An odyssey of discovery, from a shattered society through the solar system with a handful of men and women who ride a cold, hurtling ball of ice to the shaky promise of a distant, unknowable future.

    Space-faring humans challenge a godlike superrace for survival in the far reaches of the galaxy in this brilliant new adventure from the author of the "Well World" series.

    The unhuman Moldaug Ambassador to the Tri Worlds Council warned that the Pleiades belonged to the Aliens, and that the Moldaug are ready to attack the whole human race if the Frontier is not evacuated immediately. Would the diplomats of the Old Worlds sacrifice the border colonies in a panic attempt to avert galaxial war? If so, one Frontiersman was prepared to wage a guerilla war all his own!

    Ordered to destroy the comet, he instead discovers that it is actually the shell of a derelict space probe - a wreck with just enough power to emit a single electronic signal...2034: Then a reply is heard. Searching for the source of this signal that comes from outside the solar system, Nigel discovers the existence of a sentient ship. When the new vessel begins to communicate directly with him, the astronaut learns of the horrors that await humanity. For the ship was created by an alien race that has spent billions and billions of years searching for intelligent life...to annihilate it.In the Ocean of Night is a 1977 hard science fiction novel by Gregory Benford. It is the first novel in his Galactic Center Saga. It was nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1977. It was first published as a novelette in the May/June 1972 edition of Worlds of If Science Fiction.

    NASA, NATO, and the UN sent explorers to the asteroid's surface...and discovered marvels and mysteries to drive researchers mad.For the Stone was from space--but perhaps not our space; it came from the future-but perhaps not our future; and within the hollowed asteroid was Thistledown. The remains of a vanished civilization. A human--English, Russian, and Chinese-speaking--civilization. Seven vast chambers containing forests, lakes, rivers, hanging cities...And museums describing the Death; the catastrophic war that was about to occur; the horror and the long winter that would follow. But while scientists and politicians bickered about how to use the information to stop the Death, the Stone yielded a secret that made even Earth's survival pale into insignificance.

    Against this backdrop stands Mallory Ringer, who penetrates the Solid State Entity. There he makes a discovery. One that could unlock the secret of immortality.

    Reprint.

    More than a century of ecological damage, industrial and technological expansion, and unchecked population growth has left the Earth on the brink of devastation. As the world’s governments turn inward, one man dares to envision a bolder, brighter future. That man, Reid Malenfant, has a very different solution to the problems plaguing the planet: the exploration and colonization of space. Now Malenfant gambles the very existence of time on a single desperate throw of the dice. Battling national sabotage and international outcry, as apocalyptic riots sweep the globe, he builds a spacecraft and launches it into deep space. The odds are a trillion to one against him. Or are they?

    It amounts to the sudden and complete abolition of human privacy--forever. Then, as society reels, the same technology proves able to look backwards in time as well. What happens next is a story only Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter could tell. The Light of Other Days is a novel that will change your view of what it is to be human.

    The Earth does not have oxygen; it has all been trapped in The Nitrogen Fix, a novel of the ultimate ecological disaster.

    Heated from below by the planet's seething core, it is the widest, deepest, most fearsome ocean in the solar system.Idealistic young American scientist Grant Archer joins a clandestine expedition to this awesome new world. But Grant does not share the ideals of the scientists he accompanies: he has been planted on their expedition by the New Morality, a religious group that wants to ferret out what the 'godless humanists' have discovered. His mission: to reassure the new religious leaders of Earth that Jupiter holds no intelligent life.But unknown to the New Morality, Grant, though the son of a minister, is both a believer and a man who sees no reason why science and faith can not co-exist. He has come to the vast, planet-girdling ocean of Jupiter with an open mind, and he is about to tell his masters something that may shatter their conviction.

    Surely in an age such as ours when Terra's Sphere of Influence is once again surrounded by Alien Peril in all its sundry guises, it is desirable - nay, vital! - that our people be aware that, contrary to the official records of the Corps, it was not by the questionable efforts of such worthies as Ambassadors Nitworth and Spradley that Mankind held its own in the terrible arena between the stars, but by the courage, skill and daring of such men as Jame Retief! This collection has six Retief stories to tickle your funny-bone. Retief is in prime form, taking on dangerous aliens and his own bosses in the Corps Diplomatique.Contents: Protocol [Retief] (1962) / short story by Keith Laumer (variant of The Yillian Way) Sealed Orders [Retief] (1962) / short story by Keith Laumer (variant of Retief of the Red-Tape Mountain) Aide Memoire [Retief] (1962) / short story by Keith Laumer Policy [Retief] (1962) / novelette by Keith Laumer (variant of The Madman from Earth) Palace Revolution [Retief] (1961) / novelette by Keith Laumer (variant of Gambler's World) Retief's Ransom [Retief • 6] (1971) / novel by Keith Laumer.

    Once he was outbound, where the Society that ruled Earth could not reach him, he headed his starship toward the galactic core, where the unimaginable energies of the Universe wrenched the fabric of time and space and promised final escape from his captors.Then he returned to an Earth eons older than the one he'd left...a planet that had had 3,000,000 years to develop perils he had never dreamed of -- perils that became nightmares that he had to escape...somehow!

    But, because the ship will accelerate to close to the speed of light, for those on board subjective time will slow and the journey will be of only a few years' duration.Then a buffeting by an interstellar dustcloud changes everything. The ship's deceleration system is damaged irreperably and soon she is gaining velocity. When she attains light-speed, tau zero itself, the disparity between ship-time and external time becomes almost impossibly great. Eons and galaxies hurtle by, and the crew of the Leonora Christine speeds into the unknown.

    This remote world is mostly ocean, and it is a rare visitor who ventures beyond the safety of the island Dome. Outside it, only the native Hoopers dare risk the voracious appetites of the planet's wildlife. But somewhere out there is Spatterjay Hoop -- and Keech will not rest until he brings this legendary renegade to justice for hideous crimes committed centuries ago during the Prador Wars.While Keech is discovering that Hoop is now a monster -- his body and head living apart from each other -- Janer is bewildered by a place where the native inhabitants just will not die and angry when he finally learns the Hive mind's intentions for him. Meanwhile, Erlin thinks she has plenty of time to find the answers she seeks, but could not be more wrong. For one of the most brutal of the alien Prador is about to pay the planet a surreptitious visit, intent on exterminating all remaining witnesses to his wartime atrocities. As the visitors' paths converge, major hell is about to erupt in a chaotic waterscape where minor hell is already a remorseless fact of everyday life . . . and death.