Space Satire

Never meddle with unidentified spying objects...The year is: The Future. Mars and Earth are like that divorced couple who don’t exactly like each other but have at least stopped fighting in public. Floating somewhere in between them, amid all the garbage and Gene Roddenberry’s ashes, a transport vessel called the SS Jefferson is homeward bound. Its crew might have even made it on time for once, too...

Our heroes are dressed in homemade uniforms and armed with prop phasers but soon find themselves defending their hotel and convention center against hordes of flesh-eating undead. Suddenly, all of their useless knowledge about particle physics and old Star Trek episodes has genuine real-world applications! And while hotel employees and regular civilians are dying left and right, our Trekkies summon strength and courage by emulating their favorite starship-voyaging characters

Interstellar con man Rex Nihilo has a price tag on his head. Railroaded into smuggling a shipment of contraband corn to a planet short on food, Rex finds himself on the run from an insidious corporation named Ubiqorp, which reaps obscene profits by keeping the planet dependent on shipments of synthetic rations. When Rex and his long-suffering robot companion Sasha are sentenced to work as slave labor on a massive Ubiqorp plantation, they learn the terrible secret behind the corporation's products.

Professor James Lowry didn’t believe in spirits, or witches, or demons. Not until a gentle spring evening when his hat disappeared, and suddenly he couldn’t remember the last four hours of his life. Now, the quiet university town of Atworthy is changing - slightly at first, then faster and more frighteningly each time he tries to remember.

Dix Jenner, a self-proclaimed slacker, is the first chef to live--and maybe die--on Mars. After an explosion kills his colony companions and leaves him with nothing but his spacesuit, his time on the faraway planet is about to expire...until he's rescued by friendly Martians and opens a cafe--who knew Martians loved espresso? Unfortunately, his success attracts the attention of the corrupt and narcissistic Martian Grand Leader. Forced to run to avoid being imprisoned, Dix gets lucky: a NASA rescue mission lands on Mars. But seeing it brings back the dark secret he's been keeping from ...

The Believer magazine presents a compendium of advice from producers, writers, and actors of The Daily Show, Saturday Night Live, Parks and Recreation, Late Show with David Letterman, The Hangover, and The Colbert Report, along with other musicians, cartoonists, New Yorker writers, and those similarly unqualified to offer guidance.

The continuing adventures of the starship A.S.F. Willful Child. Its mission: to seek out strange new worlds on which to plant the Terran flag, to subjugate and if necessary obliterate new life-forms, to boldly blow the... And so we join the not-terribly-bright but exceedingly cock-sure Captain Hadrian Sawback and his motley crew on board the Starship Willful Child for a series of devil-may-care, near-calamitous and downright chaotic adventures through "the infinite vastness of interstellar space."

When sociologist Nalini Jackson joins the SS Delany for the first manned mission to Jupiter, all she wants is a career opportunity: the chance to conduct the first field study of group dynamics on long-haul cryoships. But what she discovers instead is an entire city encased in a bubble on Europa, Jupiter’s largest moon.

The location: London. The date: Very, very soon. Beset by multiple crises and buried under a growing mountain of debt, the leaders of the G7 have taken the only logical decision. They've sold the planet. When Toby, a penniless student, and his two new flatmates find out one morning on TV, they're surprised to find the Earth's new alien owners are staggeringly cute and bring the promise of a debt-free future. They're just getting ready to celebrate along with the rest of the world, when a chance encounter with a mysterious professor reveals the truth.

Fourteen-year-old Wyatt is having a difficult time dealing with the death of his mother. He often visits the spot where he and his mother would star gaze and dream of what it's like on Mars. Before she died, he told her he intended on traveling to Mars someday. Meanwhile, Herman is a teenage Martian who watches the NASA channel on the teletube and dreams of visiting Earth. One night, he and his friends take a joyride in a spaceship and ends up on Earth, where they accidentally zap Wyatt aboard before flying back home to Mars. Wyatt and Herman quickly become friends—and both like to ...

After surviving a nearly insurmountable peril, a starship captain returns to Earth with his badly distressed ship and remaining crew and passengers in hyper sleep over three hundred years after they were believed to be destroyed and finds his most perilous trial. In humanity’s drive towards individuality by being like everyone else, due to genetic manipulation there are only 33 standard female and male models and he and his crew will be made beautiful like everyone else unless he can figure out a way to stop it.

James Hynes is the author of three New York Times Notable Books of the Year. That same publication praises Kings of Infinite Space as “unspeakably funny!” This offbeat novel satirizes an experience ubiquitous to modern times—office life. With a defeated sigh, ex-college professor Paul Trilby faces the downward spiral that is his existence. After his wife and three subsequent girlfriends dump him, and he loses just as many jobs, he’s sure he’s a pawn in some vast conspiracy.

Steven Erikson has taken his lifelong passion for Star Trek and transformed it into a smart, inventive, and hugely entertaining spoof on the whole overblown mankind-exploring-space-for-the-good-of-all-species-but-trashing-stuff-with-a-lot-of-high-tech-gadgets-along-the-way adventure. The result is a novel that deftly parodies the genre while also paying fond homage to it.

What happens when a group of business executives, who find they can no longer exploit the inhabitants of Earth and despoil its natural resources because of do-gooder laws, travel to another world in search of easy profits? They find the locals thought of it first. This romp across the galaxy takes us to Kalista, the larger of the planets of the Smiling Disc star system, where intelligent life has been discovered that has a very different outlook from what we call intelligent life on Earth. The group of travellers gets the opportunity to compare not only business practices on Kalista with ...

Addicted to action and beholden to no one, a hell-raising space pirate and her indestructible calico cat confront the horrors of the asteroid-mining frontier, from massive monsters to revolting robots, and much, much more. Join Meteor Mags and her criminal crew of rock-and-roll rebels in a series of reckless adventures including hand-to-hand combat with a murderous cyborg, traveling through time, and uncovering the gruesome mystery of an abandoned space station. Discover new forms of life, an alternate universe, and all-new thrills in this novel-length collection of stories where science ...

Earth is rising in the House of Voltar.... And there’ll be hell to pay! That’s right. The invasion is on...and it’s coming soon to a galaxy near you. The action couldn’t be hotter, and the plot couldn’t be more diabolical. Earth is coming to Voltar - and the Voltarians won’t know what hit them. Murder, blackmail, drugs, psychoanalysis, PR firms, sex-crazed teenyboppers, riots in the streets, women in chains. These are the powerful secret weapons of war.

35 years after the first Mallworld story was produced, S.P. Somtow has produced the Ultimate, Ultimate, Ultimate Mallworld collection. Included are all the original stories (and the one story left out of the Starblaze trade edition), all the ads for the Mallworld products (left out in the TOR mass market re-printing), and all the original artwork by Karl Kofoed (the artwork was not included in the TOR edition) and Kofoed's cover art (left out of the Meisha Merlin edition!) With a new introduction by the author. Mallworld was an iconic science fiction novel of the 1980s and a pungent satire ...

President Brandon Diben was having the time of his life. His party and their mainstream media allies were devoted to covering up his family’s corruption, the exploding national debt, massive illegal immigration and a skyrocketing inflation rate. His advancing dementia was a running joke behind the scenes as well. But he never counted on an uninvited intruder that appeared mysteriously in the Oval Office and began to demand that he resign from office and admit his crimes. When he refused, this cute little strawberry blonde began to make things appear around the nation that not only ...

Elvie Nara was doing just fine in the year 2074. She had a great best friend, a dad she adored, and a bright future working on the Ares Project on Mars. But then she had to get involved with sweet, gorgeous, dumb-as-a-brick Cole - and now she's pregnant. Teen pregnancy is never easy - especially when extraterrestrials are involved....

"...will definitely bring a smile to your face." - Amazon UK reviewer "Accountants CAN be fun" - PJ Lea Could this be the worst job interview in the entire history of the universe? Possibly. So when Elton D Philpotts lands his dream Space Corps accountancy job he can’t help wondering how it happened. And why. Somebody in the Space Corps must need him, and they need him bad. But the work is dull; nothing like the glamour job he expected. Until he sees things he should not have seen: A hidden ledger, dodgy accounting transactions, bogus gate receipts. And when a whole starship disappears, ...