Showing results for "at" in Hard Science Fiction

Once, a girl called Ace travelled the universe with the Doctor - until, in the wake of a terrible tragedy they parted company. Now, decades on, she is known as Dorothy McShane, the reclusive millionaire philanthropist who heads the global organisation A Charitable Earth. But Dorothy is being haunted by terrible nightmares in which she’s abducted to an alien world. Nightmares that begin just as scores of young runaways are vanishing from the dark alleyways of London.

Alice works at the Scottish embassy in Tallinn in Estonia as a member of the Cultural Section. When two men bring her the jeweled skull of a Scottish saint, her world gets turned on its head, and she becomes the latest recruit to Les Coureurs des Bois. On a Greek island, Benno is just one of hundreds of refuges dreaming of a new life in continental Europe. After hatching an audacious escape plan, he may just get his dream, but at the price of serving some powerful mysterious new masters.

Passage at Arms tells the intimate, detailed and harrowing story of a climber crew and its captain during a critical juncture of the war. Cook combines speculative technology with a canny and realistic portrait of men at war and the stresses they face in combat. Passage at Arms is one of the classic novels of military science fiction.

The circus comes to town . . . and a man gets to go to the stars. A young girl on a vacation at the sea meets the man of her dreams. Who just happens to be dead. And an immortal pirate. A swordfighter pens his memoirs . . . and finds his pen is in fact mightier than the sword. Welcome to Gene Wolfe's playground, a place where genres blend, and a genius's imagination straps you in for the ride of your life. The Wolfe at the Door is a brand-new collection from one of America's premiere literary giants, showcasing some material been seen before

A CDC, Center for Disease Control, task force commander leads his unit into a small town where all the residents have died of a pathogen that left no trace. Soon he and his unit find themselves at odds. He knows that these are test sites for some unknown, undetectable weapon and a finale is coming.

This hard sci-fi novel is the first book of the Time-Flow Stories, a series of tales about Witt Ryllin, a young man who abruptly gains the ability to psychically control the flow of time. He sets to work, figuring out how to use his new gift to help his family and perhaps even improve his college prospects. This is far from as easy as he’d first hoped. Through all this he must deal with his sarcastic friend Jesse. A friend who’s sometimes helpful, but at least as often a big part of the problem. Oh, and Witt’s got girl trouble!

The final novel in the Orion War series, Return to Sol sees the I2 and her crew return to where it all began....

Dib is an Earthlike planet, only slightly smaller, with shorter days and longer years, in orbit around twin suns. On the continent of Geo, in the city of Velon in the nation of Inimata, a man lies dead in his study. In life, Professor Orno Linus was a world-class scholar: an astrophysicist, a dead-language linguist, and an expert in (and apparent true believer of) the religious concept of the Cull, i.e., the end of the world. Widely respected, nothing about Linus’s expertise suggests somebody might want him dead.

First contact with the seemingly impossible human civilization at Proxima Centauri is not going well. The Earth ships sent to render aid have not been able to reverse the contagion ravaging their population and, worse, many Proximans are now wondering if the humans from Earth are there for other, not so charitable, reasons. Can the extinction-level disaster faced at Proxima be reversed by the combined ingenuity of scientists from both worlds working together?

Myan - a technological and scientific marvel, a planet without a sun, rotating through the power of gigantic micro-neutron stars and moving through the universe. Once plagued by cosmic catastrophes, the Myans have transformed their home planet into a bright oasis in space through unimaginable ingenuity. Their cities shine with technological perfection, their civilization stands for progress and peace, and their ships patrol the universe as guardians of the galaxy.

As I retire as Fleet Admiral of the United Planets, I consider it my duty to reveal the internal struggles that helped shape my character while I was developing into a naval officer. From my arrival at the Mars Space Academy as a naïve lad of 15, I persevered through two grueling training years until my deployment to active duty aboard the battlecruiser, Repulse.

Lynn Venable’s Time Enough at Last is a chilling and ironic tale about the fragility of dreams and the unpredictable nature of fate. The story follows Henry Bemis, a man who loves books but is constantly denied the time to read. When a catastrophic event leaves him as the sole survivor in a desolate, post-apocalyptic world, he finds solace in the realization that he now has all the time he ever wanted—to read without interruption. However, fate has one final, cruel twist in store.

Adda Karpe and Iridian Nassir have escaped the murderous AI that was trapping them on Barbary Station and earned themselves a place on Captain Sloane's fabled pirate crew. And now that they've arrived at Vesta, Sloane's home base, they can finally start making a living stealing from well-off megacorporations. Unfortunately, the political situation has deteriorated in Captain Sloane's absence. Adda and Iridian find themselves trapped in a contract with Oxia Corp., one of the very megacorporations they'd hoped to prey on, forced to rob and intimidate targets.

The ITS Santa Maria is a generation ship in the truest sense—her colonial mission to the alluringly habitable TRAPPIST-1 system will span several. Her crew, though, original and descendent both, need not necessarily accept their lot to live and die between the stars. Greased elbows and palms tend to lubricate a path toward longevity. Wealth aboard Santa Maria is measured not in dollars and cents, but in Minutes and Seconds. Work, favors, and shrewdness are paid in Minutesand Minutes are spent in Suspension.

The Last Game at the Sanitorium follows five friends—Eric, Ethan, Chris, Patrick, and Bobby—who embark on an adventurous paintball game inside the abandoned Sanitorium in the 1990s. Once a tuberculosis hospital, the sanitorium was abandoned after a series of mysterious deaths, and rumors of a haunting caretaker spirit linger. The group, intrigued by the legends, enters the decaying building unaware that their lives are about to spiral into a terrifying nightmare.

They were banishing him from the austere world that was his home; from the people he loved, the place he had lived, and the things he loved to do. He would never see their new city Rubin built.

Once known as the great project, a united Earth began colonizing the red planet in international unity. Any country that could afford to settle on Mars did so. It became the largest melting pot of the solar system since the formation of the United States. Of course, it was not to last. When the Great War between the Pacific Alliance and the European Union began twenty years ago, the United Martian settlements had a dilemma as they made up nations from both sides. Cries for independence went unheeded, and slowly but surely, the peaceful world was dragged into the conflict.

Having lived for six billion years in a world of infinite potential, a world where technology has made it possible to practically live forever, An, one of the Ancients, has grown utterly weary of his existence. With a heavy heart, he leaves Ki, his beloved, and embarks on one final journey to Earth, the cradle of civilization and the planet where he was once born. There, he intends to conclude his life, as Earth now only has days before it will be engulfed by the dying sun....

It's May, 1978, and a UFO requests permission to land. A human girl in her early teens and a robot exit the craft, and a strange botanical lifeform is found onboard later that night by a USAF landing party. The vehicle, robot, and the strange plant are impounded and subsequently sent to Area 51. NASA astrobiologist Gabriel Greenley is called in to study this new lifeform that at first appears similar to a botanical species known as oxalis. As a psi-sensitive, Greenley quickly learns the specimen is highly intelligent and potentially dangerous when he attempts to take a leaf sample.

The Meteor Shooters Association has protected deep space colonies from the destruction of meteor showers for over 80 years. For the members, it’s a competition to see who the best shooter is. Van Wilcox was behind schedule and struggled to charter a private spacecraft to take him on the final stretch. Thankfully, he found an unorthodox pilot willing to go against protocol, because they needed all shooters armed and on the firing line for this storm.