Books with category Space Adventure
Displaying 10 books

Atmosphere: A Love Story

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.

Shades of Earth

2013

by Beth Revis

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 Quantum Thief

2010

by Hannu Rajaniemi

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.

Gateway

2004

by Frederik Pohl

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!

The Witches of Karres

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.

Diaspora

2000

by Greg Egan

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.

The Season of Passage

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.

Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers

1992

by Grant Naylor

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...

Armor

1984

by John Steakley

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.

The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress

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.

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