Steal Across the Sky


Nancy Kress - 2009
    The Atoners claim to have wronged humanity ten thousand years before, and request 21 volunteers to visit seven planets and Witness for us. At first, everyone thought it was a joke. Three of those volunteers tell what they found on Kular A and Kular B.

The Mote in God's Eye


Larry Niven - 1974
    Intelligent beings are finally found from the Mote, an isolated star in a thick dust cloud. The bottled-up ancient civilization, at least one million years old, are welcoming, kind, yet evasive, with a dark problem they have not solved in over a million years.

Grimspace


Ann Aguirre - 2008
    Then a crash landing kills everyone on board, leaving Jax in a jail cell with no memory of the crash. But her fun's not over. A group of rogue fighters frees her...for a price: her help in overthrowing the established order.

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?

Semiosis


Sue Burke - 2018
    The planet provides a lush but inexplicable landscape--trees offer edible, addictive fruit one day and poison the next, while the ruins of an alien race are found entwined in the roots of a strange plant. Conflicts between generations arise as they struggle to understand one another and grapple with an unknowable alien intellect.

Hammered


Elizabeth Bear - 2004
    Once she was somebody’s enemy. Now the former Canadian special forces warrior lives on the hellish streets of Hartford, Connecticut, in the year 2062. Racked with pain, hiding from the government she served, running with a crime lord so she can save a life or two, Jenny is a month shy of fifty, and her artificially reconstructed body has started to unravel. But she is far from forgotten. A government scientist needs the perfect subject for a high-stakes project and has Jenny in his sights. Suddenly Jenny Casey is a pawn in a furious battle, waged in the corridors of the Internet, on the streets of battered cities, and in the complex wirings of her half-man-made nervous system. And she needs to gain control of the game before a brave new future spins completely out of control.

Against a Dark Background


Iain M. Banks - 1993
    On an island with a glass shore - relic of some even more ancient conflict - she discovers she is to be hunted by the Huhsz, a religious cult which believes she is the last obstacle before their faith's apotheosis. She has to run, knowing her only hope of finally escaping the Huhsz is to find the last of the ancient, apocalyptically powerful but seemingly cursed Lazy Guns. But that is just the first as well as the final step on a search that takes her on an odyssey through the exotic Golterian system and results in both a trail of destruction and a journey into her own past, as well as that of her family and the system itself; a journey that changes everything.

The Forge of God


Greg Bear - 1987
    Not hiding, not turned black, but gone. On September 28th, Edward Shaw, a geologist working in Death valley, finds a mysterious new cinder cone in very well-mapped area As more unexplained phenomena spring up around the globeL: a granite mountain appearing in Australia, sounds emanating from the Earth's core, flashes of light among the asteroids, it becomes clear to some that the end is approaching, and there is nothing that can be done. In The Forge of God, award-winning author Greg Bear describes the final days of the world on both a massive, scientific scale and in the everyday, emotional context of individual human lives. Facing the destruction of all they know, some people turn to God, others to their families, and a few turn to saviors promising escape from a planet tearing itself apart. Will they make it in time? And who gets left behind to experience the last moments of beauty and chaos on Earth?

Provenance


Ann Leckie - 2017
    She hatches an audacious plan--free a thief from a prison planet from which no one has ever returned, and use them to help steal back a priceless artifact.But Ingray and her charge return to her home to find their planet in political turmoil, at the heart of an escalating interstellar conflict. Together, they must make a new plan to salvage Ingray's future and her world, before they are lost to her for good.

Central Station


Lavie Tidhar - 2016
    Cultures collide in real life and virtual reality. The city is literally a weed, its growth left unchecked. Life is cheap, and data is cheaper.When Boris Chong returns to Tel Aviv from Mars, much has changed. Boris’s ex-lover is raising a strangely familiar child who can tap into the datastream of a mind with the touch of a finger. His cousin is infatuated with a robotnik—a damaged cyborg soldier who might as well be begging for parts. His father is terminally-ill with a multigenerational mind-plague. And a hunted data-vampire has followed Boris to where she is forbidden to return.Rising above them is Central Station, the interplanetary hub between all things: the constantly shifting Tel Aviv; a powerful virtual arena, and the space colonies where humanity has gone to escape the ravages of poverty and war. Everything is connected by the Others, powerful alien entities who, through the Conversation—a shifting, flowing stream of consciousness—are just the beginning of irrevocable change.At Central Station, humans and machines continue to adapt, thrive...and even evolve.

This Alien Shore


C.S. Friedman - 1998
    Sheltered all her life in a corporate satellite in Earth's outer orbit, Jamisia must face the truth about her origins and her role in the power struggle between the Guerans who dominate intergalactic transportation and the rest of Earth's far-flung and genetically mutated colonies who are trying to break the Guera Guild's monopoly.

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.

Nemesis


Isaac Asimov - 1989
    In the twenty-third century pioneers have escaped the crowded earth for life in self-sustaining orbital colonies.  One of the colonies, Rotor, has broken away from the solar system to create its own renegade utopia around an unknown red star two light-years from Earth:  a star named Nemesis.  Now a fifteen-year-old Rotorian girl has learned of the dire threat that nemesis poses to Earth's people--but she is prevented from warning them.  Soon she will realize that Nemesis endangers Rotor as well.  And so it will be up to her alone to save both Earth and Rotor as--drawn inexorably by Nemesis, the death star--they hurtle toward certain disaster.

Embassytown


China Miéville - 2011
    She cannot speak the Ariekei tongue, but she is an indelible part of it, having long ago been made a figure of speech, a living simile in their language.When distant political machinations deliver a new ambassador to Arieka, the fragile equilibrium between humans and aliens is violently upset. Catastrophe looms, and Avice is torn between competing loyalties—to a husband she no longer loves, to a system she no longer trusts, and to her place in a language she cannot speak yet speaks through her.

The Collapsing Empire


John Scalzi - 2017
    Humanity flows away from Earth, into space, and in time forgets our home world and creates a new empire, the Interdependency, whose ethos requires that no one human outpost can survive without the others. It’s a hedge against interstellar war -- and a system of control for the rulers of the empire.The Flow is eternal -- but it is not static. Just as a river changes course, The Flow changes as well, cutting off worlds from the rest of humanity. When it’s discovered that The Flow is moving, possibly cutting off all human worlds from faster than light travel forever, three individuals -- a scientist, a starship captain and the Empress of the Interdependency -- are in a race against time to discover what, if anything, can be salvaged from an interstellar empire on the brink of collapse.