Showing results for "Volume 1" in Hard Science Fiction

Quicker is a near-future SciFi/Thriller whose young heroine, Ell Donsaii, is an intrepid athletic phenom who reminds one of David Weber's Honor Harrington. Like Stieg Larsson's Lisbeth Salander in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo Ell is also a mathematical genius who, instead of counting sheep, works on her own theory of quantum mechanics to help her drift off to sleep. At once shy and concerned about her social skills, yet well loved by those around her, she finds herself at the center of a terrorist plot at the Olympics.

Before science fiction became about empires, wars, and dystopias, it was about wonder. In the tradition of Arthur C. Clarke and early Isaac Asimov, Hayden’s World offers carefully crafted visions of what might await us when we cross the next frontier. From daring voyages across the solar system to aerostat rides in the skies of Uranus, these stories capture the optimism and sense of discovery that once defined the genre.

Adrift in the divide between galaxies and surrounded by the vast emptiness of the intergalactic void, the Tantalus Cluster is the only home humanity has ever known. Desperate and facing starvation, humanity’s only hope is a strange nebula that has suddenly appeared beyond the edge of the cluster. Its shifting clouds may hide a source of salvation for the people of Tantalus, but time is running out.

Ein nuklearer Terroranschlag. Mehrere Städte werden verwüstet. Chaos bricht aus, als der radioaktive Niederschlag auf die Stadt niederregnet ...Dakota Sloane, ein zähes, ehemaliges Pflegekind, hat ihr Leben damit verbracht, vor der Vergangenheit davonzulaufen. Logan Garcia, ein mysteriöser Einzelgänger, der von Geheimnissen heimgesucht wird, hat nur ein Ziel: Sich in die Vergessenheit zu trinken.

Neal Barrett, Jr., answers (sometimes) to a number of names: Odd, Weird, Gonzo, and, as a former collection points out: Slightly Off Center. Barrett is all of the above, and more. From fans who have followed his career come accolades such as brilliant, unique, sheer genius. Other writers respect his status as a master of words, his ability to weave rhythm and poetry into his tales. Neal Barrett, Jr., has made a special effort to give us a number of dark, funny, and hopefully impossible views of the future. 

The Slipspace Chronicles: Volume 1 (Books 13) A disgraced programmer. A crew of rookies. A universe that's starting to push back. Rufus never meant to join the Federated Nations. He just ran out of options. A deadend job, a stupid mistake, and a recruitment poster promising a way out that's all...

Grimm Intentions is the follow-on volumes to the Reaper Series. Jane, narrating in first person who delivers a riveting confessional that bridges fact and fiction in a tale of shadowy conspiracies and unrelenting duty. Chronicling her transformation from a covert operative in the Grimm Reapers-a...

Restricted Fantasies is a Black Mirror-style collection of short stories about lives lived inside and outside of virtual reality. The advent of simulated realities raises questions of philosophy and technology that drive at the core of our nature as humans-and in the tradition of classic sci-fi, the stories in this collection wrestle with these questions and with the shape of things to come. You'll meet a child protective services agent tasked with rescuing children being raised by Neo-Nazis in an illegal simulation of their own darkest fantasies. You'll meet a man who discovers the cheat code to our reality-and watch as it all goes horribly wrong. You'll go on a futuristic Rumspringa with an Amish woman who lives it up in virtual reality for a few years before deciding whether to go home to the last unplugged community on Earth.

Before humanity learned the price of power, it learned how easily it could be taken. Volume I – The Loom & The Knife begins a sweeping science-fiction saga inspired by Greek mythology, where ancient ideas of fate, punishment, and hubris are reborn as machines, networks, and cosmic systems beyond human control. In The Mercy Engine, humanity opens a door it was never meant to unlock, unleashing power without understanding consent.

Abernathy Squire, an agent for the Homeland, is reluctant to come out of retirement. A century has passed since the Spectral Wars. The world has changed. The elite have fled to other planes, and those left in the sprawling megacities are ruled by the five syndicates. No longer hidden, the Spectral races now mingle with the forever-young mortals. But a friend and an artifact have gone missing, and this is his chance to settle an old score. 

Following the global wave of innovation on artificial intelligence, machine learning tools, and every possible variation of GPT driven chatbots, Ishmael has been propelled to Chief Technical Officer of Paragon Logic, the most ambitious technical organization of the 21st century.

Jeremiah Ward was just another convict, a disgraced investigator who once worked the Martian beat, now serving his sentence in a mining colony on Mercury. When a member of a powerful faction goes missing on Titan, Ward is given an opportunity he cannot pass up. In exchange for investigating the disappearance of this figure, he gets a clean slate and a second chance...Instead of investigating a missing person’s case he becomes embroiled in a centuries-old conspiracy and Ward comes to realize his one shot at redemption may cost him his life.

After his troubled past, Lawrence hoped for a fresh start at MIT when he met Emma. But before they could begin, their world turned into a lie. Everything was torn away from them and they were embroiled in computer hacking and murder. Dodging the FBI while hiding from cyber-terrorists, they were forced into the underworld of the dark web, anonymous encryption, and AI finance. While trying to throw off the ghosts of his haunted past, Lawrence had to run faster and faster to evade the shadowy forces that were after him and Emma.

When encrypted signals from the outer system breach Earth’s defenses, Commander Selene Tyros is dispatched to Europa to confront Talos, the final sentinel of a forgotten security network. For seven centuries it listened. Now it speaks, invoking trials, braided probabilities, and remnants of the Moirai once severed from humanity’s fate.

Harry can build a perfect android, but no one likes them unless he can make them more human. Harry's dead wife lends a hand, but Eva, the android, hates him. A first contact goes so smoothly that Ethan falls in love with a blue alien, but soon realizes that some erroneous assumptions have been made... An explorer becomes best friends with an artificial person that he found in his salvaged ship, and the mystery of why such a valuable machine was wiped and left for junk haunts them both. Cobb had an interest in both the vast AI systems that ran everything and how they came to be.

When he accepted the job on a backwater planet, Hunter thought it would be easy. He and his partner just had to track down a missing researcher. But when they find her, she’s fled a quarter of the way around the massive ring of 27 gates and Hunter realizes all is not as he was told. That simple realization, and Hunter’s drive for retribution, kick off a series of adventures leading to the most important discovery since the fall of the Gate Age - and put him in direct confrontation with the corp he’s been running from for the past 10 revolutions.

260 million years in the future, searching for his ex-wife, who had murdered the woman he loved, Danso, a former nano-tech master is appointed by a powerful religious organization to investigate the cause of a killer epidemic, but an attempt on his life by the organization and his ex-wife resurfacing as its most valued acolyte forces him to regain mastery over his nano-tech to get justice. Or vengeance!

Is there life on Europa? You are invited to accompany a crew of eight astronauts on their mission to the Jupiter ice-moon named Europa. Their mission is relatively straightforward, look for evidence of life in a vast ocean, which is trapped beneath a thick blanket of ice. There is one problem though..."The Curse!" Over the past 36 years, man has been trying to explore Europa. Every mission to date has ended in failure.

The way we feel about another person or about objects is often bound up in associations that have no direct connection with the person or object, at all. Often, what we call a "change of heart" comes about sheerly from a change in the many associations which make up our present viewpoint. Now, suppose that these associations could be altered artificially, at the option of the person who was in charge of the process.

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.