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Binary Storm by Christopher Hinz
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Out of the Dark
David Weber - 2010
So when the Hegemony Survey Force encountered a world whose so-called "sentients" "humans," they called themselves—were almost as bad as the Shongairi themselves, it seemed reasonable to use the Shongairi to neutralize them before they could become a second threat to galactic peace. And if the Shongairi took a few knocks in the process, all the better.
Now, Earth is conquered. The Shongairi have arrived in force, and humanity's cities lie in radioactive ruins. In mere minutes, more than half the human race has died.
Master Sergeant Stephen Buchevsky, who thought he was being rotated home from his latest tour in Afghanistan, finds himself instead prowling the back country of the Balkans, dodging alien patrols and trying to organize scattered survivors without getting killed. And in the southeastern US, firearms instructor and former Marine Dave Dvorak finds himself at the center of a growing network of resistance putting his extended family at lethal risk, but what else can you do?
On the face of it, Buchevsky's and Dvorak's chances look bleak, as do prospects for the rest of the surviving human race. But it may well be that Shongairi and the Hegemony alike have underestimated the inhabitants of that strange planet called Earth
Yesterday's Kin
Nancy Kress - 2014
A deadly cloud of spores has already infected and killed the inhabitants of two worlds. Now that plague is heading for Earth, and threatens humans and aliens alike. Can either species be trusted to find the cure?Geneticist Marianne Jenner is immersed in the desperate race to save humanity, yet her family is tearing itself apart. Siblings Elizabeth and Ryan are strident isolationists who agree only that an alien conspiracy is in play. Marianne’s youngest, Noah, is a loner addicted to a drug that constantly changes his identity. But between the four Jenners, the course of human history will be forever altered. Earth’s most elite scientists have ten months to prevent human extinction—and not everyone is willing to wait.
Nexus
Ramez Naam - 2012
There are some who want to improve it. There are some who want to eradicate it. And there are others who just want to exploit it.When a young scientist is caught improving Nexus, he’s thrust over his head into a world of danger and international espionage – for there is far more at stake than anyone realizes.From the halls of academe to the halls of power, from the headquarters of an elite US agency in Washington DC to a secret lab beneath a top university in Shanghai, from the underground parties of San Francisco to the illegal biotech markets of Bangkok, from an international neuroscience conference to a remote monastery in the mountains of Thailand – Nexus is a thrill ride through a future on the brink of explosion.
SecondWorld
Jeremy Robinson - 2012
A week into his stay, strange red flakes descend from the surface. Scores of fish are dead and dying, poisoned by the debris that turns to powder in Miller’s fingers and tastes like blood.Miller heads for the surface, ready to fight whoever is polluting on his watch. But he finds nothing. No ships. No polluters.No oxygen.Instead, he finds a cloudless sky full of red particles dropping like snow and coating the ocean with a thick film that stretches to the horizon. When a dead blue whale collides with Aquarius, Miller begins a harrowing race to escape the affected area. Cut off from the rest of the world and surrounded by death, Miller makes his way to Miami where he discovers just one survivor, and the awful truth: the strange phenomenon that robbed the air of its life giving oxygen was an attack by an enemy reborn from the ashes of World War II. And they’re just getting started. Miami, Tel Aviv, and Tokyo have all been destroyed. Millions are dead.And if Miller can’t track down and stop those responsible in seven days, the rest of the world is next.
Amortals
Matt Forbeck - 2010
Matt Forbeck arrives as the new king of high-concept - with a blockbuster action movie in a book. In the near future, scientists solve the problem of mortality by learning how to backup and restore a persons memories into a vat-bred clone. When Secret Service agent Ronan "Methusaleh" Dooley is brutally murdered, he's brought back from the dead one more time to hunt his killer, but this time those who wanted him dead are much closer to home.FILE UNDER: Science Fiction [Future Thriller / Cheat Death / Rogue Agents / Who Killed Who?]
We Can Remember It for You Wholesale
Philip K. Dick - 1966
The valleys, he thought. What would it be like to trudge among them? Great and greater yet: the dream grew as he became fully conscious, the dream and the yearning. He could almost feel the enveloping presence of the other world, which only Government agents and high officials had seen. A clerk like himself? Not likely.Novellete-length, this story is the inspiration behind the popular Total Recall movies from 1990 and 2012.
Fire with Fire
Charles E. Gannon - 2013
2105, September: Intelligence Analyst Caine Riordan uncovers a conspiracy on Earth’s Moon—a history-changing clandestine project—and ends up involuntarily cryocelled for his troubles. Twelve years later, Riordan awakens to a changed world. Humanity has achieved faster-than-light travel and is pioneering nearby star systems. And now, Riordan is compelled to become an inadvertent agent of conspiracy himself. Riordan’s mission: travel to a newly settled world and investigate whether a primitive local species was once sentient—enough so to have built a lost civilization.However, arriving on site in the Delta Pavonis system, Caine discovers that the job he’s been given is anything but secret or safe. With assassins and saboteurs dogging his every step, it's clear that someone doesn't want his mission to succeed. In the end, it takes the broad-based insights of an intelligence analyst and a matching instinct for intrigue to ferret out the truth: that humanity is neither alone in the cosmos nor safe. Earth is revealed to be the lynchpin planet in an impending struggle for interstellar dominance, a struggle into which it is being irresistibly dragged. Discovering new dangers at every turn, Riordan must now convince the powers-that-be that the only way for humanity to survive as a free species is to face the perils directly—and to fight fire with fire.
First Shift: Legacy
Hugh Howey - 2012
A simple pill, it had been discovered, could wipe out the memory of any traumatic event.At almost the same moment in humanity’s broad history, mankind had discovered the means for bringing about its utter downfall. And the ability to forget it ever happened.
Warp Speed
Travis S. Taylor - 2004
Neal Anson Clemons, brilliant physicist and martial arts expert, was born at the very moment that men first landed on the moon, and his dream had always been to find a way to travel to the stars. And now he and his team have achieved a breakthrough, both in building a warp drive, and finding a new energy source powerful enough to make the drive more than an interesting theoretical concept. With the help of a beautiful Air Force Major and astronaut, Tabitha Ames, the US Government has funded the project, including assembly in orbit of the first faster-than-light probe. Unfortunately, forces working behind the scenes have much darker dreams, and they do not hesitate to blow up a space shuttle, attempt to kill Neal and Tabitha, and use the stolen warp technology to start what they expect to be a short victorious war with the United States. But Neal has ideas for using warp drive completely unsuspected by America's enemies, and repelling the all-out attack is only the beginning of a titanic struggle to reach the stars.
Orion
Ben Bova - 1984
He is an eternal warrior destined to combat the Dark Lord through all time for dominion of the Earth. Follow him, servant of a great race, as he battles his enemy down the halls of time, from the caves of our ancestors to the final confrontation under the hammer of nuclear annihilation.
Infomocracy
Malka Ann Older - 2016
The corporate coalition party Heritage has won the last two elections. With another election on the horizon, the Supermajority is in tight contention, and everything's on the line.With power comes corruption. For Ken, this is his chance to do right by the idealistic Policy1st party and get a steady job in the big leagues. For Domaine, the election represents another staging ground in his ongoing struggle against the pax democratica. For Mishima, a dangerous Information operative, the whole situation is a puzzle: how do you keep the wheels running on the biggest political experiment of all time, when so many have so much to gain?Infomocracy is Malka Older's debut novel.
Mass Effect: Revelation
Drew Karpyshyn - 2007
After discovering a cache of Prothean technology on Mars in 2148, humanity is spreading to the stars; the newest interstellar species, struggling to carve out its place in the greater galactic community.
On the edge of colonized space, ship commander and Alliance war hero David Anderson investigates the remains of a top secret military research station; smoking ruins littered with bodies and unanswered questions. Who attacked this post and for what purpose? And where is Kahlee Sanders, the young scientist who mysteriously vanished from the base hours before her colleagues were slaughtered?Sanders is now the prime suspect, but finding her creates more problems for Anderson than it solves. Partnered with a rogue alien agent he can't trust and pursued by an assassin he can't escape, Anderson battles impossible odds on uncharted worlds to uncover a sinister conspiracy . . . one he won't live to tell about. Or so the enemy thinks.
Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000
L. Ron Hubbard - 1982
Earth has been dominated for 1,000 years by an alien invader—and man is an endangered species. From the handful of surviving humans a courageous leader emerges—Jonnie Goodboy Tyler, who challenges the invincible might of the alien Psychlo empire in a battle of epic scale, danger and intrigue with the fate of the Earth and of the universe in the tenuous balance.
All Flesh is Grass
Clifford D. Simak - 1965
It's been put there by a galactic intelligence intent on imposing harmony and cooperation on the different peoples of the universe. But to the inhabitants, the barrier evokes stark terror.
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.