In the Days of the Comet


H.G. Wells - 1906
    But mankind is too busy hating, stealing, scheming, and killing to care. As luminous green trails of cosmic dust and vapor stream across the heavens, blood flows beneath: nations wage all-out war, bitter strikes erupt, and jealous lovers plot revenge and murder. The earth slips past the comet by the narrowest of margins, but all succumb to the gases in its tail. When mankind wakes up, everyone is completely and profoundly different. An ill-fated romance between Willie Leadford and Nettie Stuart unfolds in a world buried in misery and bent on its own destruction. After the earth passes through the comet's tail, suffering, pettiness, and injustice melt away. Willie, Nettie, and everyone around them are reborn. They now see themselves and their world in a dramatically new and wonderful way.

The Kraken Wakes


John Wyndham - 1953
    Strange fireballs race through the sky above the deepest trenches of the oceans. Something is about to show itself, something terrible and alien, a force capable of causing global catastrophe.

The Explorer


James Smythe - 2012
    They mourn, and Cormac sends a beautifully written eulogy back to Earth. The word from ground control is unequivocal: no matter what happens, the mission must continue.But as the body count begins to rise, Cormac finds himself alone and spiralling towards his own inevitable death … unless he can do something to stop it.

A Matter for Men


David Gerrold - 1983
    Even as many on Earth deny their existence, the giant wormlike carnivores prepare the world for the ultimate violation--the enslavement of humanity for food!

Fade to Black


Francis Knight - 2013
    A city that the Ministry rules from the sunlit summit, and where the forsaken lurk in the darkness of Under.Rojan Dizon doesn’t mind staying in the shadows, because he’s got things to hide. Things like being a pain-mage, with the forbidden power to draw magic from pain. But he can’t hide for ever.Because when Rojan stumbles upon the secrets lurking in the depths of the Pit, the fate of Mahala will depend on him using his magic. And unlucky for Rojan—this is going to hurt.

Machine Man


Max Barry - 2008
    He sees it as an opportunity. Charlie has always thought his body could be better. Stronger. With built-in wi-fi. The next leg to go is no accident. Neither is the hand. No one understands his love of upgrades, except for prosthetics expert Lola Shanks. She's always admired a good artificial leg, and Charlie's on his way to being artificial everything. His employer, military contractor Better Future, sees potential in the bioaugmentations. Charlie, however, never wanted to be a weapon, so now he's locked in a mind-bending battle for control of his artificial body. Machine Man is a daring experiment in digital fiction that is funny, tender, and always surprising.

The Frozen Sky


Jeff Carlson - 2010
    Robot probes find an ancient tunnel beneath the surface, its walls carved with strange hieroglyphics. Led by elite engineer Alexis Vonderach, a team of scientists descends into the dark... where they confront a savage race older than mankind...FIRST CONTACTBased on the award-winning short story, The Frozen Sky is a new full-length sci fi thriller novel from the international bestselling author of Plague Year.

Privateers


Ben Bova - 1985
    The U.S. has abandoned its quest for the stars, and old enemy, Soviets, moved in to fill the void. The potential wealth of the universe is now in malevolent army hands. Rebel billionaire Dan Randolph, possessor of the largest privately owned company in space, intends to weaken the stranglehold the new despotic masters of the solar system have on the lucrative ore industry. But when the mineral-rich asteroid he sets in orbit around the Earth is commandeered by the enemy, and his unarmed workers are slaughtered in cold blood, the course of Randolph's life is changed forever. Now cataclysm is aimed at the exposed heart of America -- a potential catastrophe that Randolph himself inadvertently set in motion. The maverick entrepreneur must use his skills, cunning, and vast resources to strike out at his foes hard, fast, with ruthless precision -- and wear proudly the mantle that fate thrust upon him -- space pirate .

The Dark Side of the Sun


Terry Pratchett - 1976
    Librarian Note: An alternative cover for this ISBN can be found here Dom Salabos had a lot of advantages.As heir to a huge fortune he had an excellent robot servant (with Man-Friday subcircuitry), a planet (the First Syrian Bank) as a godfather, a security chief who even ran checks on himself, and on Dom's home world even death was not always fatal.Why then, in an age when prediction was a science, was his future in doubt?

The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack


Mark Hodder - 2010
    The two men are sucked into the perilous depths of this moral and ethical vacuum when Lord Palmerston commissions Burton to investigate assaults on young women committed by a weird apparition known as Spring Heeled Jack, and to find out why werewolves are terrorizing London's East End.Their investigations lead them to one of the defining events of the age, and the terrifying possibility that the world they inhabit shouldn't exist at all!

The Dark Fields


Alan Glynn - 2001
    A drug that made you focused, charming, fast, even attractive. Eddie Spinola is on such a drug. It's called MDT-48, and it's Viagra for the brain-a designer drug that's redesigning his life. But while MDT is helping Eddie achieve the kind of success he's only dreamed about, it's also chipping away at his sanity-splitting headaches, spontaneous blackouts, violent outbursts. And now that he's hooked and his supply is running low, Eddie must venture into the drug's dark past to feed his habit. What he discovers proves that MDT, once a dream come true, has become his worst nightmare.

City of Golden Shadow


Tad Williams - 1996
    Kids, including her brother Stephen, have logged into the net, and cannot escape. Clues point to a mysterious golden city called Otherland, but investigators all end up dead.

Angel Station


Walter Jon Williams - 1989
    Misfits and outlaws, they defied the huge interstellar cartels that ruled space, always one jump ahead of the authorities.Ubu Roy was the strong young bossrider of the starship Runaway, who held all of history in his remarkable memory. Beautiful Maria was an ace star shooter and cybernetic witch, who could bend spacetime to find the perfect singularity.

The Shrinking Man


Richard Matheson - 1956
    The radioactivity acts as a catalyst for the bug spray, causing his body to shrink at a rate of approximately 1/7 of an inch per day. A few weeks later, Carey can no longer deny the truth: not only is he losing weight, he is also shorter than he was and deduces, to his dismay, that his body will continue to shrink.

Dreamer's Cat


Stephen Leather - 2010
    Dreamers are employed on billion-dollar contracts to produce psi-discs, the entertainment of the future. But when Dreamers start to die, our hero has to go into their alternative realities on the track of the killer.Be warned - there is a fair amount of sexual violence in the book, which is necessary for the plot but which is not for the faint-hearted! If you have any reservations at all, please download the sample first.Dreamer's Cat is a fast-paced 67,000 words, about 260 pages.