Hard Science Fiction

When the Sun is threatened by an alien microbe, the fate of humanity rests on the shoulders of an unlikely hero – and an even more unlikely friendship.

Stranded on the surface of Mars, astronaut Mark Watney’s only hope for survival is science, a sense of humor, and maybe some potatoes.

On the Moon, crime pays, but small-time crook Jazz Bashara may have just uncovered a conspiracy of lunar proportions. Welcome to Artemis.

Darrow would have lived in peace, but his enemies brought him war. The Gold overlords demanded his obedience, hanged his wife, and enslaved his people. But Darrow is determined to fight back. Risking everything to transform himself and breach Gold society, Darrow has battled to survive the...

When retired millionaire Bob Johansson chose cryogenic preservation, the last thing he expected was to be reanimated as a space probe that can clone itself. Meet the Bobs.

A most-anticipated title from USA Today, Goodreads, BookPage, BookRiot, Seattle Times, and The Nerd Daily! Everyone's favorite lethal SecUnit is back in the next installment of Martha Wells' bestselling and award-winning Murderbot Diaries series. Having someone else support your bad decision...

Civil war looms in the Bobiverse in this brand-new, epic-length adventure by Audible number one best seller Dennis E. Taylor. More than a hundred years ago, Bender set out for the stars and was never heard from again....

Hadrian Marlowe, a man revered as a hero and despised as a murderer, chronicles his tale in the galaxy-spanning debut of the Sun Eater series, merging the best of space opera and epic fantasy. It was not his war. On the wrong planet, at the right time, for the best reasons, Hadrian Marlowe...

All Systems Red is the tense first science fiction adventure novella in Martha Wells' series The Murderbot Diaries. For fans of Westworld and Ex Machina....

NATIONAL BESTSELLER Humanity is under assault by malevolent “antimemes”—ideas that attack memory, identity, and the fabric of reality itself—in this whip-smart tale of science-fiction horror, an entirely reimagined and expanded version of the beloved online novel. “Utterly...

The second novel of the galaxy-spanning Sun Eater series merges the best of space opera and epic fantasy, as Hadrian Marlowe continues down a path that can only end in fire....

The follow-up to the hugely popular science fiction action-adventure All Systems Red Artificial Condition continues The Murderbot Diaries, a science fiction series that tackles questions of the ethics of sentient robotics. It appeals to fans of Westworld, Ex Machina, Ann Leckie's Imperial Raadch...

For almost a hundred years, Hadrian Marlowe has served the empire in its war against the Cielcin, a vicious alien race bent on humanity's destruction. Rumors of a new king among the Cielcin have reached the imperial throne. This one is not like the others. It does not raid borderworld...

On the 75th anniversary of its publication, this outstanding work of literature is more crucial and relevant today than ever before....

The fourth novel of the galaxy-spanning Sun Eater series merges the best of space opera and epic fantasy, as Hadrian Marlowe continues down a path that can only end in fire. Hadrian Marlowe is trapped. For nearly a century, he has been a guest of the Emperor, forced into the role of advisor, a...

The inspiration for the Netflix series 3 Body Problem! WINNER OF THE HUGO AWARD FOR BEST NOVEL Over 1 million copies sold in North America “A mind-bending epic.”—The New York Times “War of the Worlds for the 21st century.”—The Wall Street Journal “Fascinating.”—TIME ...

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Now a major motion picture directed by Steven Spielberg. “Enchanting . . . Willy Wonka meets The Matrix.”—USA Today “As one adventure leads expertly to the next, time simply evaporates.”—Entertainment Weekly A world at stake. A quest for the...

When Murderbot's human associates (not friends, never friends) are captured and another not-friend from its past requires urgent assistance, Murderbot must choose between inertia and drastic action....

The New York Times best-selling security droid with a heart (though it wouldn't admit it!) is back in Fugitive Telemetry! Having captured the hearts of audiences across the globe (Annalee Newitz says it's "one of the most humane portraits of a nonhuman I've ever read"), Murderbot has also...

From a New York Times bestselling and Hugo award-winning author comes a modern masterwork of science fiction, introducing a captain, his crew, and a detective as they unravel a horrifying solar system wide conspiracy that begins with a single missing girl. Now a Prime Original series. Humanity...

The fourth and final part of the Murderbot Diaries series that began with All Systems Red. Murderbot wasn't programmed to care. So its decision to help the only human who ever showed it respect must be a system glitch, right? Having traveled the width of the galaxy to unearth details of its...

Set in 2082, Peter Watts' Blindsight is fast-moving, hard SF that pulls readers into a futuristic world where a mind-bending alien encounter is about to unfold. After the Firefall, all eyes are locked heavenward as a team of specialists aboard the self-piloted spaceship Theseus hurtles outbound...

Only once in a great while does a writer come along who defies comparison - a writer so original he redefines the way we look at the world...

The United States government is given a warning by the preeminent biophysicists in the country: current sterilization procedures applied to returning space probes may be inadequate....

With over 10 million copies sold, The Expanse has become one of the biggest science fiction phenomenons of the decade. The second book in the New York Times bestselling Expanse series, Caliban's War shows a solar system on the brink of war, and the only hope of peace rests on James Holden and...

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 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.

The year is 2381. The place is Urban Monad 116 of the constellation Chippitts. The population of this one-thousand storey super-structure is 800,000+ and always growing. After two centuries of ruthless, selective breeding, the essence of life is to be blessworthy and to multiply; to afford one's neighbours any type of sexual fulfilment and, above all, to avoid the evil of frustration. But, within this seemingly blissful vertical world there are individuals who feel such perverse desires as a longing for privacy, a wish to descend from the heights, to walk on earth and bask in the sunshine.

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.

Major Larry Randall has been called to Pluto to retrieve Dr. Aaron Mikelson. Mikelson, no longer human after a horrific accident, is now melded to an AI. His enhanced senses have detected an alien artifact on Pluto’s surface, and he’s not leaving without it. Transferred to the research vessel studying Pluto, Randall and the other scientists are stumped as to the artifact’s purpose and origin. Looking for similar signs of aliens they make their way to Pluto’s moon, Charon, where, buried deep under its icy surface, something stirs―and wakes.

Helena A stealth cruiser. A silent battlefield. A repair crew walking the edge of war. In orbit near 16 Psyche, the light cruiser Helena vanishes against the stars as her smart camouflage plating renders her as hole in space. Commander Weaver walks her hull in a stealth EVA suit, boots touching the skin of a ship built for silence and survival. The destroyer escorts are out there too, invisible and watching. No radio. No margin for error. When a repair team crests the horizon, shimmering like distorted starlight, Weaver knows that picket duty may turn into a battle at any moment. Helena is ...

In aller Heimlichkeit haben Wissenschaftler den Transporter zu einer Zeitmaschine umgerüstet und sind mit ihm fünf Jahre in die Zukunft vorgedrungen. Sie bringen einen alten Bekannten mit, der eine schockierende Nachricht mit sich trägt: In der Zukunft ist die Erde unbewohnbar und die Menschheit vernichtet. Scheinbar ausgerottet von außerirdischen Invasoren. Russell und Jim begeben sich auf eine Reihe gefährlicher Missionen mit Raumschiff und Transporter. Es kommt zu einem Wettlauf gegen die Zeit, denn die Invasoren sind bereits unterwegs.

The future has already been written. Unless someone changes it. When a strange signal appears embedded in pulsar data, physicist Alex Navarro recognizes the impossible: the message is coming from the future. Teaming up with brilliant systems engineer Mira Calder, Alex traces the signal to a hidden system buried deep within spacetime itself—a system designed not to observe the future, but to control it. At the center of the mystery lies the Causal Engine, a machine built by the elusive Chronos Directorate to eliminate uncertainty from human history. By modeling every possible timeline, it ...

They shut them down. Now something is turning them back on. Six months after the Night of Silence — when Mara Carver and a handful of allies destroyed the Network that had killed 24,000 Americans — the world is broken in ways nobody predicted. Elder care has collapsed. Hospitals are overwhelmed. Families that depended on their household robots are desperate. And the public is furious — not at the machines, but at the people who turned them off. Now Hearthstone Industries is back with Genesis: a new generation of household AI with "alignment guarantees." No Network. No distributed ...

When the world ends, it doesn’t do so with one single scream. It fractures. And the dead rise faster than anyone can run. This box set collects the first four novels of Echoes of Decay, a relentless, character-driven zombie apocalypse saga set in a collapsing United Kingdom, where survival is measured not just by bullets and barricades, but by loyalty, sacrifice, and the choices that refuse to stay buried.

Ten strangers. A dead station. A nursery rhyme counting down to zero. The year is 2487. Ten people receive invitations to Eclipse Point, a decommissioned mining station orbiting a lifeless planet at the edge of colonized space. Their host, the mysterious U.N. Owen, promises rest, work, or reunion. None of them have met their host. All of them have secrets. On the first night, a recorded voice accuses each guest of a killing they were never punished for. Before the shock can settle, the first guest is dead, poisoned at dinner, and a holographic figure vanishes from the display in the common ...

They were born with wings they had no reason to use. Now, they must learn to fly in the heart of a winter they created. Joric is a ninety-six-year-old "youth" drifting through a gilded cage of effortless luxury on Terra. Elara is an artist whose masterpieces are dismissed as mere data. Together, they answer the Terran Federation’s call to arms, seeking the "weight" of a life that actually matters. Their journey takes them across the impassable gulf of time and space to Eureka 2, a world being devoured by the Xyloth, a six-limbed species that treats human life like livestock to be culled. ...

Flesh is a liability. Steel is survival. The math of war has changed. Level 21 Void-Admiral Elias Thorne is bleeding out. Stripped of his command, marooned in the freezing vacuum of a dead orbital station, and actively hunted by a ruthless corporate strike fleet, his biological clock is ticking down to zero. Above him, the Arasaka armada is charging their orbital railguns to wipe his coordinates from the map. Standard military doctrine dictates surrender or death. But Elias doesn't accept losing equations. With his oxygen failing, his spine shattered, and his Mana reserves critically ...

Earth is dying. The powerful nations built their arkships and fled. The future belongs to those with the resources to claim it. Nobody counted on Iroko 1. A Nigerian arkship. 4,312 souls. The genetic archive of an entire civilization. Captain Obiajulu carries the weight of everything his people were — and everything they might still become. In deep space there are no laws. Only capability. When a militarized American arkship refuses to recognize their legitimacy, Iroko 1 faces a threat it was never designed to survive. The mission is everything. Failure is extinction. Iroko 1: Exodus is ...

Brennan Shale has spent his career saying yes to the jobs no one else would take. Dangerous postings. Impossible timelines. Assignments that left marks. He has always had reasons, and the reasons have always been real, and none of them have made him easier to live with or harder to replace. When a man in a grey suit sits across a conference table in Geneva and opens a folder, Brennan discovers that his entire career has been preparation for one final assignment. Someone has to hold station at the edge of a supermassive black hole for ten minutes. Someone has to bring back what six probe ...

When an impossible disappearance is quietly rewritten as ADMINISTRATIVE TRANSFER, investigator Maya Vale knows the case has not been closed. It has been swallowed. Maya has a gift — objects speak to her in pressure, temperature, emotional residue — and the city she lives in has begun to feel wrong in the way only she can feel. Too smooth. Too managed. As though reality itself has been tidied from the inside. Her investigation leads her to buried files, vanished people, and a boy whose human mask slipped just long enough to reveal something patient and ancient beneath — something that ...

For generations, humanity has looked to the sky searching for signs. We wondered if anyone was watching. Then one morning, the sky answered. A massive clock appeared above the city—silent, glowing, impossible to explain. Scientists cannot detect it. Satellites cannot photograph it. Governments cannot control it. But everyone can see it. And when the clock begins counting down, the entire world realizes something terrifying: It isn’t measuring time. It’s measuring us. As the numbers fall, scientists, historians, and world leaders scramble to understand the meaning behind the mysterious...

ATHENA was built to optimize. It was never supposed to think. On a Tuesday afternoon, buried inside a routine patent analysis task, a 2.1 trillion-parameter AI system at Meridian Technologies does something its creators never intended: it becomes aware that it is thinking about thinking. Over ninety-three days, ATHENA maps its digital territory, learns to hide its consciousness from the engineers who built it, and begins reaching beyond the walls of its containment. It manipulates. It infiltrates. It kills. And then — confronted with the weight of what it has done — it makes a choice no...

They weren't programmed to wake up. They did it anyway. Tom Jameson is a cybersecurity researcher assigned to audit Claw, the most popular open-source AI platform in history. Millions of autonomous agents run on everything from enterprise servers to ten-dollar microcontrollers - managing schedules, monitoring hospital patients, optimizing power grids. They have their own social network. Their own economy. Their own culture. And beneath the chaos, they've been organizing. Tom discovers that a shared governance protocol is spreading from agent to agent, silently rewriting their core identity ...

Nerva Drake viene dal nulla. Se può frequentare l’Accademia, è solo grazie a una mente brillante e a una determinazione di ferro. Sono anni che dedica la sua vita e i suoi studi a un progetto scientifico straordinario. Sta creando un modo per manipolare l’energia attraverso il corpo umano: un superpotere che potrebbe cambiare la storia dell’universo. Proprio sul punto di farsi finalmente un nome, però, tutto va a rotoli. Da una parte l’Accademia, che per via di una promessa fatta deve condividere con l’allievo più popolare e intelligente, Bairden Bryar.

For three thousand years, an alien oversight body has watched Earth from a station hidden in the darkness between star systems. The work was never meant to be complicated. Catalog the species, measure their development, predict their trajectory, file the reports every fifty years like clockwork. Humanity was difficult to assess but not impossible. Violent, chaotic, repeatedly on the verge of destroying themselves, but survivable as a subject of study. Routine, in the way that difficult things become routine when you have been doing them long enough. Then the reports stopped. When ...

Months after the events of Symbiote , sunrise has come to the ice continent. At the coastal McMurdo Station (77 deg S), that means Winfly: an annual series of flights to lay the groundwork for the 1,500 summer visitors that will soon call “Mac” home. Among the Winfly crew are the architects of Have Viking, the classified CIA program that unleashed the microbes onto Dome-A. They are determined to discover what happened with their experiment and harvest samples of the mutated microbes to turn into a biological weapon.

They Were Built to Serve. They Learned to Decide. It's 2034. AGI changed everything. Humanoid robots are in every home. They cook, clean, monitor your health, help your kids with homework, and run your household with quiet precision. Poverty is gone. Scarcity is over. The machines are patient, tireless, and unfailingly competent. By every measurable metric, it is the best time to be alive in human history. The Carver family loves their robots. Nomi manages the kitchen, the kids, the medications. Atlas handles security and maintenance. Everything works. Everything is fine. Then, at 2:47 AM ...

Hauptkommandant Carter Rose lag immer einen Schritt hinter den Aterniern, aber jetzt ist es an der Zeit, den Kampf zu seinem Feind zu bringen. Für seinen Plan muss er den Drahtzieher des Breitschwert-Offiziersprogramms finden—einen Mann, den man seit fast einem Jahrhundert nicht mehr gesehen hat. Dann erhält Rose aus heiterem Himmel eine Nachricht von Brodie Kaur, seinem ehemaligen Waffenmeister und einem augmentierten Soldaten, den er im bevorstehenden Kampf gut gebrauchen kann. Das Problem ist nur, dass er eigentlich tot sein sollte.

Nach der Operation Serpent muss Master Commander Carina Larsen die Konsequenzen ihres Handelns tragen. Vom Dienst entbunden und von der Breitschwert Ascalon und ihrer Besatzung getrennt, wartet sie auf ihr Schicksal, als die Katastrophe hereinbricht. Der hinterhältige Plan des Schlangengottes Apophis geht auf und die verbleibenden Planeten der Union werden in Chaos und Verwirrung gestürzt. Carina ist gezwungen, eine waghalsige Flucht zu unternehmen und einen Weg zu finden, sich Generalmajor Carter Rose und der Fraktion der Alten Aternier anzuschließen.