everything they've fought to protect. As the fabric of existence continues to unravel, unleashing anomalous storms and creating rifts large enough for unstoppable warships to traverse, the trio must find a way to repel a superior force bent on conquest.

With the Death Wave no longer a threat to humanity, humans have spread out and colonized all the worlds of the solar system. The technology of the Predecessors has made Earth a paradise, at least on the surface. But a policy of exiling discontented young people to the outer planets and asteroid mines has led to a deep divide between the new worlds and the homeworld, and those tensions are about to explode into open war.

Sometimes the few must stand against the many. From the dark, cold void came an unknown force. Their target: a remote planet, the home of a group of people distancing themselves from mankind and pursuing a path of piety and peace. If they have any chance at survival, a disparate group of pilots must come together to fight back any way they can. But the best these aces can do might not be good enough.

Nine brilliant scientists travel light-years on a one-way trip to an Earthlike planet. Their mission is to study from orbit the two species of intelligent lifeforms on the surface. The first: an isolated people embarking on civilization and building their world's first city. The second: a brutal race of massive predators, spread thick and still growing across the dominant landmass - destined to breed and eat their way to extinction within a few centuries.

After a long journey to Saturn’s moon Enceladus, spaceship ILSE is on its way back to Earth, carrying crucial cargo. The crew is exhausted and wants nothing more than a quick return home. Suddenly, a chain of malfunctions puts the expedition in peril. The difficulties appear to be related to planet Jupiter, whose orbit they are crossing. Is it the giant planet itself that won’t let these travelers pass? ILSE’s crew is heading toward catastrophe as an unknown power is forging plans designed to influence the future of human civilization.

Jack Four - one of 20 human clones - has been created to be sold. His purchasers are the alien prador, and they only want him for their experimentation program. But there is something different about Jack. No clone should possess the knowledge that’s been loaded into his mind. And no normal citizen of humanity’s Polity worlds would have this information. The prador’s king has been mutated by the Spatterjay virus into a creature even more monstrous than the prador themselves.

It's been a year of upheaval since Bren Cameron's return from space - a year since he and the aiji-dowager, one of his most powerful atevi allies, returned home from their two-year interstellar mission to find the government overthrown and their world in chaos. Now, at last, things on the atevi world seem to be on the right track, and Bren hopes that life may soon become much more tranquil. But something is coming, quietly, stealthily - just the first ominous twinkle of a new star in the heavens....

In the far reaches of the solar system, the outer planets - billions of miles from Earth, unknown for millennia - are being settled. Neptune, the ice giant, is swathed in clouds of hydrogen, helium, and methane and circled by rings of rock and dust. Three years ago, Ilona Magyr’s father, Miklos, disappeared while exploring the seas of Neptune. Everyone believes he is dead - crushed, frozen, or boiled alive in Neptune’s turbulent seas.

Where life as we know it is impossible, the real adventure begins. Venus is a hostile planet, covered by active volcanoes, but NASA launches an expedition to search for life there anyway. Their specially developed airship cruises in the clouds of Venus to serve as a research platform for its four astronauts. When they discover dangerous activities on the glowing-hot surface, there can only be one explanation: A highly sophisticated life form must be at work.

The Zombie Apocalypse Call Center Boxset # 1 is a collection of the following books The Zombie Apocalypse Convenience Store The Zombie Apocalypse Call Center Secret Missions of the Zombie Apocalypse Call Center Rebels of the Zombie Apocalypse Call Center WHO ARE YOU GOING TO CALL, TO HELP YOU SURVIVE THE ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE? Sam thinks his job at the Zombie Apocalypse Call Center is a joke. Zombies aren’t real and the customers who call in for support about their guns and conspiracy theories are crazy! Sam knows the zombie apocalypse will never happen. Until the day it does happen… Now ...

Penumbra, a haphazard city of outcasts, rebels, and malcontents, has floated around a dead planet in a backwater system for longer than living memory can recall. Its towers abandoned starships melded to an ancient, mysterious core, Penumbra is the last remnant of chaotic individualism in a galaxy where conformity to the will of the all-powerful Galactic Council is paramount.

In their Noon Universe novels, they imagined twenty-second-century Earth as a space-faring communist utopia, devoted to guiding the progress of civilization on alien worlds. But as the authors became increasingly disillusioned with life in the Soviet Union, their Noon Universe stories grew darker and more complex as well. The Waves Extinguish the Wind provides the epic conclusion to the Noon Universe saga, as eighty-nine-year-old Maxim Kammerer looks back at his most earth-shattering investigation, which brought an entire era of human civilization to an end.

Orson Scott Card, Kevin J. Anderson, and Larry Niven have seen the future. Now you can, too. A constellation of the brightest lights in the science fiction and fantasy firmament have judged these authors to be the best, the brightest, the truest emerging stars in the field.

Nearly 100,000 years after first contact with the machines that dominate the universe, only a few hundred humans survive. Trapped on Snowglade, a barren world near the center of the galaxy, Killeen and his child, Toby, of the Bishop Tribe, are primitive scavengers, homeless and hunted by the ruling “mechs”. Then suddenly, a strange cosmic entity – neither organic nor cybernetic or living matter – reaches out from a black hole to speak with Killeen.

Rick and his crew live on the edge of Earth Corps space, where the law is what you make it and the taxman doth fear to tread. While a war rages, he salvages its wreckage, profiteering from the misery of others. Despite his plan to sit it out from the sidelines and fill his pockets, Rick is drawn into a galactic conflict. When an alien armada is set to crash down upon Sol, he has to choose between cold hard cash or his conscience.