Hard Science Fiction Space

When a human team is sent to scout a few hundred light-years in front of the death wave, it encounters a civilization far in advance of our own, a civilization of machine intelligences.These sentient, intelligent machines have existed for eons and have survived earlier "death waves" - gamma-ray bursts from the core of the galaxy. They are totally self-sufficient, completely certain that the death wave cannot harm them, and utterly uninterested in helping to save other civilizations.

Commander Scott McNabb, of the science vessel Hermes, is three years into a five-year-long survey of the asteroid belt. It’s an excruciatingly dull mission, yet it keeps him far away from the agencies that are chasing him down. However, his fortunes change, along with the other four crew members, when they discover a derelict spaceship in orbit around a binary asteroid. Scott’s share of the salvage would be enough to clear his name and start a new life.

One soldier. Armed. Dangerous. And Lost. It was the biggest raid in the history of Dynamic Operations. Cryne had trained his entire career for this. One second, he was en route to the enemy’s capital via an experimental transport system; the next, he was alone in an empty forest. Something was off. Way off. In need of answers and a way home, Cryne will have to rely on years of training and combat skills to get himself back to where he belongs. If that’s even possible….

Here is the previously untold story of Captain Janeway's crew. They began as individuals, following very different pathways, but together, under the leadership of one remarkable woman, they have become one of the finest teams in the known universe - the crew of the Voyager. Read by Robert Picardo!

A year ago the Kher Empire was forced to retreat, but they were not beaten. In Orion Fleet, they return with a new weapon. A huge ship driven by AI begins methodically grinding inhabited worlds to dust. This unstoppable enemy is without fear or remorse, and the Rebels begin a desperate battle just to slow its advance. Leo Blake takes Earth's first warship into space to find a counter to this deadly new attack. The Imperial Fleets take notice of Earth's interference, and they're intent upon revenge. Even if he wins, Blake might have doomed our homeworld.

Escaping conflict on Earth, an idealistic group of settlers arrive on a distant planet - Pax - with plans for a perfect society. The world they discover is rich with life, but this is not the Eden they were hoping for. The plants on Pax are smart - smart enough to domesticate, and even slaughter, its many extraordinary animals. To survive, the colonists realise that they must strike bargains of their own. But if they are to make Pax their home, they must go further, searching for a way to communicate and coexist with these utterly alien intelligences.

Grant Archer merely wanted to study astrophysics, to work quietly as an astronomer on the far side of the Moon. But the forces of the "New Morality", the coalition of censorious do-gooders who run 21st-century America, have other plans for him. To his distress, Grant is torn from his young bride and sent to a research station in orbit around Jupiter, charged with the task of spying on the scientists who work there.

New Canaan is under attack. Driven by Uriel, the Hegemony and its last remaining allies have sent their fleets against the ISF's homeworld. It's a final solution, little more than an attempt to bring about mutually assured destruction. Of course, the humans of Sol don't know that their leader is under the control of core AIs who do not care which side wins, so long as humanity is weakened. Tanis and Tangel have returned from the core, ready to defend their homes, but they lost a month in a temporal jump, and the core AIs are ready for them, led by one of Epsilon's lieutenants.

GSI (Gettnor Space Industries) is beginning to investigate our solar system and mine the asteroids. Aircraft and automobile companies are beginning to switch over to thrusters from their more traditional products. New uses for thrusters are popping up in the healthcare and sports industries. However, at Epsilon Eridani, a race of aliens has so overpopulated their own solar system that they must move many tens of billions of their people to another system before overcrowding destroys them.

The Ixa smashed the galaxy to bits before they were defeated. Captain Husher has sounded the alarm in the decades since: the Ixa’s creators will return to finish the job. But unlike Husher, the galactic government didn't battle the Ixa, and the politicians have convinced themselves that maintaining peace means limiting the ability to wage war.

Avalon was thriving. The cold sleep colonists from Earth had settled on a verdant, livable world. The fast and cunning predators humans named “grendels” were under control, and the mainland outposts well established. Avalon’s new mainland hydroelectric power station was nearly complete, and when on-line would compensate for the nuclear power systems lost in the Grendel Wars. Humans would have power, and with power came the ability to make all the necessities for life. They would survive. They would not survive as a spacefaring people.

One of the greatest science-fiction epics ever written, John Varley's Titan, Wizard, and Demon comprise a groundbreaking trilogy that will live forever. Human explorers have entered the sprawling mind of the alien Gaea. Now they must fight her will. For she is much too powerful. And definitely insane....

First in a brand-new Foreigner trilogy by Hugo Award-winning author C. J. Cherryh. Tracker is the 16th installment of C. J. Cherryh's acclaimed Foreigner series.

When the Empire can’t win a protracted war, they’ll call upon their best to end it in one final epic battle. A war of expansion has raged for years, and the leaders of the Empire are desperate to end it. Turning to cutting edge science, the Empire will risk its greatest soldiers in a gamble to end the war once and for all. Arpina and Fairlight are battle-hardened by years of conflict. Tasked with an impossible mission, they will do everything accomplish their objective, regardless of the costs. With the galaxy's fate hanging in the balance, only a daring mission led by two of the ...

Habitats is the seventh in a series of near future sci-fi/thrillers, whose young heroine Ell Donsaii has a nerve mutation which has made her a genius as well as an athletic phenomenon. In Habitats, she is continuing to find uses for the quantum-entangled wormholes she discovered. These wormholes aren’t big enough to send people through, yet they are making huge changes in our world.

When Lee Anderson and her parents discovered a new world teeming with life, it was the dream of every explorer: they were rich beyond their imaginations. But tragedy struck when a herd of creatures overran their camp and killed her parents. The only other adult in her life had been their partner Gordon, who adopted her as parent. Which didn't turn out to be easy, because he wasn't human. He was a large intelligent alien, and to Lee, he was Uncle Gordon, but neither his race - the Derf - nor humans were gracious about accepting their family relationship.

Cajeiri is the young son of the powerful leader of the Western Association-and he has become a target for forces bent on destroying his father's rule. For Cajeiri is the first ateva to understand the humans living among them-an understanding that threatens his own race.

The first interstellar ship, John Glenn, fled a solar system populated by rogue AIs and machine/human hybrids, threatened by too much nanotechnology, and rife with political dangers. The John Glenn’s crew intended to terraform the nearly pristine planet Ymir in hopes of creating a utopian society that will limit intelligent technology, but by some miscalculation they have landed in the wrong system.

Lux keeps inventing things or adapting alien tech (ancient tech to the aliens) because the active alien civilizations they discover through portals and probes have gone through cycles of war, decline, and rebirth several times. Lux further develops the portals using discovered alien tech. Earth empties refugee camps the UN was running (1,200,000) and sends them with a military escort for their "safety." The military sends many ships for escort duty with orders to take over the colony and use the refugees as a labor force.

The colony ship Ragtime docks in the Lagos system, having traveled light-years to bring one thousand sleeping souls to a new home among the stars. But when first mate Michelle Campion rouses, she discovers some of the sleepers will never wake. Answering Campion’s distress call, investigator Rasheed Fin is tasked with finding out who is responsible for these deaths.