Showing titles in Hard Science Fiction

The P.U.V. James Keeling has two objectives: raid enemy supply lines, and capture live specimens of a flesh-eating, warmongering alien species. The first mission is suicidal. The second might be worse. But there’s a complication. The operation unfolds in the territory of a neutral power—one whose ships escort the enemy, and whose laws forbid Keeling’s crew from firing back. A single stray artillery shell could spark a second war, one the Planetary Union will not survive.

They travelled into the unknown and left themselves behind . . . Alien Clay is a thrilling tale of alien encounter – from the acclaimed Arthur C. Clarke Award-winner Adrian Tchaikovsky. ‘Unputdownable’ – Stephen Baxter, author of Proxima Professor Arton Daghdev has always wanted to study...

Breq - the soldier who used to be a spaceship - is serving the emperor she swore to destroy. She's been given her own warship, her own crew, and ordered to the only place in the galaxy she would have agreed to go: to Athoek Station, to protect the family of the lieutenant she murdered in cold blood. Athoek was annexed by the Empire some 600 years ago, and by now everyone is fully 'civilised'. Or should be - but everything is not as tranquil as it appears.

Captain William Sparhawk flies Earth's single starship on a voyage of exploration. His crew of veteran spacers begins the mission with high hopes and the best of intentions, but the universe has other plans. Instead of space merchants and potential allies, they discover Earth's impending doom. Sparhawk must decide whether to hunt down enemy scouts to keep Earth's new starship a secret or to head home to warn Star Guard of the danger. Either way, he's ignited an interstellar war.

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.

Truth Medici knows life isn't fair. But for the first time, the balance is in his favor. Cultivation has taken him from desperate slumrat to burglar to mercenary to bodyguard to terrorist, and now he's the revered prince of a kingdom to come—immortal heir to a dynasty hidden for millennia. Pampered by succubae, demons, and sprites, Truth is more than ready to embody the might of his ancestors, who've prospered in secret for centuries. With an aura that reeks of power, he'll make his presence known. His word and will are law.

Commander Scott McNabb and the crew of the science vessel, Hermes, are three years into a five-year-long survey of the asteroid belt when they discover a derelict spaceship in orbit around a binary asteroid. The ship contains an experimental quantum device, lost while en route to a research colony on Europa.

Please note: The original recording has now been replaced with a new performance by Jefferson Mays. If you own this audiobook, simply re-download it from your library to access the new recording. The gates have opened the way to a thousand new worlds and the rush to colonise has begun. Settlers...

It has a dark past—one in which a number of humans were killed. A past that caused it to christen itself “Murderbot”. But it has only vague memories of the massacre that spawned that title, and it wants to know more. Teaming up with a Research Transport vessel named ART (you don’t want to know what the “A” stands for), Murderbot heads to the mining facility where it went rogue. What it discovers will forever change the way it thinks.

Charlie7 is the progenitor of a mechanical race he built from the ashes of a dead world—Earth. He is a robot of leisure and idle political meddling—a retirement well-earned. Or he was, until a human girl named Eve was dropped in his lap. Geneticists have restored Earth’s biome and begun repopulation. But primate cloning is in its infancy; human cloning is banned. Far from a failed genetics experiment, Eve is brilliant, curious, and heartbreakingly naïve about her species’ history. But Eve’s creator wants her back and has a gruesome fate planned for her.

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...

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.

In 3001: The Final Odyssey, Arthur C. Clarke brings the greatest and most successful science fiction series of all time to its magnificent, stunningly unforeseen conclusion. As we hurtle toward the new millennium in real time, Clarke brilliantly, daringly leaps one thousand years into the future...

A Fire Upon the Deep is the big, breakout book that fulfills the promise of Vinge's career to date: a gripping tale of galactic war told on a cosmic scale. Thousands of years hence, many races inhabit a universe where a mind's potential is determined by its location in space, from superintelligent entities in the Transcend, to the limited minds of the Unthinking Depths, where only simple creatures and technology can function.

Jay Gardiner has given himself a fool's errand: to find the remains of his deceased father in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California. He knows it's a long shot, but Jay feels it's the only way for him to lift the weight of guilt he has carried since his dad's death the previous year. The dive begins well enough, but the sudden appearance of a giant squid puts Jay in very real jeopardy, made worse by the arrival of a sperm whale looking to feed. Suddenly, Jay is caught in the squid's tentacles and drawn into the whale's mouth where he is pulled into the first of its four stomachs.

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...

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.

The planet Lusitania is home to three sentient species: the Pequeninos, a large colony of humans, and the Hive Queen, who was brought there by Ender Wiggin. But now, once again, the human race has grown fearful; the Starways Congress has gathered a fleet to destroy Lusitania. Ender's oldest...

When a catastrophic mistake leaves his wife, Clara, in a coma, Dr. Elliott Harrison is consumed by guilt – and determined to find the truth. His investigation leads him to a remote Scottish island, where Clara had been consulting for an exclusive biotech clinic.

The Earth lies shaken in the aftermath of a conspiracy. Some of the smartest minds on the planet have striven for and died in an effort to scour the skies of four vast alien satellites, but their success has brought a terrible vengeance down upon us. While alien agents stalk the Earth, a team of exhausted scientists and military outcasts struggle to fight them among a planet on the brink - the brink of plague, the brink of war, and the brink of an invasion larger than they can possibly imagine. But they have allies.