Showing results for "Sky" in Space Exploration

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.

When a catastrophic disaster cripples the International Space Station, the balance of power shatters overnight. The United States and China race to seize control of orbit—because whoever dominates space controls the future of humanity. But the disaster wasn’t an accident. As governments mobilize and private space companies push dangerous new technology to the brink, a smoldering conspiracy for world domination ignites a war no one can stop.

Caught up in an experiment gone wrong, Joseph Schwartz is transported forward in time from post-war Chicago to the heyday of the first Galactic Empire. Earth, he soon learns, is a backwater, despised by the other two hundred million planets of the Empire because its people dare to claim it as the original home of man. And Earth is poor, with great areas of radioactivity ruining much of its soil – so poor that everyone is sentenced to death at the age of sixty. And Joseph Schwartz is sixty-two.

They left Earth to save humanity. They'll have to save themselves first. 'The Deep Sky is a beautiful tightly-wound mystery. It is both an intimate character portrait and a thriller' Mary Robinette Kowal, winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards 'One of the best debuts of the year' Book Riot...

From the author of The Three-Body Problem, a collection of award-winning short stories - a breathtaking selection of diamond-hard science fiction. Stories included are 'The Village Teacher', 'The Time Migration', '2018-04-01', 'Fire in the Earth', 'Contraction', 'Mirror', 'Ode to Joy', 'Full Spectrum Barrage Jamming', 'Sea of Dreams', 'Cloud of Poems' and 'The Thinker'. 

Copilots Msizi and Tariro are testing a newly constructed wormhole jump that presumably leads to unsettled habitable worlds. Then an explosion sends them off course, far from where they started and with little chance of ever making it back. Now they’re stranded on their new home for the diaspora. It’s called Malcolm X-b. But they’re beginning to wonder how many light-years from civilization they really are.

Mary Robinette Kowal continues the grand sweep of alternate history begun in The Calculating Stars. The Fated Sky looks forward to 1961, when mankind is well established on the moon and looking forward to its next step: journeying to, and eventually colonizing, Mars. Of course the noted Lady Astronaut Elma York would like to go, but there’s a lot riding on whoever the International Aerospace Coalition decides to send on this historic - but potentially very dangerous - mission. Could Elma really leave behind her husband and the chance to start a family to spend several years traveling to Mars?

After thousands of years searching, humans stand on the verge of first contact with an alien race. Two human groups: the Qeng Ho, a culture of free traders, and the Emergents, a ruthless society based on the technological enslavement of minds.The group that opens trade with the aliens will reap...

When a brilliant scientist gets a letter from herself about faster-than-light travel, she doesn't know what to believe. The equations work, but her paper is discredited - and soon the criticism is more than scientific. Exiled by the establishment, she gets an offer to build her starship from an unlikely source. But in the heights of Venus and on a planet of another star, a secret is already being uncovered that will shake humanity to its foundations.

Nearly 100,000 years after first contact with the machines that dominate the universe, only a few hundred humans survive. Trapped on Snowglade, a barren world near the center of the galaxy, Killeen and his child, Toby, of the Bishop Tribe, are primitive scavengers, homeless and hunted by the ruling “mechs”. Then suddenly, a strange cosmic entity – neither organic nor cybernetic or living matter – reaches out from a black hole to speak with Killeen.

Boundless Skies explores classic sci-fi themes through a contemporary lens. Continuing the legacy of decades gone by, these fast-paced standalone stories offer wondrous settings, philosophical sci-fi questions, and twists that pack a punch.

Ten years have passed on Tines World, where Ravna Bergnsdot and a number of human children ended up after a disaster that nearly obliterated humankind throughout the galaxy. Ravna and the pack animals for which the planet is named have survived a war, and Ravna has saved more than one hundred children who were in cold-sleep aboard the vessel that brought them. While there is peace among the Tines, there are those among them - and among the humans - who seek power. And no matter the cost, these malcontents are determined to overturn the fledgling civilization....

Back at the joint Zvezda-US Copernicus Moonbase, the precarious Cold War cease-fire between the NASA and Soviet crews comes under threat from another consolidated assault. Vivian must navigate a treacherous political and military landscape, and travel from the lunar surface to high lunar orbit and back again, to solve the riddle of these strange lunar incursions and move ahead to a future that even she can barely imagine.

The Formless have been thwarted for now, but a message may have escaped a mining scout ship before it was destroyed. With the threat of an incoming Formless fleet, Ryan begs his old boss to act. Instead, he discovers Solus is a prisoner, their only starship seized by the government. Ryan's training taught him to never leave a man behind, and he isn't about to start now. The Formless are coming, and only the Faction can help Earth survive their second attack.

In the uncharted depths of space, aboard the Astral Horizon, a crew bound by fate and fractured pasts navigates a labyrinth of cosmic enigmas. Captain Jade Emerson, a brilliant yet haunted astrophysicist, seeks redemption for a tragedy she cannot outrun. Finn Calder, the ship’s daring pilot, hides secrets as dangerous as the stars themselves. And Theo, a sentient AI with a mind—and heart—of its own, teeters on the edge of humanity and machine.

Fulfilling her mom’s dying wish, Maisy goes to live with her dad on the Citadel, a fancy name for an ore processing plant built into the side of an asteroid. There, she discovers the terrible truth.

It is the eve of Earth’s environmental collapse. A single ship carries humanity’s last hope: eighty elite graduates of a competitive program, who will give birth to a generation of children in deep space. But halfway to a distant but livable planet, a lethal bomb kills three of the crew and knocks The Phoenix off course. Asuka, the only surviving witness, is an immediate suspect.

Through the tumultuous waves and eddies of life, choices come and go. Not everyone makes the right call; not everyone gets a second chance. But when that opportunity arrives, even fewer are bold enough to take it. Enter Staff Sergeant Daniel Cadwell: conflicted, determined, haunted. Can one man find forgiveness in a sea of guilt? Will he take advantage of a renewed prospect? Or will he drown in the coming tide of chaos? When the monsters of his soul conspire with the demons of the living, it's a war on two fronts!

They hit the train for credits. They left with a weapon that could rewrite time. Rix Varn is a battle-scarred pilot with a chip on his shoulder and a bounty on his head. Grix is his half-mechanical partner with feathers, firepower, and a bad habit of stealing from people who take themselves too seriously. Together, they fly the Black Vow—the fastest rustbucket this side of Saturn—and they only take jobs no one else is crazy enough to touch. So when a plasma train loaded with high-grade tech comes screaming across Hyperion’s skies, they do what outlaws do best: board it, rob it, and vanish.

Plagued by cold and life-ending tremors, humanity dwindles out of existence in the last known human outpost in a far-forgotten alien world. Once a tribute to life and perseverance, the mammoth structure they shelter in is failing as its engineers scramble to keep it afloat. Warmth Jegga is one of the few who still dare to dream of a world outside, of one day reaching the stars and going back to those forgotten worlds.