Showing titles in Hard Science Fiction

Commander Joe Pikeman has his share of demons. But after a long deployment, he just wants to enjoy some home leave with his daughter. The galaxy has other plans. His last assignment takes him to Earth, humanity’s deserted homeworld. There, he finds Earth’s last settlement littered with the bodies of the people who lived there. As he hunts down those responsible, he runs head-first into some galaxy-shaking questions.

They dreamed of a new home. They woke to a nightmare. A far-reaching space opera spanning generations, species and galaxies by Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning author Adrian Tchaikovsky. On Imir, Captain Holt founded a hopeful new colony on an empty world. But generations later, his descendants...

With The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume 3, award-winning editor Neil Clarke provides a year-in-review and 27 of the best stories published by both new and established authors in 2017. 

So far, Officer Candidate School is living up to its cutthroat reputation. Still, the merciless mental, physical, and psychological torture may be worth it for Lance Warder to have a chance to fight in space. The space that awaits isn't for the faint of heart. He'll have to shed his mental chains to prove his mettle. Because no one cares who your father is when you're faced with unknown threats in a dark, infinite void.

Long before Earth began conquering her neighboring stars, Legion Varus was deployed on Tau Ceti. Valuable and highly illegal treasures were stolen during the campaign, but McGill never gave it a second thought. The Tau haven’t forgotten him, however. For decades, they’ve hunted and plotted, and at last they’ve found the pirate who robbed them. Tau agents invade Earth seeking revenge and profit. Caught up in violence and intrigue, McGill is given the task of finding out where the loot has gone and who was responsible for the theft in the first place.

Although there is no unequivocal proof… we all have a quantum mind buried deep inside the neural structures of our brains… it’s what makes us human. Complex quantum processes work continuously to shape and uphold our essence - functioning synergistically across the vast quantum multiverse. Do they ever fail? … What happens if they do?

Deep in the steaming jungles of Paraguay, Aimee Weir is in trouble. The petrobiologist has found what she was looking for – a unique microorganism in a natural gas deposit – but it proves to be more destructive than anyone could have imagined. A contagion is striking down all in its wake. The camp is quarantined, but workers start to vanish in the night. Is it fear of contamination – or has something far more lethal come to the surface? Something that has been trapped beneath the miles of stone, waiting... for us.

Captain Jackson Wolfe never thought he'd see the end of the Phage War in his lifetime. The enemy was too powerful, too numerous, and utterly determined to exterminate humanity. But the appearance of a new ally in the fight has changed all of that. For the first time since the original incursion, Wolfe thinks that maybe there's a chance to stop their implacable enemy before they have the chance to wipe out any more human planets.

March 15th, Earth Year 2290. The day the aliens returned. The memories are still fresh. Of colonies burning. Of millions dying in agony. Fifty years later, we’ve built up our strength. Using a wormhole, we colonized both sides of the galaxy. It was the worst mistake we could have made. Our enemy has returned and the wormhole has collapsed. Commander Thatcher finds himself on the wrong side of the divide. Separated from his pregnant wife by countless light years. He’s just been given command of a light armored cruiser. His first command.

The UFS Phoenix embarks on a dangerous quest for the AI Ceephay Queen who rules at the heart of the Reeh Empire. For cover, Phoenix will use the enormous war being launched by the new rulers of the croma, Croma'Dokran, into reeh space. This war is intended in part to evacuate the corbi homeworld of Rando, thus righting a great wrong of croma history by rescuing 200 million corbi from reeh tyranny.

The day that changed Melody's life was like any other over the previous two years. She'd found she had a gift for writing, and her career as an author had almost healed the pain of losing her job. When the Secret Service rang her bell, everything changed. Something was nearing Saturn…and it was slowing down. Had she been right about the object?

'So much fun ... adorable characters, seductive dragons, narcissist cats, crazy imagination and lots of wisdom' LIAN HEARN An exciting new adventure filled with diverse characters, strong heroes and heroines and wild creatures from the bestselling author of White Tiger. Corporal Jian Choumali is...

Trurl and Klaupacius are constructor robots who try to out-invent each other. Over the course of their adventures in The Cyberiad, they travel to the far corners of the cosmos to take on freelance problem-solving jobs, with dire consequences for their unsuspecting employers.

Dark Intelligence is the first novel in the Transformation series, a no-holds-barred adventure set in Neal Asher's popular Polity universe. One man will transcend death to seek vengeance. One woman will transform herself to gain power. And no one will emerge unscathed . . . Thorvald Spear wakes...

From the bestselling author of Lost in Time and Quantum Radio comes a new mind-bending thriller: a group of strangers with tinnitus begins seeing numbers—numbers they soon realize are a code that will change the world.

No, I didn't kill the dead human. If I had, I wouldn't dump the body in the station mall. When Murderbot discovers a dead body on Preservation Station, it knows it is going to have to assist station security to determine who the body is (was), how they were killed (that should be relatively straightforward, at least), and why (because apparently that matters to a lot of people—who knew?) Yes, the unthinkable is about to happen: Murderbot must voluntarily speak to humans! Again!

The planet is called Banshee. The air is unbreathable, the water poisonous. It is the home of the most implacable enemies that humanity, in all its interstellar expansion, has ever encountered. Felix is a scout in A-team Two. Highly competent, he is the sole survivor of mission after mission. Yet he is a man consumed by fear and hatred.

Old enemies meet on new worlds in The Line of Polity, the second novel in Neal Asher's popular Agent Cormac series. At the frontiers of human-occupied space, the Miranda space station has been utterly destroyed. Earth Central assigns Agent Ian Cormac to discover the truth, because the alien...

When the AI infected the internet, three hundred years of industrial and technological advancements were eradicated overnight. After untold sacrifice, humanity won—barely. Victory was only possible thanks to the hidden martials revealing themselves and stepping onto the stage of history. They were named the Old Monsters, immortal superhumans with impossible strength and speed, capable of dismantling entire armies with their bare hands. Thus began the gold rush of the 25th century; the rush to fitness, to the unimaginable power displayed by the Old Monsters.

From the author of The Three-Body Problem, a collection of award-winning short stories - a breathtaking selection of diamond-hard science fiction. Stories included are 'The Village Teacher', 'The Time Migration', '2018-04-01', 'Fire in the Earth', 'Contraction', 'Mirror', 'Ode to Joy', 'Full Spectrum Barrage Jamming', 'Sea of Dreams', 'Cloud of Poems' and 'The Thinker'.