Showing results by narrator "Scott Aiello" in All Categories

Escaping wrongful imprisonment wasn't something Connor had in mind, but being put into stasis aboard Earth's first interstellar colony ship was something he couldn't have prepared for. For 300,000 colonists, the new colony brings the promise of a fresh start...a second chance. Connor might be the wrong man for the colony, but he's the right man to see that it survives what's coming.

Captain Jack Hale and his crew of ragtag scavengers live by a code. They do the job, get paid, and keep their heads down. Salvaging a distant section of the asteroid belt seemed like the perfect job. But when he and his crew stumble across a mining camp filled with dead bodies, their plans for a quick payday quickly go out the airlock. Especially when they find a scared little girl who knows the truth about the massacre.

In exchange for help escaping her long and wrongful imprisonment, embittered magical healer Blackthorn has vowed to set aside her bid for vengeance against the man who destroyed all that she once held dear. Followed by a former prison mate, a silent hulk of a man named Grim, she travels north to Dalriada. There she'll live on the fringe of a mysterious forest, duty bound for seven years to assist anyone who asks for her help. Oran, crown prince of Dalriada, has waited anxiously for the arrival of his future bride, Lady Flidais.

All Liam Avione ever wanted was to be a Deathbringer. Almost twenty years old now, he’s approaching the last six months of the decade-long training program, hopeful for his future as a protector of the Universe. One, slight problem: he’s got a genetic defect that he’s been keeping a secret. But as the training intensifies, so do his symptoms. Which are really hard to hide when they cause him to puke, pass out, and have a seizure in front of the training cadre.

Hugh Howey is known for crafting riveting and immersive tales of boundless imagination. Now comes Machine Learning, an impressive collection of Howey's science fiction and fantasy short fiction, including three stories set in the world of Wool, two never-before-published tales written exclusively for this volume, and 15 additional stories collected here for the first time. These stories explore everything from artificial intelligence to parallel universes to video games, and each story is accompanied by an author's note.

En route to London from New York, Flight 305 suddenly loses power and crash-lands in the English countryside, plunging a group of strangers into a mysterious adventure that will have repercussions for all of humankind. Struggling to stay alive, the survivors soon realize that the world they've crashed in is very different from the one they left. But where are they? Why are they here? And how will they get back home?

To say Jon Ryan's life was good would be a silly understatement. Sure. Come on, he did CPR on his very first girlfriend, Jenna, when they were in their tweens and narrowly saved her from drowning. Then they dated throughout high school and were only temporarily separated when he went off to the USAF Academy and she to UCLA. But their future was looking so bright they both needed welding goggles. But, way back there in the reality that seems to always kick anyone named Jon Ryan in the ass was...er, an uncomfortable truth. His life, Jenna's life, and their life together never happened.

Jon Ryan is irreverent, cocky, funny, and walks with a swagger. The cocky fighter pilot turned astronaut is also Earth's only chance for survival. The planet Jupiter, thrown off orbit, will destroy Earth in less than a century. Jon volunteers for the most ambitious, desperate mission ever conceived: His consciousness must be transferred into an experimental android host, where he'll live an immortal - and lonely - life. Jon's only companion on his 50-year voyage is his ship's irritable AI.

When your fairy godmother threatens to enslave you with a curse - when a malevolent piper solves your rat problem but steals your children - when you seek revenge on the prince who turned you into a frog - who can you turn to in your hour of need? The band of scoundrels known far and wide as the Bastard Champions - the swashbuckling trio who travel a world of legend, seeking adventure and righting wrongs - as long as there's enough gold to be earned.

As a horrific war with the ruthless Berrillians heats up, a new, more deadly threat arises - a mythical race known as the Last Nightmare, intent on destroying the universe. Once more, fate calls upon Jon Ryan. An alliance is made between old friends and bitter enemies. Cooperation is the only thing that might just save them all. But all the fighting, all the death, and all the suffering are changing Jon. With each passing crisis, his humanity ebbs further and further away.

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.

The galaxy is on fire. The ruthless Adamant Empire is sweeping across all of space leaving only chard ashes in their wake. No civilization can withstand their firestorm of conquest. But they made one serious mistake along their path to galactic domination. They pissed off Jon Ryan. Bad move. That's never a healthy thing to do.

Exploring New Earth should be a thrilling undertaking. Instead, the more the colonists learn about the planet, the more alarmed they become. Alien ruins hint at a species who fought great wars among themselves and disappeared centuries ago. When Connor Gates discovers a hidden bunker, he finds something he never expected. Everything the colonists have learned about New Earth’s previous inhabitants is wrong. Connor must race to unravel the mystery. The colonists must face the possibility that they are not alone and that New Earth was never theirs for the taking.

Guess who may just need to end time? You got it: Jon Ryan may be forced to cancel, terminate, and definitively end time itself—everywhere. Why is he straying in that direction? Well, he wanted to fix the timeline. After the Clan no-timed Earth and Jon resurrected it, he was stressed that the new future would void out the very future that gave us our hero himself. So, Jon did his best to fix the timeline according to how he thought it should be.

Contains books three and four of Time Wars Last Forever. Fragmented Time: Time is tearing apart. The Earth and every soul on it are not just gone; they never even existed. Jon Ryan's hopes of pulling off yet another miracle are evaporating like drops of rain on hot desert sands. Shattered Time: Time has not been kind to Jon Ryan. It almost seems personal between the two of them. His mission to resurrect a lost Earth gets more complicated, more dangerous, and less likely to succeed with each new barrier thrown in his path.

The Jon Ryan of the distant future has an uncontrollable knack for mischief. Now it's really gotten him in trouble. If the universe had a principal's office, he'd be sitting outside it for the next million years! They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Look that up, and you'll find Jon's picture in the Wikipedia article. After the evil clan no-time Earth, he simply wanted to restore his home world. And Jon did, but was he satisfied? No. Then he decided to try to repair that timeline to the exact one it had originally been. Talk about a harebrained notion.

The greatest threat humanity has ever faced lies beyond the frontier of its galactic civilization, but dangers closer to home have been overlooked and allowed to grow. As greed and personal ambition in the Terran Union push the common good aside, the Navy is forced to turn to unconventional means. Jack Samson is ordered to team up with former allies to uncover and destroy the rot eating the Union from the inside. Chasing down a trail of smuggled alien technology through the Union's underworld, they soon discover the web of treachery reaches farther than anyone could have expected.

General Connor Gates is leading a task force on the most ambitious exploration initiative to date. The crew aboard the ships are mix of military and civilian, and include his son, Ethan, who has grown into a well respected leader. While exploring a strange alien world, the team investigating the wreckage of an alien ship is brutally attacked. The survivors barely escape and are now fighting for their lives and their sanity…including Ethan. They’ve been exposed to a dangerous contagion, and it’s going to spread.

If it's peace you want don't ever be Jon Ryan. He's lived two billion years in the android host he transferred to when asked to save humankind. Darn thing won't wear out. Since successfully ensuring the survival of the population of doomed Earth, Jon wanted to die. He was switched off with the promise of never being powered up again. Yeah, Jon's never been that kind of lucky. He was forced to fight and win a war with the most powerful enemy he'd ever faced, the Berrillians. Then he longed for rest.

He was in a gang but was trying to change his future, when a board member of the elite advanced academy NEXUS made a snap decision and offered him a chance. Then fate, or an unbalanced genius, offered him another. The Nexus Academy is for the elite trainees from Earth, and now trials from our alien allies, as they teach the future generation how to fight, lead, hack, spy, and many other talents and tactics. Hired by companies, governments, and NGOs, these graduates work to pay off the massive debt their training at the academy accumulates.