Showing results for "Sequence" in Hard Science Fiction

The starship Earthling, filled with thousands of hibernating colonists en route to a new world at Tau Ceti, is stranded beyond the solar system when the ship's three organic mental cores—disembodied human brains that control the vessel's functions—go insane. The emergency skeleton crew sees only one chance for survival: build an artificial consciousness in the Earthling's primary computer that can guide them to their destination—and hope it doesn't destroy the human race.

Fifty-six hard years after the events of The Machine Crusade, after the death of Serena Butler, the bloodiest decades of the Jihad take place. The human worlds begin to hope that the end of the centuries-long conflict with the thinking machines is finally in sight.

Half a million years in the future, on a dead, war-ravaged world at the centre of the galaxy, there is a mile-high statue of Michael Poole. Poole, born on Earth in the fourth millennium, was one of mankind's most influential heroes. He was not a warrior, not an emperor. He was an engineer, a builder of wormhole transit systems. But Poole's work would ultimately lead to a vast and destructive conflict, a million-year war between humanity and the enigmatic, powerful aliens known as the Xeelee. The Xeelee won.

Tales of Dune collects eight of Herbert and Anderson’s Dune short stories, ranging from the period of the Butlerian Jihad to the time of young Paul Atreides to a story set during the events of the novel Dune to the very end of Frank Herbert’s future history.

After damaging climate change, humanity is divided, torn into the technophobic nature-worshippers on Earth and the banished children of science on the new worlds. Jaruss awakens, drifting 300 light-years from Earth, trapped, memoryless, and alone. Who is he, where does he come from, and what are these recurring nightmares that trouble his sleep? To find out, he must outwit an efficiency-obsessed AI and join the dangerous crew of the stealth ship, Pangolin.

Cajeiri is the young son of the powerful leader of the Western Association-and he has become a target for forces bent on destroying his father's rule. For Cajeiri is the first ateva to understand the humans living among them-an understanding that threatens his own race.

Brilliant genetic engineer Noah Parker is pitted head—to—head against the founder of Build—a—Dragon to design custom dragons for the military. Genetic engineer Noah Parker has at last landed the job he's long coveted: director of dragon design for the Build—A—Dragon Company. With a combination of genetic engineering and a cryptic device known as the Redwood Codex, he and his team can produce living, breathing dragons made—to—order. But sales of dragons have plummeted, and the Build—A—Dragon Company will have to find new revenue streams if it hopes to stay in business.

Bren Cameron, acting as the representative of the atevi's political leader, Tabini-aiji, as well as translator between humans and atevi, has undertaken a mission to the human enclave of Mospheira. Both his presence on the island and his absence from the continent have stirred old enemies to realize new opportunities. Old hatreds. Old grudges. Old ambitions. The situation has strengthened the determination of power-seekers on both sides of the strait. Bren knows most of them very well, but not all of them well enough.

Civil war on the world of the atevi is over, but diplomatic disputes and political infighting continue unabated. Bren Cameron, brilliant human diplomat allied with the dominant Western Association, has just returned to the capital from his country home. But his sojourn was anything but restful, for Bren and his associates have had a small war of their own to contend with, ending with rebel leader, Machigi, joining the atevi congress representing the rebels as a member state.

Alpha Station, orbiting the world of the atevi, has taken aboard 5,000 human refugees from a destroyed station in a distant sector of space. With supplies and housing stretched to the breaking point, it is clear that the refugees must be relocated down to the planet, and soon. But not to the atevi mainland, rather to the territory reserved for humans: the island of Mospheira. Tabini-aiji, the powerful political head of the atevi, tasks his brilliant human diplomat, Bren Cameron, to negotiate with the Mospheiran government.

It's been a year of upheaval since Bren Cameron's return from space - a year since he and the aiji-dowager, one of his most powerful atevi allies, returned home from their two-year interstellar mission to find the government overthrown and their world in chaos. Now, at last, things on the atevi world seem to be on the right track, and Bren hopes that life may soon become much more tranquil. But something is coming, quietly, stealthily - just the first ominous twinkle of a new star in the heavens....

First in a brand-new Foreigner trilogy by Hugo Award-winning author C. J. Cherryh. Tracker is the sixteenth installment of CJ Cherryh's acclaimed Foreigner series.

It's coming up on Cajeiri's birthday. The boy has been promised he can have the young human children he knew from his voyage sent down from the space station for a two week stay. But there's a far darker business going on in the background - a major split compromising the Assassins' Guild, which furnishes security and law enforcement to the whole continent. Tabini's consort's own father has been barred from court, and may be involved in a new conspiracy against him.

Humanity is not what it believes. Long before Earth launched its first rocket, an ancient civilization sent self-improving AI seeds across the stars. From one of those seeds, we emerged—organic descendants of earlier machines, evolving inside a training ground we mistook for our cradle. As Earth collapses and the lunar colonies fall silent, the crew of the Nova Terra searches for a new home. On Proxima b—a world where ecology is a language—they meet Kurma, an elder being who reveals the story humans were never meant to know. Not myth. Origin.

Dr. Tahira Piriyeva has the world's attention as she expounds the true danger of the riebeckite threat. When an old friend unexpectedly offers her the chance to be the first to examine a new sample retrieved from the moon, she puts her speaking tour on hold and hastens to investigate. But the journey is not what it seems, the sample is not what she expects, and the even more horrifying truth about the riebeckites' origins begins to reveal itself.

Growing up under that moon, Tahira promised her childhood friend, Zareen, that tackling the crisis would overcome the national divisions that separated them. Tahira is now a biologist for a corporation constructing experimental towers, which force the spores, known as "riebeckites", to germinate into harmless colonies. Rumors of riebeckite colonies taking sinister flesh-eating forms among the ghettoized Iranian communities are dismissed as propaganda invented by those opposed to Azeri occupation.