Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach


Kelly Robson - 2018
    Minh is part of the generation that first moved back up to the surface of the Earth from the underground hells, to reclaim humanity's ancestral habitat. She's spent her entire life restoring river ecosystems, but lately the kind of long-term restoration projects Minh works on have been stalled due to the invention of time travel. When she gets the opportunity take a team to 2000 BC to survey the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, she jumps at the chance to uncover the secrets of the shadowy think tank that controls time travel technology.

Second Contact


Mike Resnick - 1990
    A starship captain has gone a little crazy and killed two of his crewmen in cold blood. Just plead insanity, make sure they give his client a nice, comfortable, padded cell, and go skiing at Aspen.But the captain refuses to cop an insanity plea. He insists that the two crew members he killed were not humans, but aliens. That's his story, and he's sticking by it. So Becker reluctantly goes through the motions of trying to prove his case----and suddenly his witnesses start getting transferred or disappearing, and when he finally finds one he realizes there are holes in his story... and suddenly Becker is running for his life, hunted by every branch of the military. He can't figure it out: he's a loyal officer, he's just doing his job as a military attorney, he's never broken a law, there are no aliens: so why does everybody want him dead?Join Hugo- and Nebula-winning author Mike Resnick as he chronicles Becker's desperate attempt to learn the only thing that can save him: the truth.

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.

To Be Taught, If Fortunate


Becky Chambers - 2019
    Ariadne is one such explorer. As an astronaut on an extrasolar research vessel, she and her fellow crewmates sleep between worlds and wake up each time with different features. Her experience is one of fluid body and stable mind and of a unique perspective on the passage of time. Back on Earth, society changes dramatically from decade to decade, as it always does.Ariadne may awaken to find that support for space exploration back home has waned, or that her country of birth no longer exists, or that a cult has arisen around their cosmic findings, only to dissolve once more by the next waking. But the moods of Earth have little bearing on their mission: to explore, to study, and to send their learnings home. Carrying all the trademarks of her other beloved works, including brilliant writing, fantastic world-building and exceptional, diverse characters, Becky's first audiobook outside of the Wayfarers series is sure to capture the imagination of listeners all over the world.

Arrival


Ryk Brown - 2016
     To start the first extra-solar colony… To avoid the mistakes of our past… To start anew.Three generations, born and raised on a starship hurtling through space. To never know an open sky… To never feel the wind on their face… To never witness the sun rise or set.It is up to the advance team to set foot on each of these worlds, conduct their surveys, and send their findings back to the colony ship. So many questions… So little time… Such an enormous responsibility.Everything must go as planned, for the welfare of all the colonists depends on them.“Arrival” is a 170,000 word, stand-alone novel.

The Accidental Time Machine


Joe Haldeman - 2007
    Now he delivers a provocative novel of a man who stumbles upon the discovery of a lifetime-or many lifetimes. Grad-school dropout Matt Fuller is toiling as a lowly research assistant at MIT when, while measuring subtle quantum forces that relate to time changes in gravity and electromagnetic force, his calibrator turns into a time machine. With a dead-end job and a girlfriend who has left him for another man, Matt has nothing to lose taking a time machine trip himself-or so he thinks.

Pirate Cinema


Cory Doctorow - 2012
    In near-future Britain, this is more illegal than ever. The punishment for being caught three times is to cut off your entire household from the internet for a year - no work, school, health or money benefits.Trent thinks he is too clever for that to happen, but it does, and nearly destroys his family. Shamed and shattered, Trent runs away to London, where slowly he learns the ways of staying alive on the streets. He joins artists and activists fighting a new bill that will jail too many, especially minors, at one stroke. Jem introduces him to the Jammie Dodgers, beautiful brilliant "26" to love and cemetery parties.Things look bad. Parliament is in power of a few wealthy media conglomerates. But the powers-that-be haven’t entirely reckoned with the power of a gripping movie to change people’s minds ...

The Wrong Stars


Tim Pratt - 2017
    or awaken an ancient evil and destroy all life in the galaxy.The shady crew of the White Raven run freight and salvage at the fringes of our solar system. They discover the wreck of a centuries-old exploration vessel floating light years away from its intended destination and revive its sole occupant, who wakes with news of First Alien Contact. When the crew break it to her that humanity has alien allies already, she reveals that these are very different extra-terrestrials... and the gifts they bestowed on her could kill all humanity, or take it out to the most distant stars. File Under: Science Fiction

Into the Void


Tim Lebbon - 2013
    And at the feet of its wise Masters, Lanoree Brock learned the mysteries and methods of the Force—and found her calling as one of its most powerful disciples. But as strongly as the Force flowed within Lanoree and her parents, it remained absent in her brother, who grew to despise and shun the Je’daii, and whose training in its ancient ways ended in tragedy. Now, from her solitary life as a Ranger keeping order across the galaxy, Lanoree has been summoned by the Je’daii Council on a matter of utmost urgency. The leader of a fanatical cult, obsessed with traveling beyond the reaches of known space, is bent on opening a cosmic gateway using dreaded dark matter as the key—risking a cataclysmic reaction that will consume the entire star system. But more shocking to Lanoree than even the prospect of total galactic annihilation, is the decision of her Je’daii Masters to task her with the mission of preventing it. Until a staggering revelation makes clear why she was chosen: The brilliant, dangerous madman she must track down and stop at any cost is the brother whose death she has long grieved—and whose life she must now fear.

Run For The Stars


Harlan Ellison - 2005
    All that stood in their way was a man on Deald's World named Benno Tallant, about as lousy a candidate for hero as one could imagine: junkie, looter, coward, betrayer. So the retreating Earth forces made him the last man on Deald's World. They surgically implanted a cataclysmic bomb in his body, turned him loose, and let the Kyben hunt him down. SEE BENNO RUN. RUN, BENNO, RUN LIKE HELL.

The Chronoliths


Robert Charles Wilson - 2001
    In early twenty-first-century Thailand, Scott is an expatriate slacker. Then, one day, he inadvertently witnesses an impossible event: the violent appearance of a 200-foot stone pillar in the forested interior. Its arrival collapses trees for a quarter mile around its base, freezing ice out of the air and emitting a burst of ionizing radiation. It appears to be composed of an exotic form of matter. And the inscription chiseled into it commemorates a military victory--twenty years in the future.Shortly afterwards, another, larger pillar arrives in the center of Bangkok-obliterating the city and killing thousands. Over the next several years, human society is transformed by these mysterious arrivals from, seemingly, our own near future. Who is the warlord "Kuin" whose victories they note? Scott wants only to rebuild his life. But some strange loop of causality keeps drawing him in, to the central mystery and a final battle with the future. The Chronoliths is a 2002 Hugo Award Nominee for Best Novel and the winner of the 2002 John W. Campbell Memorial Award.

The Wanderers


Meg Howrey - 2017
    Helen Kane, Yoshi Tanaka, and Sergei Kuznetsov must prove they’re the crew for the job by spending seventeen months in the most realistic simulation ever created.Retired from NASA, Helen had not trained for irrelevance. It is nobody’s fault that the best of her exists in space, but her daughter can’t help placing blame. The MarsNOW mission is Helen’s last chance to return to the only place she’s ever truly felt at home. For Yoshi, it’s an opportunity to prove himself worthy of the wife he has loved absolutely, if not quite rightly. Sergei is willing to spend seventeen months in a tin can if it means travelling to Mars. He will at least be tested past the point of exhaustion, and this is the example he will set for his sons.As the days turn into months the line between what is real and unreal becomes blurred, and the astronauts learn that the complications of inner space are no less fraught than those of outer space. The Wanderers gets at the desire behind all exploration: the longing for discovery and the great search to understand the human heart.

When Worlds Collide


Philip Wylie - 1932
    As it draws near, massive tidal waves, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions wrack our planet, devastating continents, drowning cities, and wiping out millions. In central North America, a team of scientists race to build a spacecraft powerful enough to escape the doomed earth. Their greatest threat, they soon discover, comes not from the skies but from other humans. A crackling plot and sizzling, cataclysmic vision have made When Worlds Collide one of the most popular and influential end-of-the-world novels of all time. This Bison Frontiers of Imagination edition features the original story and its sequel, After Worlds Collide.

The Punch Escrow


Tal M. Klein - 2017
    Advancements in nanotechnology have enabled us to control aging. We've genetically engineered mosquitoes to feast on carbon fumes instead of blood, ending air pollution. And teleportation has become the ideal mode of transportation, offered exclusively by International Transport—a secretive firm headquartered in New York City. Their slogan: Departure... Arrival... Delight!Joel Byram, our smartass protagonist, is an everyday twenty-second century guy. He spends his days training artificial intelligence engines to act more human, jamming out to 1980's new wave—an extremely obscure genre, and trying to salvage his deteriorating marriage. Joel is pretty much an everyday guy with everyday problems—until he's accidentally duplicated while teleporting. Now Joel must outsmart the shadowy organization that controls teleportation, outrun the religious sect out to destroy it, and find a way to get back to the woman he loves in a world that now has two of him.

Deep Fathom


James Rollins - 2001
    Solar flares have triggered a series of gargantuan natural disasters. Earth-quakes and hellfire rock the globe. Air Force One has vanished from the skies with America's president on board.Now, with the United States on the narrow brink of a nuclear apocalypse, Kirkland must pilot his oceangoing exploration ship, Deep Fathom, on a desperate mission miles below the ocean's surface. There, devastating secrets await him--and a power an ancient civilization could not contain that has been cast out into modern day, where it will forever alter a world that's already racing toward its own destruction.