Showing titles in Hard Science Fiction

Jazz Bashara is a criminal. Well, sort of. Life on Artemis, the first and only city on the moon, is tough if you're not a rich tourist or an eccentric billionaire. So smuggling in the occasional harmless bit of contraband barely counts, right? Not when you've got debts to pay and your job as a porter barely covers the rent. Everything changes when Jazz sees the chance to commit the perfect crime, with a reward too lucrative to turn down.

Ryland Grace is the sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission - and if he fails, humanity and the Earth itself will perish. Except that right now, he doesn't know that. He can't even remember his own name, let alone the nature of his assignment or how to complete it. All he knows is that he's been asleep for a very, very long time. And he's just been awakened to find himself millions of miles from home, with nothing but two corpses for company.

Six days ago, astronaut Mark Watney became one of the first people to walk on Mars. Now, he's sure he'll be the first person to die there. After a dust storm nearly kills him and forces his crew to evacuate while thinking him dead, Mark finds himself stranded and completely alone with no way to even signal Earth that he’s alive - and even if he could get word out, his supplies would be gone long before a rescue could arrive. But Mark isn't ready to give up yet.

NOW THE NO.1 DRAMA IN THE HISTORY OF AppleTV+, SILO. In a ruined and hostile landscape, in a future few have been unlucky enough to survive, a community exists in a giant underground silo. Inside, men and women live an enclosed life full of rules and regulations, of secrets and lies. To live...

Darrow would have lived in peace, but his enemies brought him war. The Gold overlords demanded his obedience, hanged his wife, and enslaved his people. But Darrow is determined to fight back. Risking everything to transform himself and breach Gold society, Darrow has battled to survive the cutthroat rivalries that breed Society's mightiest warriors, climbed the ranks, and waited patiently to unleash the revolution that will tear the hierarchy apart from within.

Civil war looms in the Bobiverse in this brand-new, epic-length adventure by Audible number one best seller Dennis E. Taylor. More than a hundred years ago, Bender set out for the stars and was never heard from again. There has been no trace of him despite numerous searches by his clone-mates. Now Bob is determined to organize an expedition to learn Bender’s fate - whatever the cost. But nothing is ever simple in the Bobiverse. Bob’s descendants are out to the 24th generation now, and replicative drift has produced individuals who can barely be considered Bobs anymore.

A thousand worlds have opened, and the greatest land-rush in human history has begun. As wave after wave of colonists leave, the power structures of the old solar system begin to buckle. Ships are disappearing without a trace. Private armies are being secretly formed. The sole remaining...

It has been waiting through the ages. Now it's time . . . A scout ship discovers a human outpost lying derelict in space – and a planet better left unexplored. Thousands of years ago, Earth’s terraforming program took to the stars. On the world they called Nod, scientists discovered alien...

Bob Johansson didn't believe in an afterlife, so waking up after being killed in a car accident was a shock. To add to the surprise, he is now a sentient computer and the controlling intelligence for a Von Neumann probe. Bob and his copies have been spreading out from Earth for 40 years now, looking for habitable planets. But that's the only part of the plan that's still in one piece.

Rebecca and Mark Higgins are doing their best to hold their family together. She’s healing from the pain of a miscarriage, he’s drowning in pressure at work, and their neurodivergent daughter, Maddy, needs all the care she can get. So when a cutting-edge tech company offers the perfect solution, they jump at the chance. And they welcome “Mr. Man”—humanoid AI companion—into their home.

For generations, the solar system - Mars, the Moon, the Asteroid Belt - was humanity's great frontier. Until now. The alien artefact working through its program under the clouds of Venus has emerged to build a massive structure outside the orbit of Uranus: a gate that leads into a starless dark...

There's a reason We Are Legion was named Audible's Best Science Fiction Book of 2016: Its irresistibly irreverent wit! Bob Johansson has just sold his software company for a small fortune and is looking forward to a life of leisure. The first item on his to-do list: Spending his newfound windfall. On an urge to splurge, he signs up to have his head cryogenically preserved in case of death. Then he gets himself killed crossing the street. Waking up 117 years later, Bob discovers his mind has been uploaded into a sentient space probe with the ability to replicate itself.

Breq - the soldier who used to be a spaceship - is serving the emperor she swore to destroy. She's been given her own warship, her own crew, and ordered to the only place in the galaxy she would have agreed to go: to Athoek Station, to protect the family of the lieutenant she murdered in cold blood. Athoek was annexed by the Empire some 600 years ago, and by now everyone is fully 'civilised'. Or should be - but everything is not as tranquil as it appears.

A revolution brewing for generations has begun in fire. It will end in blood. The Free Navy - a violent group of Belters in black-market military ships - has crippled the Earth and begun a campaign of piracy and violence among the outer planets. The colony ships heading for the 1,000 new worlds on the far side of the alien ring gates are easy prey, and no single navy remains strong enough to protect them. James Holden and his crew know the strengths and weaknesses of this new force better than anyone.

A most-anticipated title from USA Today, Goodreads, BookPage, BookRiot, Seattle Times, and The Nerd Daily! Everyone's favorite lethal SecUnit is back in the next installment of Martha Wells' bestselling and award-winning Murderbot Diaries series. Having someone else support your bad decision...

Brought to you by Penguin. An antimeme is an entity with self-censoring properties. Some are benign; but others, less so… These entities can feed on your most cherished memories, the things that make you you – and you’ll never even know anything changed. And they aren’t just feeding on...

For someone who didn't intend to wreck the solar system's fragile balance of power, Jim Holden did a pretty good job of it.While Earth and Mars have stopped shooting each other, the core alliance is shattered. The outer planets and the Belt are uncertain in their new - possibly temporary - autonomy. Then, on one of Jupiter's moons, a single super-soldier attacks, slaughtering soldiers of Earth and Mars indiscriminately and reigniting the war.

The acclaimed voice of the Children of Time Universe, Mel Hudson, returns for this highly-anticipated fourth instalment. They thought they’d found refuge. But this paradise became their prison. Centuries ago, a maverick terraforming team played God with a distant planet. Out of their vanity...

The most original AI audiobook of our time Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Amazon & Audible bestselling author, RR Haywood. One of the most downloaded indie authors in the UK with over four million books sold and more than 35 Kindle bestsellers. For nearly two days, every human on Earth...

When the world ends, it doesn’t do so with one single scream. It fractures. And the dead rise faster than anyone can run. This box set collects the first four novels of Echoes of Decay, a relentless, character-driven zombie apocalypse saga set in a collapsing United Kingdom, where survival is measured not just by bullets and barricades, but by loyalty, sacrifice, and the choices that refuse to stay buried.

Please note: The original recording has now been replaced with a new performance by Jefferson Mays. If you own this audiobook, simply re-download it from your library to access the new recording. The gates have opened the way to a thousand new worlds and the rush to colonise has begun. Settlers...

In the thousand-sun network of humanity's expansion, new colony worlds are struggling to find their way. Every new planet lives on a knife-edge between collapse and wonder, and the crew of the aging gunship Rocinante have their hands more than full keeping the fragile peace. In the vast space...

Bloomsbury presents The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu, read by Daniel York Loh. Read the award-winning, critically acclaimed, multi-million-copy-selling science-fiction phenomenon – soon to be a Netflix Original Series from the creators of Game of Thrones. 1967: Ye Wenjie witnesses Red...

They dreamed of a new home. They woke to a nightmare. A far-reaching space opera spanning generations, species and galaxies by Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning author Adrian Tchaikovsky. On Imir, Captain Holt founded a hopeful new colony on an empty world. But generations later, his descendants...

Bloomsbury presents Lives of Bitter Rain by Adrian Tchaikovsky, read by David Thorpe. SHORTLISTED FOR THE HUGO AWARD FOR BEST SERIES 2025 City-by-city, kingdom-by-kingdom, the Palleseen have sworn to bring ‘Perfection’ and ‘Correctness’ to an imperfect world. But before these ruthless...

When Lenina and Bernard visit a savage reservation, we experience how Utopia can destroy humanity. Cloning, feel-good drugs, anti-aging programs, and total social control through politics, programming, and media: has Aldous Huxley accurately predicted our future? With a storyteller's genius, he weaves these ethical controversies in a compelling narrative that dawns in the year 632 A.F. (After Ford, the deity). When Lenina and Bernard visit a savage reservation, we experience how Utopia can destroy humanity.

Bloomsbury presents Cage of Souls, read by David Thorpe and written and introduced by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Humanity clings to life on a dying Earth in an epic, far-future science fiction novel from an award-winning author. The sun is bloated, diseased, dying perhaps. Beneath its baneful light...

Late in the 26th century, the human race has advanced enough to accidentally trigger the Inhibitors---alien-killing machines designed to detect intelligent life and destroy it. The only hope for humanity lies in the recovery of a secret cache of doomsday weapons---and a renegade named Clavain who is determined to find them. But other factions want the weapons for their own purposes---and the weapons themselves have another agenda altogether.

'ASTONISHING AND THOUGHT-PROVOKING' Adrian Tchaikovsky, author of Children of Time From the million-copy-bestselling Claire North - one of the most original and dazzling voices in speculative fiction - comes an intergalactic tale of conspiracy, war and the fall of empires. ***Shortlisted for the...

A classic thriller from #1 New York Times bestselling author Michael Crichton, Sphere is a bravura demonstration of what he does better than anyone: riveting storytelling that combines frighteningly plausible, cutting-edge science and technology with pulse-pounding action and serious chills.