Showing titles in Hard Science Fiction

Things have gone bad among the colonies. Insurgents are building alien-hybrid armies and planet-killing weapons, threatening to upend the fragile balance of power in Province 921. There's not only trouble in the province—the Core Worlds are igniting as well. The Mogwa have asserted claims upon the Imperial Throne, causing their rivals to move against them. Earth's Hegemony and the rebels are pulled into a conflict that could tear the galaxy apart.

The effort almost killed him, but Maddox temporarily closed the breach to an alien dimension, one where genetic supermen rule humanity as gods. The trouble is the master race’s Ninth Assault Fleet is still inside Commonwealth space—and destroying worlds with hellburner missiles. Without the hyper-spatial tubes of the smashed Nexuses, the Grand Fleet can’t jump straight to battle. To win, Star Watch must relearn maneuver warfare across light-years against super soldiers bred for war.

Tom Dreyfus is a Prefect, a law enforcement officer with the Panoply. His beat is the multifaceted utopian society of the Glitter Band, that vast swirl of space habitats orbiting the planet Yellowstone, the teeming hub of a human interstellar empire spanning many worlds. His current case: investigating a murderous attack against one of the habitats that left 900 people dead, a crime that appalls even a hardened cop like Dreyfus.

Seventeen-year-old Truth Medici scavenges for scraps to eat; weathers his parents' abuse; and battles derelicts, killer pimps, and demons in the soul-crushing stretch of desperation he calls home. Even the cops steer clear of the toxic Harban slums. But just across the canal live the magical elite, with their wealth, flying carpets, gorgeous mages, and custom spell beasts, all thanks to the patronage of the almighty Starbrite Corporation. Getting there, and taking his three vulnerable siblings with him, is Truth's only dream.

Britain, the not-too-distant future. Idir is taking the British Citizenship Test. He wants his family to belong. Twenty-five questions to determine his fate. Twenty-five chances to impress. When the test takes an unexpected and tragic turn, Idir is handed the power of life and death. How do you value a life when all you have is multiple choice?

The first novel in Isaac Asimov’s classic science-fiction masterpiece, the Foundation series THE EPIC SAGA THAT INSPIRED THE APPLE TV+ SERIES FOUNDATION Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read For twelve thousand years the Galactic Empire has...

David Ryan is the designer of ELOPe, an email language optimization program, that if successful, will make his career. But when the project is suddenly in danger of being canceled, David embeds a hidden directive in the software accidentally creating a runaway artificial intelligence. David and his team are initially thrilled when the project is allocated extra servers and programmers.

Prador Moon is one of Neal Asher’s most explosive excursions into the Polity universe. It’s also an action-packed prequel to the dramatic events in Neal Asher's Spatterjay novels. It takes one encounter to turn peace into war . . . The worlds of the Polity stretch from Earth Central into the...

Four hundred years from now mankind is strung out across a region of interstellar space inherited from an ancient civilization discovered on Mars. The colonies are linked together by the occasional sublight colony ship voyages and hyperspatial data-casting. Human consciousness is digitally...

A self-proclaimed Tyrant controls the colony ship still orbiting overhead—a fortress that should have been dismantled to build their new world. Armed with surveillance drones and brutal enforcers, he's turned a struggling settlement into his personal kingdom. Anyone who defies him vanishes into the ship above, never to return.

As tensions escalate between the emerging Earth Space Agency alliance and a powerful coalition led by Russia and China, the struggle for dominance extends beyond Earth’s atmosphere. In orbit, rival megacorporations and governments race to construct the largest structures ever built by human hands — rotating wheel space stations capable of reshaping civilization’s future.

The last living astronaut to walk on the Moon has been murdered… Silas visits his estranged grandfather's lakehouse in the aftermath of the deadly home invasion. What he discovers hidden below the floorboards triggers a mystery buried since the final trip to the Moon, over fifty years earlier. Rory returns to her family home in Vermont to write her second novel, but fate has a different story in mind. Her reunion is shattered when she's thrust into danger revolving around the same tokens.

2744 CE. In a city guarded by unseen hands, every disaster is prevented before it happens, but every life is quietly steered. When Hanna uncovers the hidden machinery of mercy, she must decide whether safety without freedom is worth the price, and whether she dares to cut the threads that bind them all.

Separated from her ship, Major Trace Thakur is stranded on the reeh-occupied world of Rando. The native corbi have suffered beneath reeh tyranny for 800 years, and many have given up hope. But Trace needs the data stored in the reeh’s genetic technology and command center - the Rando Splicer - if she’s to learn how to save humanity from impending disaster, and is planning an assault against overwhelming odds. She’ll need help from the UFS Phoenix, though, which is caught in a ritual medieval battle to change the croma leadership.

The military SF sequel to his extraordinary Old Man's War, John Scalzi's The Ghost Brigades is the second in The Old Man's War series. Who can you trust, if you can't trust yourself? Three hostile alien races have united against humanity, determined to halt our expansion into space. The...

Neal Stephenson is a blazing new force on the sci-fi scene. With the groundbreaking cyberpunk novel Snow Crash, he has "vaulted onto the literary stage." It weaves virtual reality, Sumerian myth, and just about everything in between with a cool, hip cybersensibility - in short, it is the gigathriller of the information age.

In High Earth, digital entertainment is everything. Shows. Virtual worlds. Simulations - there’s something for everybody in a city where working for a living has been rendered obsolete by technological advancements. Even a short walk outside to visit with others is no longer necessary. Just load into the network and you can be with anyone, anywhere. For Asher Reinhart, nothing compares to Ignis; a live reality show that pushes human beings to their very extremes.

The Majority always gets what it wants. Thomas Hill just wishes it didn't want him. There's no way to escape a galactic mob of mind readers, no way for him to blend in with his foster family and other average Americans. Because Thomas invented a way to save his own life. His custom medicine halts the progress of his degenerative neuromuscular disease. Newscasters proclaim him the next Einstein, but mere humans have no idea his bioengineered processing capacity rivals that of a supercomputer. They just think he's smart. However, there are other bioengineered supergeniuses in the Majority.

When Earth’s global lattice begins to fail, salvation arrives in the form of the Novum Gift, a flawless quantum patch that restores stability overnight. Power flows cleanly. Cities breathe again. The world celebrates a miracle it never earned. Lyra Meitner isn’t convinced. As she studies the Gift’s behavior, Lyra discovers unsettling patterns buried beneath its perfection.

A new age of exploration is taking humanity to the stars. It's a chance to build a new life from the ground up, to make your fortune and help the colonies grow. Anyone can become someone out in the stars. When John Carver, a veteran of the Halfway War, arrives on the colony of Greenworld, he finds it completely abandoned, as though its residents simply walked out, leaving all of their belongings behind. All that remains are half-built greenhouses and habitats, poorly maintained farmlands, and basic supplies.