Book picks similar to
Harmony by C.F. Bentley
sci-fi
science-fiction
fantasy
fiction
The X-Files: Goblins
Charles L. Grant - 1994
The agency maverick and the female agent assigned to keep him in line.Their job: investigate the eeriest unsolved mysteries in modern America, from pyro-psychics to death row demonics, from rampaging Sasquatches to alien invasions. The cases the Bureau wants handled quietly, but quickly, before the public finds out what's really out there. And panics. The cases filed under "X."Something out there is killing people, remaining invisible and unseen by human eyes until it strikes with deadly force...
The Courtship of Princess Leia
Dave Wolverton - 1994
The Hapes Consortium of 63 worlds is ruled by the Queen Mother, who wants Leia to marry her son, the dashing and wealthy Prince Isolder. Han Solo has always dreamed of marrying Leia himself, and now he makes a desperate last gamble to win her back. Soon he, Isolder, Luke Skywalker and Artoo will be at the center of an adventure leading to an awesome treasure, a group of Force-trained "witches," and a showdown with an invincible foe.Features a bonus section following the novel that includes a primer on the Star Wars expanded universe, and over half a dozen excerpts from some of the most popular Star Wars books of the last thirty years!
Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000
L. Ron Hubbard - 1982
Earth has been dominated for 1,000 years by an alien invader—and man is an endangered species. From the handful of surviving humans a courageous leader emerges—Jonnie Goodboy Tyler, who challenges the invincible might of the alien Psychlo empire in a battle of epic scale, danger and intrigue with the fate of the Earth and of the universe in the tenuous balance.
Alphabet Squadron
Alexander Freed - 2019
Set after Return of the Jedi, Alphabet Squadron follows a unique team, each flying a different class of starfighter as they struggle to end their war once and for all. The Emperor is dead. His final weapon has been destroyed. The Imperial Army is in disarray. In the aftermath, Yrica Quell is just one of thousands of defectors from her former cause living in a deserters’ shantytown—until she is selected to join Alphabet Squadron. Cobbled together from an eclectic assortment of pilots and starfighters, the five members of Alphabet are tasked by New Republic general Hera Syndulla herself. Like Yrica, each is a talented pilot struggling to find their place in a changing galaxy. Their mission: to track down and destroy the mysterious Shadow Wing, a lethal force of TIE fighters exacting bloody, reckless vengeance in the twilight of their reign. The newly formed unit embodies the heart and soul of the Rebellion: ragtag, resourceful, scrappy, and emboldened by their most audacious victory in decades. But going from underdog rebels to celebrated heroes isn’t as easy as it seems, and their inner demons threaten them as much as their enemies among the stars. The wayward warriors of Alphabet Squadron will have to learn to fly together if they want to protect the new era of peace they’ve fought so hard to achieve.Part of a Marvel and Del Rey crossover event, Alphabet Squadron is the counterpart to Marvel’s TIE Fighter miniseries, which follows the exploits of Shadow Wing as they scheme to thwart the New Republic.
The City and the Stars
Arthur C. Clarke - 1956
For millennia its protective dome shut out the creeping decay and danger of the world outside. Once, it held powers that rule the stars.But then, as legend has it, the invaders came, driving humanity into this last refuge. It takes one man, a Unique, to break through Diaspar's stifling inertia, to smash the legend and discover the true nature of the Invaders.
The Tommyknockers
Stephen King - 1987
Tommyknockers, tommyknockers, knocking at the door.Something was happening in Bobbi Anderson's idyllic small town of Haven, Maine. Something that gave every man, woman, and child in town powers far beyond ordinary mortals. Something that turned the town into a death trap for all outsiders. Something that came from a metal object, buried for millennia, that Bobbi accidentally stumbled across. It wasn't that Bobbi and the other good folks of Haven had sold their souls to reap the rewards of the most deadly evil this side of hell. It was more like a diabolical takeover...an invasion of body and soul--and mind....Note: All information herein, such as number of pages, publisher, etc., refer to this alternate cover edition and may or may not coincide with the main entry for this ISBN or any other alternate covers.~
Infected
Scott Sigler - 2008
Working under the government’s shroud of secrecy, CIA operative Dew Phillips crisscrosses the country trying in vain to capture a live victim. With only decomposing corpses for clues, CDC epidemiologist Margaret Montoya races to analyze the science behind this deadly contagion. She discovers that these killers all have one thing in common – they’ve been contaminated by a bioengineered parasite, shaped by a complexity far beyond the limits of known science.Meanwhile Perry Dawsey – a hulking former football star now resigned to life as a cubicle-bound desk jockey – awakens one morning to find several mysterious welts growing on his body. Soon Perry finds himself acting and thinking strangely, hearing voices . . . he is infected. The fate of the human race may well depend on the bloody war Perry must wage with his own body, because the parasites want something from him, something that goes beyond mere murder.
The Sheep Look Up
John Brunner - 1972
In this nightmare society, air pollution is so bad that gas masks are commonplace. Infant mortality is up, and everyone seems to suffer from some form of ailment.
Axiom's End
Lindsay Ellis - 2020
A well-timed leak has revealed that the US government might have engaged in first contact. Cora Sabino is doing everything she can to avoid the whole mess, since the force driving the controversy is her whistleblower father. Even though Cora hasn’t spoken to him in years, his celebrity has caught the attention of the press, the Internet, the paparazzi, and the government—and with him in hiding, that attention is on her. She neither knows nor cares whether her father’s leaks are a hoax, and wants nothing to do with him—until she learns just how deeply entrenched her family is in the cover-up, and that an extraterrestrial presence has been on Earth for decades.Realizing the extent to which both she and the public have been lied to, she sets out to gather as much information as she can, and finds that the best way for her to uncover the truth is not as a whistleblower, but as an intermediary. The alien presence has been completely uncommunicative until she convinces one of them that she can act as their interpreter, becoming the first and only human vessel of communication. Their otherworldly connection will change everything she thought she knew about being human—and could unleash a force more sinister than she ever imagined.
Radiant
Karina Sumner-Smith - 2014
Born without the power that everyone else takes for granted, Xhea is an outcast—no way to earn a living, buy food, or change the life that fate has dealt her. Yet she has a unique talent: the ability to see ghosts and the tethers that bind them to the living world, which she uses to scratch out a bare existence in the ruins beneath the City’s floating Towers.When a rich City man comes to her with a young woman’s ghost tethered to his chest, Xhea has no idea that this ghost will change everything. The ghost, Shai, is a Radiant, a rare person who generates so much power that the Towers use it to fuel their magic, heedless of the pain such use causes. Shai’s home Tower is desperate to get the ghost back and force her into a body—any body—so that it can regain its position, while the Tower’s rivals seek the ghost to use her magic for their own ends. Caught between a multitude of enemies and desperate to save Shai, Xhea thinks herself powerless—until a strange magic wakes within her. Magic dark and slow, like rising smoke, like seeping oil. A magic whose very touch brings death.With two extremely strong female protagonists, Radiant is a story of fighting for what you believe in and finding strength that you never thought you had.
The Tar-Aiym Krang
Alan Dean Foster - 1972
The planet attracted unwary travelers, hardened space-sailors, and merchant buccaneers -- a teeming, constantly shifting horde that provided a comfortable income for certain quick-witted fellows like Flinx and his pet flying snake Pip. With his odd talents, the pickings were easy enough so that Flinx did not have to be dishonest ... most of the time.In fact, it hardly seemed dishonest at all to steal a starmap from a dead body that didn't really need it anymore. But Flinx wasn't quite smart enough. He should have wondered why the body was dead in the first place...
Proxima
Stephen Baxter - 2013
The age of star formation is long past. Yet there is life here, feeding off the energies of the stellar remnants, and there is mind, a tremendous galaxy-spanning intelligence each of whose thoughts lasts a hundred thousand years. And this mind cradles memories of a long-gone age when a more compact universe was full of light... The 27th century: Proxima Centauri, an undistinguished red dwarf star, is the nearest star to our sun. How would it be to live on such a world?
Foreigner
C.J. Cherryh - 1994
Cherryh's eponymous series, Foreigner begins an epic tale of the survivors of a lost spacecraft who crash-land on a planet inhabited by a hostile, sentient alien race.From its beginnings as a human-alien story of first contact, the Foreigner series has become a true science fiction odyssey, following a civilization from the age of steam through early space flight to confrontations with other alien species in distant sectors of space. It is the masterwork of a truly remarkable author.
Killing Gravity
Corey J. White - 2017
She escaped the MEPHISTO lab where she was raised as a psychic supersoldier, which left her with terrifying capabilities, a fierce sense of independence, a deficit of trust and an experimental pet named Seven. She’s spent her life on the run, but the boogeymen from her past are catching up with her. An encounter with a bounty hunter has left her hanging helpless in a dying spaceship, dependent on the mercy of strangers.Penned in on all sides, Mariam chases rumors to find the one who sold her out. To discover the truth and defeat her pursuers, she’ll have to stare into the abyss and find the secrets of her past, her future, and her terrifying potential.
Hunter's Run
George R.R. Martin - 2007
Human colonists serve as world-building crash-test dummies, dropped onto empty planets deemed too dangerous or inconvenient for other races, to pave over whatever marvels and threats evolution had put there. Like so many others, Ramon Espejo ran from the poverty and hopelessness of the Third World to the promise of a new world, joining a host of like-minded workers and dreamers aboard one of the great starships of the mysterious, repulsive Enye. But the life he found on the far-off planet of Sao Paulo was no better than the one he had abandoned.Tough, volatile, and angry, a luckless prospector hoping for that one rich strike that will make him wealthy, Ramon is content only when on his own out in the bush, far from the dirty, loud, bustling hive of humanity that he detests with sociopathic fervor. Then one night his rage and too much alcohol get the better of him, resulting in sudden bloodshed and a high-profile murder.Ramon is forced to flee into the wilderness for however long it will take for the furor to die down. Here, mercifully, almost happily alone, Ramon is once again free. But while searching for his long-elusive lode, he stumbles upon something completely unexpected: a highly advanced alien race in hiding; fugitives like himself on a world not their own.Suddenly in possession of a powerful, dangerous secret, Ramon must battle for his freedom from alien captors and also against the hostile and unpredictable planet. And so the chase begins. Police, fugitive aliens, and a human murderer weave a web of shifting alliances as Ramon enters the greatest manhunt the alien world of Sao Paulo has ever known. If he is to survive, Ramon must overcome inscrutable aliens and deadly predators, but his greatest enemy is himself. With every move in the desperate game, he struggles to outwit his enemies and solve the mystery of a murder he himself committed. A rip-roaring adventure tale and character study of a fascinating and twisted mind, "Hunter's Run" showcases three masters of the form at their best.