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Station Cores: Complete
Jonathan Brooks - 2019
Milton Frederick was originally abducted from his apartment to help defend one batch of pacifistic aliens called The Collective against another set of homicidal aliens called Heliothropes…but he never quite made it that far. Instead, during the process where his human consciousness was ripped from his body and inserted into a massive metal contraption called a Station Core, the ship that he was being transported on blew up and he was sent hurtling through space. Crash-landing on an unknown planet with just a foot-and-a-half tall, foul-mouthed, nanite-formed AI guide called ALANNA to tell him what happened, Milton has to come to terms with his new existence as a giant metal egg, defend his hazardously-in-need-of-repair outer shell from the dangerous local wildlife (including blood-thirsty squirrels), and manage the unique radiation spewing from his damaged internal reactor – all while figuring out how the heck to get off the planet. All of his work building a “dungeon” underground, defending it with makeshift traps, and filling it with small Combat Units may work well enough against the random beasts wandering around, but they’re next to useless when something else even more dangerous shows up knocking on his door: people. Not humans, of course, but the local equivalent – Proctans – who are similar enough to Milton’s original species…though with one major difference. They all have unique special abilities that looks suspiciously like “magic”. However, there is an even bigger threat that looms on the horizon not only for Milton, but all the Proctans as well… Contains LitRPG/GameLit elements such as level progression and experience, optional tables, no harems, and a heavy Dungeon Core emphasis. Note: The optional stat tables tend to skew the percentages toward the back of the eBook. The locations can be a tad deceptive; while this box set is 562,000 words, stat tables comprise less than 8% of that total word count.
Fractured Light
Nick Cook - 2018
THEY UNCOVERED A THREAT TO EVERY PERSON ON THE PLANET.
NOW AN INVISIBLE ENEMY IS HUNTING THEM DOWN.
What would you do if you started to see something lurking in the shadows of our everyday world? That's the reality that Jake Stevens has been pitched into and now he’s questioning his sanity.Jake’s been an outsider in his hometown Stoneham, England, ever since his life was shattered when his father's experiment into dark energy exploded, killing himself and many others.When Jake witnesses a satellite crash-landing, and starts to receive garbled messages that hint at a conspiracy, a chain of events is unleashed that will threaten the very existence of all life on Earth in a dystopian nightmare.Can Jake, and the best friend that he froze out of his life, Chloe Haze, a coding genius who’s heavily entrenched with the underground hacking network, figure out the connections of the mystery that link all the events before it’s too late?Fractured Light is the first volume in the Fractured Light trilogy, and is also part of the Multiverse Chronicles, an epic series of interlinked stories that follows the struggle of humanity to survive across parallel universes.
If you love books by Michael Grant and Robert J Crane, or adore series like Stranger Things and Fringe, then this page-turning smart sci-fi thriller, is for you.
Velocity Weapon
Megan E. O'Keefe - 2019
A high-flying sergeant, Sanda has the skills to take down any enemy combatant. Biran is a savvy politician who aims to use his new political position to prevent conflict from escalating to total destruction.However, on a routine maneuver, Sanda loses consciousness when her gunship is blown out of the sky. Instead of finding herself in friendly hands, she awakens 230 years later on a deserted enemy warship controlled by an AI who calls himself Bero. The war is lost. The star system is dead. Ada Prime and its rival Icarion have wiped each other from the universe.Now, separated by time and space, Sanda and Biran must fight to put things right.
To the Galactic Rim: The John Grimes Saga
A. Bertram Chandler - 2011
John Grimes will one day command his own starship, and change the course of Galactic history, but right now he’s a wet-behind-the-ears junior officer who finds that he keeps running into problems which were never covered in his courses at the Academy. The Road to the Rim—meet Lieutenant John Grimes of the Federation Survey Service; fresh out of the Academy—and as green as they come. To Prime the Pump—El Dorado is a planet with a pressing problem: the men are infertile, cause unknown, and the women want someone to Do Something! Not quite the problem young John Grimes expected to deal with . . .The Hard Way Up—a collection of seven tales of John Grime’s adventures, meeting danger and winning glory out at the rim of the Galaxy.The Broken Cycle—John Grimes never intended to get lost in space, let alone being lost with a very attractive policewoman who’s all business. And he really never expected to run into an entity who claims to be a god and has a garden of Eden ready and waiting for the pair. Three novels and a story collection, all in one attractively-priced volume of space adventure.
This is Not a Game
Walter Jon Williams - 2009
And though each was good at a number of things, all of them were very good at games...Dagmar is a game designer trapped in Jakarta in the middle of a revolution. The city is tearing itself apart around her and she needs to get out. Her boss Charlie has his own problems — 4.3 billion of them, to be precise, hidden in an off-shore account. Austin is the businessman — the VC. He's the one with the plan and the one to keep the geeks in line. BJ was there from the start, but while Charlie's star rose, BJ sank into the depths of customer service. He pads his hours at the call-center slaying on-line orcs, stealing your loot, and selling it on the internet.But when one of them is gunned down in a parking lot, the survivors become players in a very different kind of game. Caught between the dangerous worlds of the Russian Mafia and international finance, Dagmar must draw on all her resources — not least millions of online gamers — to track down the killer. In this near-future thriller, Walter Jon Williams weaves a pulse-pounding tale of intrigue, murder, and games where you don't get an extra life.
Randoms
David Liss - 2015
He knows his games, comics, movies, and TV shows like Captain Kirk knows the starship Enterprise. So it’s a dream come true when he learns the science fiction he loves so much is based on reality—and that he’s been selected to spend a year on a massive space station. To evaluate humanity’s worthiness, the Confederation of United Planets has hand picked three of Earth’s most talented young people—and then there’s Zeke. He’s the random.Unfortunately, Zeke finds life in space more challenging than he’d hoped. When he saves his transport ship from a treacherous enemy attack, he’s labeled a war criminal. Now despised by the Confederation, rejected by his fellow humans, and pursued by a ruthless enemy, Zeke befriends the alien randoms: rejected by their own species, but loyal to each other. But their presence in the Confederation may not be so random after all, and as the danger increases, Zack’s knowledge of science fiction might be the only thing that can save himself, his friends, and Earth itself.
Russian Spring
Norman Spinrad - 1991
owns a technology that renders it "the world's best-defended Third World country." The only real outer-space planning is in Common Europe, so young American "space cadet" Jerry Reed goes to work in Paris. He falls in love with and marries Soviet career bureaucrat Sonya Gagarin and the story jumps ahead 20 years, blending world events with a focus on their family. Sonya's star has risen with the Euro-Russians' while Jerry has been stymied by pervasive anti-Americanism. Daughter Franja has her father's space fever and enrolls in a Russian space school; son Bob, fiercely curious about an earlier, admired America before it was run by xenophobic "Gringos," enters Berkeley. Ten years later the U.S. is a pariah, Euro-Russia the pet of the civilized world and the Reeds scattered--politics forced Jerry and Sonya's divorce, Franja speaks only to her mother and Bob is trapped in "Festung Amerika." A series of odd, occasionally tragic events brings the family (and the world) together. Despite some tech-talk this is not science fiction: the first two-thirds of this hefty book is chillingly logical, if sometimes very funny, and while the "happy" ending may seem forced, Spinrad ( Bug Jack Barron ) gives us a wild, exhilarating ride into the next century.
A Haven in Ash
Robert J. Crane - 2017
A horde of beasts known only as the scourge has ravaged the land, leaving only the village of Terreas to survive. Hemmed in on all sides by the scourge, the denizens of Terreas eke out a lonely existence, trying to survive in a land that is all but dead. Jasen Rabinn is a teenage boy trapped in Terreas but with a mind rooted outside the boundaries of his village. He longs for adventure, and when the mysterious Baraghosa – a sorcerer of a sort not native to Luukessia – comes to Terreas, a chain of events is set in motion that will carry Jasen beyond his simple town. To adventure. To danger. To his destiny.
Coyote
Allen M. Steele - 2002
Lee and his crew travel to a distant planetary system with a habitable moon (named Coyote) with the dream of starting a colony free from governmental and social oppression.The trip lasts 226 years, but while everyone is in biostasis, one of the crew members is accidentally awakened. With his cell permanently deactivated by the ship's AI, communications officer Leslie Gillis is doomed to a solitary life (and death) aboard the starship. When the rest of the crew is eventually reawakened as the ship reaches its destination, what they find is extraordinary. Once the small colony is established on Coyote, they realize just how different their new world is from Earth. Exploration begins, and although a few colonists are killed by predators, the colony survives and even begins to thrive that is, until a strange comet appears in the sky.
The Interstellar Age: The Complete Trilogy
Valmore Daniels - 2014
There is no trace of their young son, Alex Manez, or of the asteroid itself. On the outer edge of the solar system, the first manned mission to Pluto, led by the youngest female astronaut in NASA history, has led to an historic discovery: there is a marker left there by an alien race for humankind to find. We are not alone! While studying the alien marker, it begins to react. Four hours later, the missing asteroid appears in a Plutonian orbit, along with young Alex Manez, who has developed some alarming side-effects from his exposure to the kinetic element they call Kinemet. From the depths of a criminal empire based on Luna, an expatriate seizes the opportunity to wrest control of outer space, and takes swift action. The secret to faster-than-light speed is up for grabs, and the race for interstellar space begins! Music of the Spheres The technology for interstellar flight exists through the power of Kinemet, but the key to unlocking its code lies in a thousand-year-old scroll left on Earth by an alien species. When the ancient manual is stolen before a full translation is completed, Alex, Michael and Justine scramble to recover it. Along the way, they stumble on an interplanetary conspiracy and uncover a secret that shatters their view of life and shakes the very foundations of our existence. Worlds Away For a thousand years the Kulsat Armada has ravaged the galaxy searching for the lost legacy of an extinct race of technologically advanced beings. They destroy anyone who gets in their way. Now they have turned their attention to Earth and are gathering their forces for an invasion. Justine, Michael and Alex each hold a key to stopping the enemy, but they are worlds away from each other, and they are running out of time...
The Hunters of Vermin
H. Paul Honsinger - 2017
For reasons Max barely understands, the Vaaach decide that they have an obligation to train him to be a Vaaach warrior, or at least as close as a puny, fruit-eating human can come. Max finds himself on a strange, unknown world, under the tutelage of a nine-foot tall, carnivorous Vaaach drill instructor, learning an alien way of fighting, and stalking and making war. Not only is the training like nothing Max has ever imagined, there's the small matter of the final exam: a real mission involving real combat against real Krag with the life or death of an entire Union naval task force hanging in the balance. Max is going to have to find resources of cunning, creativity, strength, endurance, and courage far beyond his years if he's going to survive and save thousands of his comrades who--unknown to them--are depending on the slender thread of the young officer's abilities for their very survival. The Hunters of Vermin is a short novel (just over 62,500 words, slightly longer than such classic novels as Lord of the Flies and All Quiet on the Western Front), that can be read as a stand-alone adventure or as a part of the longer series of Max Robichaux space tales. Readers who have never met Max Robichaux or encountered Honsinger's fiction before will find a thrilling, self-contained adventure. Fans of Honsinger's other books will gain interesting insight into the events that helped make Max Robichaux the officer we meet in the "Man of War" series, as this novel covers events immediately after the conclusion of the novella Deadly Nightshade and twelve years before the beginning of the "Man of War" Series. This novel packs everything Honsinger's readers expect--realistically staged combat, deep character development, believable aliens, and the thrill of deep space adventure--into a compact package. The Hunters of Vermin is a military coming-of-age story in the vein of the early Horatio Hornblower books, but set centuries in the future against the backdrop of an interstellar war that threatens the survival of the human race.
Crossover
Joel Shepherd - 2001
Cassandra is an experimental design — more intelligent, more creative, and far more dangerous than any that have preceded her. But with her intellect come questions, and a moral awakening. She deserts the League and heads incognito into the space of her former enemy, the Federation, in search of a new life. Her chosen world is Callay, and its enormous, decadent capital metropolis of Tanusha, where the concerns of the war are literally and figuratively so many light years away. But the war between the League and the Federation was ideological as much as political, with much of that ideological dispute regarding the very existence of artificial sentience and the rules that govern its creation. Cassandra discovers that even in Tanusha, the powerful entities of this bloody conflict have wound their tentacles. Many in the League and the Federation have cause to want her dead, and Cassandra’s history, inevitably, catches up with her. Cassandra finds herself at the mercy of a society whose values preclude her own right even to exist. But her presence in Tanusha reveals other fault lines, and when Federal agents attempt to assassinate the Callayan president, she finds herself thrust into the service of her former enemies, using her lethal skills to attempt to protect her former enemies from forces beyond their ability to control. As she struggles for her place and survival in a new world, Cassandra must forge new friendships with old enemies, while attempting to confront the most disturbing and deadly realities of her own existence
The Lost Gunboat Captain
J.D. Oppenheim - 2017
Alone in the cold black with 36 hours of oxygen. Jolo Vargas, Federation Gunboat Captain, is trapped in a runaway escape pod zooming towards Federation space. But will he be dead before he gets there? He's in a tight spot. But he's a war hero, just the type of man who could work his way out of this jam. But there's just one little problem. He doesn't remember who he is. Will he find out his identity and his place in the universe, or will he run out of air on the edge of Fed space?
Space Race
Nathan Hystad - 2021
One grand prize. The Race is on.Arlo Lewis was resigned to his station in life as a supply hauler for one of the Primary Corporations ruling Earth, until an acquisition forces him to re-evaluate his situation.When he’s hand selected to lead SeaTech’s Race team, he struggles to return to the competitive field he abandoned as a teenager.With an eager team, and the promise of a better future, Arlo takes on the challenge, only to find more at stake than the rights to Proxima.Under the threat of a revolution brewing at the finish line, things don’t go as expected.The galaxy will never be the same. But that may be exactly what Arlo needs.Join Space Race today!From the author of The Survivors and Baldwin's Legacy comes a thrilling new series.