The Martians were on the rampage all across Queen Victoria's Britain. Nothing man possessed could stop them. But then the huge fighting machines began to slow down and lumber to a halt. One by one, the Martians inside the giant machines began to die. Soon there were just scattered and failing remnants of the once-mighty tripods wandering here and there among the derelict monuments. Even the red weed was dying as Mother Earth began to reclaim her own. The human survivors became emboldened, and they emerged from the hiding places intent on fighting back. 

It has been 14 years since the Martians invaded England. The world has moved on, always watching the skies but content that we know how to defeat the Martian menace. Machinery looted from the abandoned capsules and war machines has led to technological leaps forward. The Martians are vulnerable to earth germs. The army is prepared. So when the signs of launches on Mars are seen, there seems little reason to worry. Unless you listen to one man, Walter Jenkins, the narrator of Wells' book.

Following the initial Martian invasion of England, President Theodore Roosevelt tries to prepare the United States for the potential of another Martian incursion. As the possibility of a stronger invasion is increasingly clear, the US government tries to mobilize nations to share information and technology to defend humanity. Newly minted ordinance officer Andrew Comstock has been placed in charge of developing new technology that has to be tested on the fly in a race against time if humanity is to survive.

Frozen fingers, broken bones, shattered hearts...the situation could not get worse. Or so Lieutenant Peter Harding thought. The Trigger has just left UK shores and is on its way to northern Norway when the relentless storm hits. Harding’s crew are barely surviving the Artic conditions which face them. The ship is slowly dying and cracks are beginning to show, in both the ship and in relations between the men on board. The navy of Nazi Germany are under orders to destroy The Trigger, but how much will it take before Harding and his men surrender to the enemy?

The night after a shooting star is seen streaking through the sky from Mars, a cylinder is discovered on Horsell Common in London. At first, naïve locals approach the cylinder armed just with a white flag - only to be quickly killed by an all-destroying heat ray, as terrifying tentacled invaders emerge. Soon the whole of human civilisation is under threat, as powerful Martians build gigantic killing machines, destroy all in their path with black gas and burning rays, and feast on the warm blood of trapped, still-living human prey.

H. G. Wells wrote dozens of novels and short stories and is often called the 'father of science fiction'. Here we collect together the works of H. G. Wells as broadcast on BBC Radio. With full-cast dramatisations of novels including The Time Machine, The Island of Dr Moreau, The War of the Worlds, Ann Veronica, The First Men in the Moon and The Wonderful Visit; plus readings of The Invisible Man, Love and Mr Lewisham and several short stories including The Inexperienced Ghost and In the Abyss. 

A thrilling novel leading into the new CBS series, Una McCormack’s The Last Best Hope introduces you to brand-new characters featured in the life of beloved Star Trek captain Jean-Luc Picard—widely considered to be one of the most popular and recognizable characters in all of science fiction. 

Summer, 1803: the uneasy peace with France is over, and Britain has once more been plunged into the turmoil of war. After a spell on the beach, Sir Richard Banks is appointed to HMS Prometheus, a 74 gun line-of-battleship which an eager admiralty loses no time in ordering to sea. The ship is fresh from a major re-fit, but Banks has spent the last year with his wife and young family: will he prove himself worthy of such a powerful vessel, and can he rely on his officers to support him?

The new United States in central Germany launches a one-plane Doolittle Raid on Paris, France. The target: their arch-enemy, Cardinal Richelieu. Meanwhile, an ambassador from the Mughal Empire of northern India is being held captive in Austria by the Habsburg dynasty. Mike Stearns decides to send a mercenary company to rescue him, led by two 17th-century mercenary officers: an Englishman and a Irishman, who seem to spend as much time fighting each other as they do the enemy.

After a harrowing war patrol in the Sea of Japan, the US submarines of Wolfpack 351 are low on fuel, torpedoes, and morale. Their only means of escape is a narrow passage teeming with enemy aircraft, mines, and coastal batteries - and guarded by a menacing Japanese fleet led by a legendary admiral hellbent on stopping them. Facing the imminent destruction of the entire wolfpack and with few options remaining, the American admirals in Pearl Harbor turn to an aging submarine, the only boat close enough to help. 

On an Imperial outpost world on the fringes of tau space, the renowned Commissar Ciaphas Cain and his fractious regiment of Valhallan Guard, newly created from the remnants of two devastated units, find themselves in the middle of a war. As the Astra Militarum struggle to contain worldwide civil insurrection, can the wily Commissar Cain identify the real villain before the planet is lost to the Imperium forever?

Heide wails, jumps up and lands on the other side of the trench, where he slides through the mud like a bulldozer. Our tank starts backing up in full speed. Porta has clearly also spotted the madness lying ahead in wait of spreading death and mutilation. Nothing travels as fast as the rumor that the front troops have hit the dreaded mines. Suddenly everything goes quiet. Even the heavy Maxim gun stops. Everyone holds their breath and waits for the mine to go off.

In the spring of 1915, a young Austro-Czech naval lieutenant Ottokar Prohaska finds himself posted to the minuscule Imperial and Royal Austro-Hungarian Submarine Service in the Adriatic port of Pola. In some trepidation at first, because he has no experience whatever of submarines, his fears are soon set at rest when he discovers that nobody else has either: least of all his superiors.

Nineteen gut-wrenching reports from the front lines of the War of the Worlds, as logged by Albert Einstein, Mark Twain, Theodore Roosevelt, H.P. Lovecraft, Winston Churchill, Jules Verne, and many of the other most famous writers of the time. The most popular and acclaimed science fiction writers of today relive the Martian invasion through the eyes of their famous predecessors.

Master and Commander is the first of Patrick O’Brian’s now famous Aubrey-Maturin novels, regarded by many as the greatest series of historical novels ever written. It establishes the friendship between Captain Jack Aubrey RN and Stephen Maturin, who becomes his secretive ship’s surgeon and an intelligence agent. It displays the qualities which have put O’Brian far ahead of any of his competitors.