Book picks similar to
The Epsilon Eridani Alternative by Beth Groundwater
science-fiction
sci-fi-modern
the-future
uninterested
Star Wars: The Secrets of the Jedi
Marc Sumerak - 2019
With thrilling original illustrations and amazing special features including lift-the-flaps, textures, and more, Star Wars: Jediography is guaranteed to thrill the saga’s legions of young fans.
A Hole in the Sky
Peter F. Hamilton - 2021
Hamilton comes his first audio original, A Hole in the Sky, Book 1 in the Arkship Trilogy.Sixteen-year old Hazel lives in the Daedalus, a starship that is flying in search of a new world. The ship has been traveling for five hundred years, searching for a world to settle in after having to abandon its last world. Everyone on board Daedalus lives a very simple existence in farming villages. The age of machines supplying their needs was lost during a mutiny five hundred years ago. The captain regained control of the ship after a huge struggle. Now, with finite resources, everything in the habitat is Cycled, including humans, who essentially are suicided at sixty-five so they don't deplete the biosphere's resources.Hazel encounters the Cheaters, people who refused to Cycle, who tell her the Daedalus has been damaged and its atmosphere is leaking away. When her brother has a paralyzing accident which condemns him to be Cycled since he can no longer be productive, Hazel runs off with him to join the Cheaters. While with the Cheaters, she discovers that much of what has been told to the people living on Daedalus for the last five hundred years is untrue, and that the ship is under the control of Aliens called the Yi. Soon, Hazel is in a thrilling race to help repair the ship and help the people of the Daedalus escape the Yi.
Jax-Xon
Alana Khan - 2019
Can she find love and thrive?
Tara—Stolen from her bed with her four-year-old in her arms, Tara survives a cataclysmic crash and is rescued by a tribe of huge, green males on a lush, forested planet. Her mantra, "I don't do men," is challenged when she meets sexy, muscular Jax-Xon.Jax-Xon—Thought he was doomed to a loveless life until beautiful Tara and her adorable daughter hurtle into his life. Can his love allow her to drop her barriers and create a new life together? This 12,000 word novelette contains a strong female, a swoonworthy green giant, love, sex, and action. It's the prequel to Sirius, Book 7 in the Sci-Fi Romance Galaxy Gladiators Alien Abduction Series.This is not a full-size novel.
Solaris
Stanisław Lem - 1961
Others examining the planet, Kelvin learns, are plagued with their own repressed and newly corporeal memories. The Solaris ocean may be a massive brain that creates these incarnate memories, though its purpose in doing so is unknown, forcing the scientists to shift the focus of their quest and wonder if they can truly understand the universe without first understanding what lies within their hearts.
Side Life
Steve Toutonghi - 2018
DickVin, a down-on-his-luck young tech entrepreneur forced out of the software company he started, takes a job house-sitting an ultra-modern Seattle mansion whose owner has gone missing. There he discovers a secret basement lab with an array of computers and three large, smooth caskets. Inside one he finds a woman in a state of suspended animation. There is also a dog-eared notebook filled with circuit diagrams, beautiful and intricate drawings of body parts, and pages of code. When Vin decides to climb into one of the caskets to see what happens, his reality begins to unravel, and he finds himself on a terrifying journey that asks fundamental questions about reality, free will, and the meaning of a human life.
Roark's Baby
Hannah Davenport - 2019
Instead it became some wacko adventure, we’re being chased by some creepy guy, named Ardak, who just so happens to want to kill us.... And now I’ve gone into labour, far away from medical and projected it to Roark… as if I don’t have enough to worry about, wondering what the first Human/Ulayian baby is going to look like and whether or not I can handle giving birth…
Will Roark get here in time? Can he manage the pain? Can I actually do this? Why does everything have to be so damn complicated?
Anathem
Neal Stephenson - 2008
Over the centuries, cities and governments have risen and fallen beyond the concent's walls. Three times during history's darkest epochs violence born of superstition and ignorance has invaded and devastated the cloistered mathic community. Yet the avout have always managed to adapt in the wake of catastrophe, becoming out of necessity even more austere and less dependent on technology and material things. And Erasmas has no fear of the outside—the Extramuros—for the last of the terrible times was long, long ago.Now, in celebration of the week-long, once-in-a-decade rite of Apert, the fraas and suurs prepare to venture beyond the concent's gates—at the same time opening them wide to welcome the curious "extras" in. During his first Apert as a fraa, Erasmas eagerly anticipates reconnecting with the landmarks and family he hasn't seen since he was "collected." But before the week is out, both the existence he abandoned and the one he embraced will stand poised on the brink of cataclysmic change.Powerful unforeseen forces jeopardize the peaceful stability of mathic life and the established ennui of the Extramuros—a threat that only an unsteady alliance of saecular and avout can oppose—as, one by one, Erasmas and his colleagues, teachers, and friends are summoned forth from the safety of the concent in hopes of warding off global disaster. Suddenly burdened with a staggering responsibility, Erasmas finds himself a major player in a drama that will determine the future of his world—as he sets out on an extraordinary odyssey that will carry him to the most dangerous, inhospitable corners of the planet . . . and beyond.
Refuge 9 (Fire and Rust #5)
Anthony James - 2019
For the human Unity League, this is a truth to be stamped on the barrel of every gun and painted on the side of every warship. The Sekar aliens have already killed billions and nobody knows where they came from or how to defeat them. The enemy’s only weakness is tharniol – the rarest substance in the known universe. Desperate times call for desperate measures and a shaky truce is made with the treacherous Raggers. The Raggers claim knowledge of data that will assist in the fight. Unfortunately, the data is buried deep in a subsurface facility on a fringe planet called Glesia – a facility which is crawling with Sekar. The mission to recover it goes wrong from the outset, leaving Captain Tanner Conway and his squad the task of rescuing an impossible situation. With limited ammunition and no chance of a resupply, they must fight their way to the mission goal. An alien weapon sweeps through the place at seemingly random intervals. It is Conway’s best friend and his worst enemy. Meanwhile, Captain Jake Griffin, alongside Captain Endrax Isental from the Fangrin navy, are left with a similarly unpalatable task – they must handle a Ragger officer with an immensely powerful warship and more faces than a crate full of dice. Hass-Tei-112 has his own plans for what lies below the surface of Glesia. When you can’t trust your friends and you can’t stop your enemies, what hope is there for survival? Refuge 9 is a fast-paced military sci-fi shooter filled with spaceships, guns, tech and warfare. It follows on from book 4 in the Fire and Rust Series: Death Skies.
Prairie Justice (The Bounty Hunter Book 3)
G. Michael Hopf - 2018
Oscar Milke and other settlers are rejoicing in the land they’ve claimed and have plans for its future. However, they soon discover that it’s occupied by two outlaw brothers who declare the land theirs. The dispute sets in motion a violent series of events that will end in a deadly clash.
The Last Builder
Simeon Graves - 2017
We've spread to other galaxies and continue to thrive as a vast civilization. But calamity looms on the horizon. Little do our people know that a long-gestating killer, called The Keresian Virus, will soon decimate 99.99% of our population.
One of the few people aware of the government cover-up is Cutler Copeland. Not only is he immune to the virus, he's also a scout who's spent his life finding inhospitable planets with just the right attributes to facilitate terraforming into living ecosystems. But now, with his ex-wife dead, Cutler must return to Earth to fetch his teenage daughter, Kit, and somehow remain undetected by the government conspirators hellbent on stealing the secrets that will soon come into Cutler's possession.Will he succeed in reconnecting with his daughter, and get away just before the slaughter, or will his enemies track him down and use him for their own nefarious plans?P.S. Visit SimeonGraves.com to get a free copy of the never-to-be-published prequel to The Last Builder.
Rogue
David Ryker - 2019
The best of the best. And now he's gone Rogue... His entire life, all James 'Red' Maddox has known is war. He was born on a dust rock called Genesis-526, conscripted into the Federation military with thousands of other recruits, and somehow stumbled into the Mech Corps. It was a moment that changed his life. Mech Corps pilots are the best of the best. They sit in the cockpit of iron beasts that tower into the sky, fighting alongside men and women who have been bred for their task since birth. Perfect reaction times. An almost inhuman level of concentration. The courage to throw themselves into the fight day after day, year after year, knowing that their mechs are sent into the crucible of the fight, into the heart of danger—and expected not just to survive, but to win... But Red is getting real tired of putting down rebellions on colony planets he's never heard of. Of pulverizing alien planets before he ever even learns their name. Of losing friends, lovers, and brothers in the service of an empire that doesn't care whether he lives or dies. Every man has his breaking point. And Red just found his...
The Super Olympian: Bloodhound (Shapechanger Tales)
Laer Carroll - 2012
And she has strange powers. What can feed her challenge-addiction now? Fighting crime? There is plenty of it.
Natural Selection
David Coy - 2005
Hours later teacher Phil Lynch finds himself living a nightmare. Paralyzed and taken prisoner, his body is used as an unwilling host in a bizarre and grisly series of parasitic infections. On board the alien vessel within which he is imprisoned are more than a hundred other humans - and like Phil - just as confused and terrified - their bodies subjected to unfathomable violence for a dark and malevolent purpose. As the terrible truth about the alien visitation unfolds, a small group of captives must first understand - then fight for escape. That struggle will cause them to stretch razor-thin the limits of the human will to survive. 323 pages.
News From Gardenia
Robert Llewellyn - 2012
In this gentle, peaceful, sustainable new world, it is possible to travel from one side of the globe to the other in a matter of minutes without burning fuel, and everyone is a gardener because that's how they can be sure to eat.Inspired by William Morris's utopian novel News from Nowhere, Robert Llewellyn shows us a future where we don't burn anything to make anything else and which isn't hovering on the brink of disaster; where aliens haven't invaded, meteors haven’t hit and zombies haven’t taken over. In short, a world where humanity eventually gets it right.All the technology described in the novel has seen the light of day in reality. Llewellyn's future isn't perfect and may not be very likely, but it is entirely possible.
Out of the Silent Planet
C.S. Lewis - 1938
Lewis's classic science fiction trilogy, Dr Ransom, a Cambridge academic, is abducted and taken on a spaceship to the red planet of Malacandra, which he knows as Mars. His captors are plotting to plunder the planet's treasures and plan to offer Ransom as a sacrifice to the creatures who live there. Ransom discovers he has come from the 'silent planet' – Earth – whose tragic story is known throughout the universe...