Showing results by publisher "Audible Studios" in Hard Science Fiction

Luck has always run in both directions for Naval Commandant Nicholas Seafort. While he has managed to save the Hope Nation colony from alien attack, he and his friends have paid a heavy price. Most recently his exploits have earned him a dignified position as an instructor at the United Nations Naval Academy. But as Seafort suspects, trouble isn't far behind. A return to Earth means a return to his roots, some of which he wishes would remain buried.

High atop a dormant volcano, a team of scientists preserve the last remnants of higher technology. Off the coast of Kauai, a flotilla of survivors must decide whether to return to their island, or make their way to another location, risking pirates and nature on the gamble of safer shores. On the central plateau of the Big Island, a group of ranchers want to rebuild civilization… but to do that, they’ll need to reunite a people scattered across an ocean of stars.

Death awaits the curious! Out along the rim of the galaxy hangs a loose configuration of some 60 stars known as the Faustian Chain. This whorl of sparkling suns is rich in planets and occupies an irregular volume of space some 20 light years in diameter. From an external viewpoint, the Chain presents a colorful display of plasma-streams, luminous nebulae and sparkling pinpoints of light.

A cyber-dystopian thriller unlike any other. In a near-future Tokyo, every action - from blinking to sexual intercourse - is intellectual property owned by corporations that charge licensing fees. A BodyBank computer system implanted in each citizen records their movements from moment to moment and connects them to the audio-visual overlay of the ImmaNet so that every inch of this cyber-dystopian metropolis crawls with information and shifting cinematic promotainment.

Conn Maxwell returns from Terra to his poverty-stricken home planet of Poictesme, “The Junkyard Planet”, with news of the possible location of Merlin, a military super-computer rumored to have been abandoned there after the last war. The inhabitants hope to find Merlin, which they think will be their ticket to wealth and prosperity. But is Merlin real or just an old rumor? And if they find it, will it save them - or tear them apart?

Everyone knows Nick Seafort as The Fisherman - the hero who stopped the merciless, fishlike aliens when they attacked Earth. Voices of Hope picks up with Seafort decades later, after he's retired as the secretary general of the United Nations. Despite his trappings of power, he has been unable to aid the so-called transpops, desperate people who live in the dangerous lower levels of New York City.

It is 2019. NASA astronaut Nigel Walmsley is sent on a mission to intercept a rogue asteroid on a collision course with Earth. Ordered to destroy it, he instead discovers that it is actually the shell of a derelict space probe - a wreck with just enough power to emit a single electronic signal….

As tragedy strikes his multicultural family, Martin struggles to maintain his place in his adapted culture, and to provide for his child. Zendigi explores what it means to be human, and the lengths one will go to in order to provide for ones children. This emotional roller coaster explores a non-Western-European near future that both challenges ideas of global monoculture and emphasizes the humanity we all share.

Retrieval Artists help the lost find their way back home, whether they like it or not. Specialized private detectives, they investigate the most unusual crimes in the galaxy. But Miles Flint isn't a Retrieval Artist. He's just a cop, trying to do his job.

A civilization-destroying omega cloud has switched direction, heading straight for a previously unexplored planetary system--and its alien society. And suddenly, a handful of brave humans must try to save an entire world--without revealing their existence.

Nick Morrison always wanted to be an astronaut. When a start-up company recruits him to build a lunar launch system at the moon’s south pole, Nick gladly leaves behind his troubled life on Earth—but Nick doesn’t know that the company is in financial and legal trouble. Deprived of support from Earth, the team on the moon must figure out how to survive on their own. Worse yet, there’s another base at the lunar south pole, run by a ruthless contractor who has big plans for the moon...and for Earth.

In a Legion gone lax, Colonel Bill Booly, with his mixed blood and by-the-book attitude, is a misfit. So when he steps on some important toes, his punishment is assignment to the worst post in the galaxy: Earth. But Booly and his troops will turn out to be Earth's best line of defense, when a Legion-led military coup topples the government. It's Legionnaire against Legionnaire in a struggle that will be won by strength and courage.

Fresh out of college with his Ship Engineer 3rd-Class certificate, Dave Walker’s only thought is to try to find a berth on a corporate ship plying the trade routes between the many habs, orbitals, and moons in the Solar System. The problem for Dave, however, isn't his straight C average; it's that his stepfather, a powerful Earth senator he’s never met, now wants him dead. Forced to take the first berth he can find, Dave ends up on the Iowa Hill, an old tramp freighter running with a minimal crew and nearing the end of its useful life.

It is 2076: Lancer, Earth’s first starship, is on a mission to find interstellar civilizations. Although astronaut Nigel Walmsley’s experiences with alien encounters make him the expert, no one believes Nigel’s theory that machines are the dominant intelligent beings left in the galaxy and that their purpose is to annihilate all organic life. Then the explorers discover once-living planets where only machines remain – and ruined worlds where fugitive survivors must evade omnipresent and lethally advanced A.I. warships.

Stranded humans must adapt alien technology to survive on a dangerous planet. Lost in the dark, half a year into their journey to the colony world of Tantalus, Sakura Kimei, her family, and her best friend, the alien "Bemmie" nicknamed Whips, are torn from the safety of their colony ship. In a crippled lifeboat, they have one chance to find a habitable world. But even then they will find that their apparent salvation is a world of a thousand secrets.

Stranded on the moon after a global economic crash, Nick Morrison and his friends must take decisive action to secure their supply chain before they starve to death. The capture of a space station wins them some breathing room. But the powers that be on Earth cannot tolerate an independent, thriving lunar colony. Amidst a high-stakes arms race, Nick and his friends struggle to hold off the entire might of Earth. At the same time, Nick must also fight his old nemesis, Joe Massad, for control of the lunar base.

With the alien Dhryn cutting a pathway through the inhabited spaceways - bringing about the annihilation of many of the races who have the misfortune to lie along the star trail they are following - time is running out for all sentient life-forms. Can biologists Mackenzie Connor and Emily Mamami solve the riddle of the Dhryn before their part of the galaxy becomes as dead as the mysterious region known as the Chasm?

Long before movies like Minority Report and The Matrix, the world's writers have been recording the future as it might exist - and as it turns out, they were right. This bizarre anthology collects the most stunning predictions and imagined inventions here for the first time. Visions of Tomorrow includes "The Land Iron Clads" by H. G. Wells, who described a military tank in 1903 - long before it was ever a possibility; "The Yesterday House" by Fritz Leiber, who wrote about cloned humans; and more.

At 25, General Jason Wander has fought and won man's only alien conflict. Now, after long years in space, he's coming home...but to what? Earth's desperate nations, impoverished by war damage and military spending, are slashing defense budgets. There's just one problem with this new worldwide policy - the first alien invasion was merely Plan A. Suddenly, the real assault begins: Earth is attacked by a vast armada of city-sized warships. To block their invasion, mankind has only one surviving craft and a single guerrilla strike force...a suicide squad led by Jason Wander.

Hugo Award-winning author Egan returns to the field with Incandescence, a novel of hard SF. The Amalgam spans nearly the entire galaxy, and is composed of innumerable beings from a wild variety of races, some human or near it, some entirely other. The one place that they cannot go is the bulge, the bright, hot center of the galaxy. There dwell the Aloof, who for millions of years have deflected any and all attempts to communicate with or visit them.