Book picks similar to
The Cadwal Chronicles by Jack Vance
science-fiction
sci-fi
ebooks
sf
Splashdown: First Contact?
Dave Cole - 2013
"This is not possible, this isn't supposed to happen," he spoke out loud, well aware that the others couldn't hear him. He and his six passengers were going to die and there was no one in the universe that could save them.Splashdown tells a different story of first contact with extraterrestrials. L'atel is the pilot of an alien cargo ship who is illegally hauling passengers through our solar system when an accident forces them to crash-land on Earth.As L'atel and his passengers know, Earth is a primitive planet that has been placed off limits by the Ebens, the self appointed guardians of the galaxy. No outsider is allowed to land or even approach within one light year of Earth to protect its fragile culture. Or at least that is what the Ebens want the rest of the galaxy to believe.Soon L'atel and his passengers discover that all is not as it appears. The Ebens have secrets, and will go to any length to protect them, even if it means war, with the Earth as the battleground.Splashdown weaves a story to include many of the better known UFO and alien myths, as well as other conspiracy theories that are so popular in today's media. For example, Splashdown includes references to the 1947 Roswell New Mexico crash, the rumored 1954 meeting between aliens and President Eisenhower at Holloman Air Force Base, Project Serpo, the MJ12 documents as well as other lesser known events, such as, the Nuremberg Germany event of 1561. The novel also incorporates several historical events such as, the Kennedy assassination, the Cuban missile crisis, and the Watergate scandal resulting in a new and unique twist on the old aliens on Earth story.
The Survivors (Box Set of Books 7-12) (The Survivors Collection Book 2)
Nathan Hystad - 2020
The Day the Tide Kept Rising
Greg Jefferys - 2015
A thrilling tale filled with action, adventure, intrigue and a pleasant pinch of romance the story is set primarily in Antarctica, Tasmania and on the east coast of Australia. The book follows the lives of four different people in their struggles to survive after a huge tsunami, caused by the massive Ross Shelf icesheet sliding off Antarctica and into the Southern Ocean, sweeps across the Pacific. The tsunami leaves a trail of death and destruction after which the water levels of Earth's oceans begin to rise rapidly causing cataclysmic disaster as well as massive political and social upheaval. As cities and nations are flooded the fabric of civilisation is torn as groups and individuals struggle for survival in a terrifying new world. The three parallel story lines are exciting, predictive and thought provoking. The author has degrees archaeology and history with a particular interest in the effects of the end of the last Ice Age on the humans of 8,000 B.C. He has transposed known archaeological information on rapid sea level rises onto the modern world to create an exciting, informative and relevant novel that attempts to answer the question of what would really happen to you and I if the Earth's sea levels rose more than six meters. The stories. Katherine Brown is a climatologist based on Antarctica, when the Ross Iceshelf shatters and slides into the ocean she and her team must traverse the rapidly changing Antarctic terrain to reach the relative safety of a base camp at Cape Colbeck; only a few will survive the trek through ice and mud and snow. Peter Taylor and his family survived the first wave but not the second. Alone and homeless he is forced to scavenge in flooded supermarkets for food and avoid roving gangs of bandits that quickly establish themselves as social norms disintegrate to be replaced by anarchy. He meets a mysterious and alluring woman, who, like himself, finds herself thriving in the post apocalypse world. Jeremy Jones is an archaeologist with a particular interest in Paleo- climatology. He is fired from his prestigious position at the Queensland University for predicting massive sea level rises even as his predictions, and much worse, come true. Karen Whitaker had been partying with girlfriends when the first tsunami tore through Hobart. Trapped overnight in the remains of a collapsed building, she emerged to discover a ruined city strewn with the bodies of the dead, the dying and the injured. Living in a refugee camp she does what she must to make the best of the new world.
Invincible
David Bruns - 2016
Commander Halsey wants it back. For decades they were among us, silently infiltrating the power structures of society. Now the Swarm stands on Earth’s doorstep. As humanity launches a desperate counter-attack, the alien victory seems inevitable. For Halsey, this is personal. While the Fleet executes their battle plan, she leads a do-or-die suicide strike at the heart of the alien force: her own INVINCIBLE, turned into a weapon against mankind. With a few marines, a pirate ship, and an ex-lover by her side, Halsey fights to take back her command and save the human race--or die trying. She is a proud warrior. She is humanity’s last hope. She is INVINCIBLE.
Solar Kill
Charles Ingrid - 1987
It is the story of his desperate struggle to survive and his determination to claim justice for the lives and worlds wrongfully destroyed.
The Search for Gram
Chris Kennedy - 2015
With the latest war concluded, he turned his attention to deciphering the strange rod an ancient alien civilization gave him as a test. Was a little “down time" to work on the project too much to hope for? Yes. Something or someone is destroying the starships of the alien Aesir race. The elven Aesir are in need of help, and all of the signs point to Calvin as the hero they need. He has already defeated the merciless Drakuls and saved Earth from alien invasion, but is he prepared to face this unknown challenge? As the Theogony trilogy comes to a close, a new chapter for Calvin is set to begin. "The Search for Gram" initiates the "Codex Regius," a trilogy that will once again take Lieutenant Commander Hobbs and his Special Forces platoon to the stars. Not even the universe can hold him this time!
Ecolitan Prime
L.E. Modesitt Jr. - 2003
E. Modesitt, Jr., includes the third and fourth of his four- volume Ecolitan series, The Ecologic Envoy and The Ecolitan Enigma, both starring Nathaniel Whaler. Four hundred years after winning secession from the Terran Empire (as chronicled in the earlier omnibus, Empire & Ecolitan), the star system Accord wants to sign a simple trade treaty with the Empire on microchip export tariffs. But if the agreement is so minor, why is Professor Nathaniel Whaler, chief economist at the Ecolitan Institute and his world's top commando killer, chosen as Accord's Envoy? Because the Imperial capital is a maddening bureaucracy of sniveling diplomats, high-profile figureheads, powers behind the throne, and spies---everywhere, spies. So the Envoy has to face red tape, politics, prejudice, as well as and a gauntlet of kidnappers, assassins, snipers, and bombs. And some ministry---but which?---doesn't want the treaty. In fact, some in the Empire still blame Accord for Earth's poisoning and for the defection of fifty star systems after the war between Imperial nuclear might and Ecolitan bio-ecological weaponry. A hidden cabal wants to fight that war again---even if, this time, the entire galaxy dies. And only Nathaniel Whaler, the Ecologic Envoy, has the power to stop the catastrophe. This omnibus concludes one of L. E. Modesitt's most powerful science fiction series.
Version Control
Dexter Palmer - 2016
She spends her days working in customer support for the internet dating site where she first met her husband. But she has a strange, persistent sense that everything around her is somewhat off-kilter: she constantly feels as if she has walked into a room and forgotten what she intended to do there; on TV, the President seems to be the wrong person in the wrong place; her dreams are full of disquiet. Meanwhile, her husband's decade-long dedication to his invention, the causality violation device (which he would greatly prefer you not call a “time machine”) has effectively stalled his career and made him a laughingstock in the physics community. But he may be closer to success than either of them knows or can possibly imagine.Version Control is about a possible near future, but it’s also about the way we live now. It’s about smart phones and self-driving cars and what we believe about the people we meet on the Internet. It’s about a couple, Rebecca and Philip, who have experienced a tragedy, and about how they help — and fail to help — each other through it.
Void Star
Zachary Mason - 2017
Irina isn’t rich, not quite, but she does have an artificial memory that gives her perfect recall and lets her act as a medium between her various employers and their AIs, which are complex to the point of opacity. It’s a good gig, paying enough for the annual visits to the Mayo Clinic that keep her from aging.Kern has no such access; he’s one of the many refugees in the sprawling drone-built favelas on the city’s periphery, where he lives like a monk, training relentlessly in martial arts, scraping by as a thief and an enforcer. Thales is from a different world entirely—the mathematically inclined scion of a Brazilian political clan, he’s fled to L.A. after the attack that left him crippled and his father dead.A ragged stranger accosts Thales and demands to know how much he can remember. Kern flees for his life after robbing the wrong mark. Irina finds a secret in the reflection of a laptop’s screen in her employer’s eyeglasses. None are safe as they’re pushed together by subtle forces that stay just out of sight.Vivid, tumultuous, and propulsive, Void Star is Zachary Mason’s mind-bending follow-up to his bestselling debut, The Lost Books of the Odyssey.
The Outer Rims
Clint Morey - 2013
But expansion means contact with new worlds and species—and with them, new challenges.As a young boy, Matthew Wallace experienced this as the child of missionaries on the planet Altair, living a rugged existence on the undeveloped world. Undeveloped, but not uninhabited. For Altair was home to a proud race of warriors—the Ananke.The same warriors Matthew watched as they murdered his parents.Now he is the Marshal of the place he swore he’d never return to, his hatred for the Ananke only tempered by his desperation to treat his wife’s terrible illness. For located on Altair is a clinic performing medical miracles, curing men and women of terminal diseases that even the most advanced technologies can’t touch. And yet, nothing is without its price, and as Matthew learns more about the world where he’s now charged with keeping the peace, he slowly realizes he’s going to have to decide what is more important: The life of his wife…or the lives of an entire species.A sci-fi thriller that calls to mind the grand masters of the genre, The Outer Rims explores the morality of doing whatever is necessary and the question of whether humanity and sentience are one in the same.
Oh, to Be A Blobel!
Philip K. Dick - 1964
Arrasmith was his opposite, a Blobel spy on earth who was unwilling to return to Titan due to the shame of being in human form for almost three quarters of each day.The story deals with the ramifications for the agents' personal and social identity from this alteration.Author quote: "Here I nailed down the ultimate meaningless irony of war; the human turns into a Blobel and the Blobel, his enemy, turns into a human, and there it all is, the futility, the black humor, the stupidity. And in the story they all wind up happy."
Wildcatter
Dave Duncan - 2012
“As long as there is money to be made, there will be Wildcatters” — Dave Duncan Throughout human history wildcatters, the first great explorers and prospectors to lay claim to newly discovered lands, have marched to the beat of a different drummer — motivated by a deep yearning to be the first to walk on uncharted land and benefit from treasures yet to be discovered. In the future, wildcatters in space will travel to exoplanets, located in The Big Nothing, to search for new chemicals which, when transformed into pharmaceuticals, might bring untold wealth and fame to the individuals and corporations that stake their claim for exclusive exploitation rights. Such is the quest of the crew of the independent starship Golden Hind, whose mission is to travel a year and a half to “Cacafuego”, beat the larger corporations to the exoplanets’ resources, and strike it rich for themselves. But will a yellow warning flag, already planted above the planet, stop them? Or will the Golden Hind’s prospector foray to the planet’s surface, possibly never to return alive? Wildcatter is a raucous tale of mystery, greed and passion, told by master story teller Dave Duncan, once himself a real wildcatter!
Schrodingers Caterpillar
Zane Stumpo - 2012
One morning he misses his bus when he stops to put a strange caterpillar in a matchbox. As the bus passes he’s shocked to spot himself inside. Like Schrödinger’s Cat in the famous quantum thought experiment, the caterpillar's spawned parallel possibilities. This comic novel explores Graham’s search for a better life among the various overlapping alternatives.Another clone, Grim Dupeint, is a loathsome international arms dealer. Graham infiltrates Grim’s corporation, then embezzles cash for charity. When a furious Grim realises, Graham must act fast. And right now he's acting like fish food.Graham launches upon a new lifestyle (and sex life) as he dons the designer suits of power. But sinister figures soon see through Graham’s clothing. Now Graham’s under attack from the corporation, the police, his ex-wife’s private detective, and an infuriatingly pompous water-colourist who Graham might have been if he’d gone to art college rather than business school. To survive (and steal the artist’s wonderful woman) Graham needs to find hidden resources. By definition Dopplegraham’s equally resourceful. Bugger...Schrödinger's Caterpillar - a stupid book for brainy people!
Ninth City Burning
J. Patrick Black - 2016
When an alien race came to make Earth theirs, they brought with them a weapon we had no way to fight, a universe-altering force known as thelemity. It seemed nothing could stop it—until we discovered we could wield the power too.Five hundred years later, the Earth is locked in a grinding war of attrition. The talented few capable of bending thelemity to their will are trained in elite military academies, destined for the front lines. Those who refused to support the war have been exiled to the wilds of a ruined Earth.But the enemy's tactics are changing, and Earth's defenders are about to discover this centuries-old war has only just begun. As a terrible new onslaught looms, heroes will rise from unlikely quarters, and fight back.
Acadia
James L. Erwin - 2013
She’d loved the thrill of staring off the ship’s stern, watching the Sun slowly shrink, peering as closely at the white-hot thrusters as she could before Virgil shut off her visor. She’d loved looking forward at Acadia’s magnetic scoop, trying to catch some glimpse of the invisible cone that was funneling the vacuum’s stray atoms into its antimatter furnace. In those days, she’d even grinned at the dizzying challenge of spacewalking on a rotating cylinder. But that was five years ago . . .Acadia — the latest work of fiction from critically acclaimed author, James Erwin (Rome, Sweet Rome) takes to the far reaches of space to weave a tale of intrigue and suspense among the stars.