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.

In 1942, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse - mathematical genius and young Captain in the US Navy - is assigned to detachment 2702. It is an outfit so secret that only a handful of people know it exists, and some of those people have names like Churchill and Roosevelt. The mission of Watrehouse and Detachment 2702 - commanded by Marine Raider Bobby Shaftoe - is to keep the Nazis ignorant of the fact that Allied Intelligence has cracked the enemy's fabled Enigma code. In the present, Waterhouse's crypto-hacker grandson, Randy, is attempting to create a "data haven" in Southeast Asia....

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Last Sentinel of Europa opens the trilogy with a summons from the outer system. When a forgotten guardian awakens near Jupiter, Commander Selene Tyros is sent to confront it, only to discover that protection has become evaluation, and survival now depends on choices humanity never consented to make. What begins as an investigation becomes a trial, where freedom itself is placed on the scales.

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.

Count Zero is a rustbelt data-hustler totally unprepared for what comes his way when the designer's defection triggers war in cyberspace. With voodoo gods in the Net and angels in the software, he can only hope that the megacorps and the super-rich have their virtual hands too full to notice the amateur hacker with the black market kit trying desperately to stay alive....

Two mighty empires are at war - and both will lose, with thousands of planets falling to the extinction event called the Scour. At least that's what the artificial intelligence known as Rupshe believes. But somewhere in the multiverse there exists a force - the Mother Mass - that could end the war in an instant, and Rupshe has assembled a team to find it. Essien Nkanika, a soldier trying desperately to atone for past sins; the cat-woman Moon, a conscienceless killer; the digitally recorded mind of physicist Hadiz Tambuwal; Paz, an idealistic child and the renegade robot spy Dulcimer Coronal.

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.

The second of two prequel novels in Isaac Asimov’s classic science-fiction masterpiece, the Foundation series THE EPIC SAGA THAT INSPIRED THE APPLE TV+ SERIES FOUNDATION As Hari Seldon struggles to perfect his revolutionary theory of psychohistory and ensure a place for humanity among the...