From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo and Daisy Jones & The Six comes an epic new novel set against the backdrop of the 1980s Space Shuttle program about the extraordinary lengths we go to live and love beyond our limits.
Joan Goodwin has been obsessed with the stars for as long as she can remember. Thoughtful and reserved, Joan is content with her life as a professor of physics and astronomy at Rice University and as aunt to her precocious niece, Frances. That is, until she comes across an advertisement seeking the first women scientists to join NASA’s Space Shuttle program. Suddenly, Joan burns to be one of the few people to go to space.
Selected from a pool of thousands of applicants in the summer of 1980, Joan begins training at Houston’s Johnson Space Center, alongside an exceptional group of fellow candidates: Top Gun pilot Hank Redmond and scientist John Griffin, who are kind and easy-going even when the stakes are highest; mission specialist Lydia Danes, who has worked too hard to play nice; warm-hearted Donna Fitzgerald, who is navigating her own secrets; and Vanessa Ford, the magnetic and mysterious aeronautical engineer, who can fix any engine and fly any plane.
As the new astronauts become unlikely friends and prepare for their first flights, Joan finds a passion and a love she never imagined. In this new light, Joan begins to question everything she thinks she knows about her place in the observable universe.
Then, in December of 1984, on mission STS-LR9, everything changes in an instant.
Fast-paced, thrilling, and emotional, Atmosphere is Taylor Jenkins Reid at her best: transporting readers to iconic times and places, with complex protagonists, telling a passionate and soaring story about the transformative power of love, this time among the stars.
In a distant future, mankind discovers they're not alone in this universe.
Aliens arrive, and the Earth gets engulfed in space wars, where humans turn out helpless and defenseless, regardless of their nuclear and biological weapons. One of the strongest and most aggressive species of aliens - Reptiloids - turn Planet Earth into their slave-trading colony. Soon, the population of humans drastically decreases, bringing them to the verge of extinction.
Gods, deities, fate, light - everything seems to have forsaken them.
Violet Hawthorne is one of the few surviving humans, sold as a slave. The nineteen-year-old girl works in a pub on Planet Irahor of the Radenoids (the species that created humans millennia ago). She is treated worse than an animal and laments about her cruel fate. Yet, unlike other humans, Violet has not given up on hope - she knows that somewhere across the stars roams a man who can reverse the course of fate - the Young Captain of the Galaxy Pirates.
Violet dreams to find this legendary man and enter his crew of audacious pirates fighting against the cruel world, in the hope of getting their help to save her planet and people.
Throughout the deepest reaches of space, a crew rebuilds beautiful and broken-down structures, painstakingly putting the past together. As the newest member, Mia, gets to know her team, the story flashes back to her pivotal year in boarding school, where she fell in love with a mysterious new student.
Soon, Mia reveals her true purpose for joining their ship—to track down her long-lost love. An inventive world, a breathtaking love story, and stunning art come together in this work by acclaimed artist Tillie Walden.
Can you fall in love with someone you’ve never met, never even spoken to – someone who is light years away?
Romy Silvers is the only surviving crew-member of a spaceship traveling to a new planet, on a mission to establish a second home for humanity among the stars. Alone in space, she is the loneliest girl in the universe until she hears about a new ship which has launched from Earth – with a single passenger on board. A boy called J.
Their only communication with each other is via email – and due to the distance between them, their messages take months to transmit across space. And yet Romy finds herself falling in love.
But what does Romy really know about J? And what do the mysterious messages which have started arriving from Earth really mean?
Sometimes, there’s something worse than being alone . . .
Galactic Energies takes you on a thrilling journey through a universe where technology and fantasy collide.
The artificial intelligences of DataCom are trying to save the planet by exterminating the human race. Aurelia finds her perfect man: a robot.
The space explorer Captain Arcot sacrifices his life for an impossible conquest, the heart of Vril the vampire queen.
A shape-shifting mutant ignites the erotic desires of the galactic police officer who's been tracking her down.
Alessio fights against corruption in a universe of his own creation.
An innocent man is forced to submit to the domination of a ruthless prison director.
A king who's forgotten his own past wanders through a magical dimension where he discovers his own history.
Two souls separated after one abandons the other meet again in another life.
In an exciting virtual reality game, the hunter of the fearsome black widow becomes her prey.
Devi Morris isn't your average mercenary. She has plans. Big ones. And a ton of ambition. It's a combination that's going to get her killed one day - but not just yet.
That is, until she just gets a job on a tiny trade ship with a nasty reputation for surprises. The Glorious Fool isn't misnamed: it likes to get into trouble, so much so that one year of security work under its captain is equal to five years everywhere else. With odds like that, Devi knows she's found the perfect way to get the jump on the next part of her Plan.
But the Fool doesn't give up its secrets without a fight, and one year on this ship might be more than even Devi can handle.
If you enjoy Firefly or the space marines of the Alien franchise, you'll find yourself captivated by this rollicking space opera starring a tough, sexy, armor-clad space chick.
Amy and Elder have finally left the oppressive walls of the spaceship Godspeed behind. They're ready to start life afresh—to build a home—on Centauri-Earth, the planet that Amy has traveled 25 trillion miles across the universe to experience. But this new Earth isn't the paradise Amy had been hoping for. There are giant pterodactyl-like birds, purple flowers with mind-numbing toxins, and mysterious, unexplained ruins that hold more secrets than their stone walls first let on.
The biggest secret of all? Godspeed's former passengers aren't alone on this planet. And if they're going to stay, they'll have to fight. Amy and Elder must race to discover who—or what—else is out there if they are to have any hope of saving their struggling colony and building a future together. They will have to look inward to the very core of what makes them human on this, their most harrowing journey yet. Because if the colony collapses? Then everything they have sacrificed—friends, family, life on Earth—will have been for nothing.
The stars were closed to Max Jones. To get into space you either needed connections, a membership in the Guild, or a whole lot more money than Max, the son of a widowed, poor mother, was ever going to have. What Max does have going for him are his uncle’s prized astrogation manuals—books on star navigation that Max literally commits to memory word for word, equation for equation.
When Max’s mother decides to remarry a bullying oaf, Max takes to the road, only to discover that his uncle Chet’s manuals, and Max’s near complete memorization of them, is a ticket to the stars. But serving on a spaceship is no easy task. Duty is everything, and a mistake can mean you and all aboard are lost forever.
Max loves every minute of his new life, and he steadily grows in the trust of his superior officers, and seems to be on course for a command track position. But then disaster strikes, and it’s going to take every trick Max ever learned from his tough life and his uncle’s manuals to save himself and the ship from a doom beyond extinction itself.
From the First Golden Age of Heinlein, this is the so-called juvenile (written, Heinlein always claims, just as much for adults) that started them all and made Heinlein a legend for multiple generations of readers.
The mining ship El Cavador is far out from Earth, in the deeps of the Kuiper Belt, beyond Pluto. Other mining ships, and the families that live on them, are few and far between this far out. So when El Cavador's telescopes pick up a fast-moving object coming in-system, it's hard to know what to make of it. It's massive and moving at a significant fraction of the speed of light.
El Cavador has other problems. Their systems are old and failing. The family is getting too big for the ship. There are claim-jumping corporate ships bringing Asteroid Belt tactics to the Kuiper Belt. Worrying about a distant object that might or might not be an alien ship seems not important.
They're wrong. It's the most important thing that has happened to the human race in a million years. The first Formic War is about to begin.
Ensign Andrew Dahl has just been assigned to the Universal Union Capital Ship Intrepid, flagship of the Universal Union since the year 2456. It’s a prestige posting, with the chance to serve on "Away Missions" alongside the starship’s famous senior officers.
Life couldn’t be better...until Andrew begins to realize that:
Unsurprisingly, the savvier crew members below decks avoid Away Missions at all costs.
Then Andrew stumbles on information that transforms his and his colleagues’ understanding of what the starship Intrepid really is...and offers them a crazy, high-risk chance to save their own lives.
Jean le Flambeur gets up in the morning and has to kill himself before his other self can kill him first. Just another day in the Dilemma Prison. Rescued by the mysterious Mieli and her flirtatious spacecraft, Jean is taken to the Oubliette, the Moving City of Mars, where time is a currency, memories are treasures, and a moon-turned-singularity lights the night.
Meanwhile, investigator Isidore Beautrelet, called in to investigate the murder of a chocolatier, finds himself on the trail of an arch-criminal, a man named le Flambeur...
Indeed, in his many lives, the entity called Jean le Flambeur has been a thief, a confidence artist, a posthuman mind-burglar, and more. His origins are shrouded in mystery, but his deeds are known throughout the Heterarchy, from breaking into the vast Zeusbrains of the Inner System to stealing rare Earth antiques from the aristocrats of Mars. In his last exploit, he managed the supreme feat of hiding the truth about himself from the one person in the solar system hardest to hide from: himself. Now he has the chance to regain himself in all his power—in exchange for finishing the one heist he never quite managed.
The Quantum Thief is a breathtaking joyride through the solar system several centuries hence, a world of marching cities, ubiquitous public-key encryption, people who communicate via shared memory, and a race of hyper-advanced humans who originated as an MMORPG guild. But for all its wonders, The Quantum Thief is also a story powered by very human motives of betrayal, jealousy, and revenge.
In a universe where assassins make the law, everyone lives in fear—except for Syn. Born of an illicit scandal that once rocked a dynasty, he always knew how to survive on the bloodthirsty streets. But that was then, and the future is now...
Syn was raised as a tech-thief until his livelihood uncovered a truth that could end his life. He tried to destroy the evidence, and has been on the run ever since. Now trained as an assassin, he allows no one to threaten him. Ever. He is the darkness that swallows his enemies whole.
Shahara Dagan is the best bounty hunter in the universe. When Syn comes back on the radar, she's the only one who can bring him to justice. There's only one problem: Syn is a close family friend who's helped out the Dagans countless times. But if she saves him, both of their lives will be on the line. Is Syn's protection worth the risk?
The only hope Shahara has is to find the evidence he buried long ago. Now it's kill or be killed—and they, the predators, have just become the hunted...
Retired from his fighting days, John Perry is now village ombudsman for a human colony on distant Huckleberry. With his wife, the former Special Forces warrior Jane Sagan, he farms several acres, adjudicates local disputes, and enjoys watching his adopted daughter grow up.
That is, until his and Jane's past reaches out to bring them back into the game—as leaders of a new human colony, to be peopled by settlers from all the major human worlds, for a deep political purpose that will put Perry and Sagan back in the thick of interstellar politics, betrayal, and war.
Gateway opened on all the wealth of the Universe... and on reaches of unimaginable horror.
When prospector Robinette Broadhead ventured out to Gateway on the Heechee spacecraft, he was determined to find the right mission that would make him his fortune.
Three missions later, now famous and permanently rich, Rob Broadhead faces the haunting memories of what happened to him and what he has become.
Join him on a perilous journey into his own psyche, which proves to be even more horrifying than the nightmare trip through the interstellar void that he pushed himself to undertake!
No good deed goes unpunished... Captain Pausert thought his luck had finally turned — but he did not yet realize it was a turn for the worse. On second thought, make that a turn for the disastrous.
Unlucky in love, unsuccessful in business, he thought he had finally made good with his battered starship Venture, cruising around the fringes of the Empire and successfully selling off odd-ball cargoes which no one else had been able to sell. He was all set to return home, where his true love was faithfully waiting for him ... he hoped.
But then he made the fatal mistake of freeing three slave children from their masters (who were suspiciously eager to part with them). They were just trying to be helpful, but those three adorable little girls quickly made Pausert the mortal enemy of his fiancée, his home planet, the Empire, warlike Sirians, psychopathic Uldanians, the dread pirate chieftain Laes Yango — and even the Worm World, the darkest threat to mankind in all of space.
And all because those harmless-looking little girls were in fact three of the notorious and universally feared Witches of Karres.
Deploying invulnerable twenty-fifth-century soldiers called Skins, Zantiu-Braun's corporate starships loot entire planets. But as the Skins invade bucolic Thallspring, Z-B's strategy is about to go awry, all because of:
Sgt. Lawrence Newton, a dreamer whose twenty years as a Skin have destroyed his hopes and desires; Denise Ebourn, a school teacher and resistance leader whose guerrilla tactics rival those of Che Guevara and George Washington; and Simon Roderick, the director who serves Z-B with a dedication that not even he himself can understand.
Grimly determined to steal, or protect, a mysterious treasure, the three players engage in a private war that will explode into unimaginable quests for personal grace...or galactic domination.
By the end of the 30th century, humanity has the capability to travel the universe, to journey beyond Earth and beyond the confines of the vulnerable human frame.
The descendants of centuries of scientific, cultural, and physical development divide into three groups: fleshers — true Homo sapiens; Gleisner robots — embodying human minds within machines that interact with the physical world; and polises — supercomputers teeming with intelligent software, containing the direct copies of billions of human personalities now existing only in the virtual reality of the polis.
Diaspora is the story of Yatima — a polis being created from random mutations of the Konishi polis base mind seed — and of humankind. An astrophysical accident spurs the thousandfold cloning of the polises, leading to the discovery of an alien race and a kink in time that ensures humanity — in whatever form it takes — will never again be threatened by acts of God.
Dr. Lauren Wagner was a celebrity. She was involved with the most exciting adventure mankind had ever undertaken. The whole world admired and respected her. But Lauren knew fear.
Inside--voices entreating her to love them.
Outside--the mystery of the missing group that had gone before her. The dead group. But were they simply dead? Or something else?
A terrifying novel of horror--and, surprisingly, of salvation--from one of America's bestselling writers. A novel you won't forget.
The first lesson Lister learned about space travel was you should never try it. But Lister didn't have a choice. All he remembered was going on a birthday celebration pub crawl through London. When he came to his senses again, with nothing in his pockets but a passport in the name of Emily Berkenstein.
So he did the only thing he could. Amazed to discover they would actually hire him, he joined the space corps—and found himself aboard Red Dwarf, a spaceship as big as a small city that, six or seven years from now, would get him back to Earth.
What Lister couldn't foresee was that he'd inadvertently signed up for a one-way jaunt three million years into the future—a future which would see him the last living member of the human race, with only a hologram crew mate and a highly evolved cat for company. Of course, that was before the ship broke the light barrier and things began to get really weird...
Rama II takes you on an exhilarating space journey, a trip no reader will want to miss. Years ago, the enormous and enigmatic alien spacecraft called Rama sailed through our solar system, offering mind-boggling proof that life existed—or had existed—elsewhere in the universe.
Now, at the dawn of the twenty-third century, another ship is discovered hurtling towards us. A crew of Earth's best and brightest minds is assembled to rendezvous with the massive vessel. Armed with everything we know about Raman technology and culture, they embark on their mission.
But nothing can prepare them for what they are about to encounter on board Rama II: cosmic secrets that are startling, sensational—and perhaps even deadly.
Felix is an Earth soldier, encased in special body armor designed to withstand Earth's most implacable enemy—a bioengineered, insectoid alien horde. But Felix is also equipped with internal mechanisms that enable him, and his fellow soldiers, to survive battle situations that would destroy a man's mind.
This is a remarkable novel of the horror, the courage, and the aftermath of combat—and how the strength of the human spirit can be the greatest armor of all.
Phssthpok the Pak had been traveling for most of his thirty-two thousand years. His mission: save, develop, and protect the group of Pak breeders sent out into space some two and a half million years before.
Brennan was a Belter, the product of a fiercely independent, somewhat anarchic society living in, on, and around an outer asteroid belt. The Belters were rebels, one and all, and Brennan was a smuggler. The Belt worlds had been tracking the Pak ship for days—Brennan figured to meet that ship first.
He was never seen again—at least not by those alive at the time.
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress is a tale of revolution, of the rebellion of a former penal colony on the Moon against its masters on the Earth. It is a tale of a culture whose family structures are based on the presence of two men for every woman, leading to novel forms of marriage and family. It is the story of the disparate people, a computer technician, a vigorous young female agitator, and an elderly academic who become the movement's leaders, and of Mike, the supercomputer whose sentience is known only to the revolt's inner circle, who for reasons of his own is committed to the revolution's ultimate success.
After the fall of the American Ayatollahs as foretold in Stranger in a Strange Land and chronicled in Revolt in 2100, the United States of America at last fulfills the promise inherent in its first Revolution: for the first time in human history, there is a nation with Liberty and Justice for All.
No one may seize or harm the person or property of another, invade his privacy, or force him to do his bidding. Americans are fiercely proud of their re-won liberties and the blood it cost them. Nothing could make them forswear those truths they hold self-evident.
Nothing except the promise of immortality...
In the far future, travel is made possible by controlled wormholes made in the fabric of space-time. Crystal, a young woman freshly graduated from university, finds herself on her first job aboard the base-ship 'Crossing Paths'. Workplace politics and a romance make it complicated. The last thing she needs are the frightening errors beginning to crop up on her maps...
War and Mystery Beyond the Stars
Sgt. “Det” Cox has just spent three years under psych observation on Earth; now that he’s out-system, he isn’t about to tell anyone he’s seeing aliens again. Paige Barnett has lost everything, even her name, because she knows too much about the rebellion spreading through the Earth-Space mining colonies.
Together, Cox and Barnett stumble upon the mystery at the revolution’s heart and learn why the rebels are willing to die for it. Is their discovery humanity’s worst threat or greatest gift? The authorities are willing to destroy whole planets to keep the revolution’s secret from reaching Earth… What’s to stop them from destroying two people?
Join the thrilling adventure as the duo uncovers cosmic secrets that could change the fate of humanity.