Book picks similar to
Orion Colony by J.N. Chaney


sci-fi
science-fiction
space-opera
audible

Galaxy Outlaws: The Complete Black Ocean Mobius Missions


J.S. Morin - 2018
    His ship, the Mobius, is home to a ragtag crew of misfits and refugees looking to score a big payday but more often just scratching to pay for fuel. The crew consists of his ex-wife (and pilot), a drunkard, four-handed mechanic, a xeno-predator with the disposition of a 120kg housecat, and the galaxy's most-wanted wizard.Along the way, the Mobius crew crosses paths with the Black Ocean's vilest scum, from pirate fleets to criminal syndicates, and most law-abiding scum, including Earth Interstellar Enhanced Investigative Organization, ARGO high command, and the Convocation of Wizards.Time and again, riches lie just out of reach, because for all the talents Carl Ramsey and his crew possess, they've also got an outlaw's greatest weakness: a conscience. Galaxy Outlaws is a collection of all 16 Black Ocean missions chronicling the adventures of the starship Mobius and her crew, along with six short stories. This series is the perfect cure for the Firefly Season 2 blues. It's what you'd get if The Orville took place on Serenity, or if Star Wars had wizards instead of Jedi.

Existence


David Brin - 2012
    Gerald Livingston is an orbital garbage collector. For a hundred years, people have been abandoning things in space, and someone has to clean it up. But there’s something spinning a little bit higher than he expects, something that isn’t on the decades’ old orbital maps. An hour after he grabs it and brings it in, rumors fill Earth’s infomesh about an “alien artifact.” Thrown into the maelstrom of worldwide shared experience, the Artifact is a game-changer. A message in a bottle; an alien capsule that wants to communicate. The world reacts as humans always do: with fear and hope and selfishness and love and violence. And insatiable curiosity.

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August


Claire North - 2014
    Harry August is on his deathbed. Again. No matter what he does or the decisions he makes, when death comes, Harry always returns to where he began, a child with all the knowledge of a life he has already lived a dozen times before. Nothing ever changes. Until now. As Harry nears the end of his eleventh life, a little girl appears at his bedside. "I nearly missed you, Doctor August," she says. "I need to send a message." This is the story of what Harry does next, and what he did before, and how he tries to save a past he cannot change and a future he cannot allow.

A Darkling Sea


James L. Cambias - 2014
    The Terran explorers have made an uneasy truce with the Sholen, their first extraterrestrial contact: so long as they don’t disturb the Ilmataran habitat, they’re free to conduct their missions in peace.But when Henri Kerlerec, media personality and reckless adventurer, ends up sliced open by curious Ilmatarans, tensions between Terran and Sholen erupt, leading to a diplomatic disaster that threatens to escalate to war.Against the backdrop of deep-sea guerrilla conflict, a new age of human exploration begins as alien cultures collide. Both sides seek the aid of the newly enlightened Ilmatarans. But what this struggle means for the natives—and the future of human exploration—is anything but certain, in A Darkling Sea by James Cambias.

All Systems Red


Martha Wells - 2017
    Exploratory teams are accompanied by Company-supplied security androids, for their own safety.But in a society where contracts are awarded to the lowest bidder, safety isn’t a primary concern.On a distant planet, a team of scientists are conducting surface tests, shadowed by their Company-supplied ‘droid — a self-aware SecUnit that has hacked its own governor module, and refers to itself (though never out loud) as “Murderbot.” Scornful of humans, all it really wants is to be left alone long enough to figure out who it is.But when a neighboring mission goes dark, it's up to the scientists and their Murderbot to get to the truth.

Dauntless


Jack Campbell - 2006
    Now its fleet is crippled and stranded in enemy territory. Their only hope is a man who's emerged from a century-long hibernation to find he has been heroically idealized, beyond belief...Captain John "Black Jack" Geary's legendary exploits are known to every schoolchild. Revered for his heroic "last stand" in the early days of the war, he was presumed dead. But a century later, Geary miraculously returns from survival hibernation and reluctantly takes command of the Alliance fleet as it faces annihilation by the Syndics.Appalled by the hero-worship around him, Geary is nevertheless a man who will do his duty. And he knows that bringing the stolen Syndic hypernet key safely home is the Alliance's one chance to win the war. But to do that, Geary will have to live up to the impossibly heroic "Black Jack" legend...

Emergency Skin


N.K. Jemisin - 2019
    The mission comes with a warning: a graveyard world awaits him. But so do those left behind—hopeless and unbeautiful wastes of humanity who should have died out eons ago. After all this time, there’s no telling how they’ve devolved. Steel yourself, soldier. Get in. Get out. And try not to stare.N. K. Jemisin’s Emergency Skin is part of Forward, a collection of six stories of the near and far future from out-of-this-world authors. Each piece can be read or listened to in a single thought-provoking sitting.

Infinite


Jeremy Robinson - 2017
    With Earth no longer habitable and the Mars colony slowly failing, they are humanity's best hope.After ten years in a failed cryogenic bed--body asleep, mind awake--William Chanokh's torture comes to an end as the fog clears, the hatch opens, and his friend and fellow hacker, Tom, greets him...by stabbing a screwdriver into his heart. This is the first time William dies.It is not the last.When he wakes from death, William discovers that all but one crew member--Capria Dixon--is either dead at Tom's hands, or escaped to the surface of Kepler 452b. This dire situation is made worse when Tom attacks again--and is killed. Driven mad by a rare reaction to extended cryo-sleep, Tom hacked the Galahad's navigation system and locked the ship on a faster-than-light journey through the universe, destination: nowhere. Ever.Mysteriously immortal, William is taken on a journey with no end, where he encounters solitary desperation, strange and violent lifeforms, a forbidden love, and the nature of reality itself....HE DISCOVERS THE INFINITE.Jeremy Robinson, the master of fast-paced and highly original stories seamlessly blending elements of horror, science fiction, and thrillers, tackles his most ambitious subject matter to date: reality itself. An amalgam of the works of J.J. Abrams and Ridley Scott, Infinite is a bold science fiction novel exploring the vastness of space and a man's desire to exist, find love, and alter the course of his life.

Destination: Void


Frank Herbert - 1966
    An emergency skeleton crew sees only one chance for survival: to create an artificial consciousness in the Earthling's primary computer, which could guide them to their destination . . . or could destroy the human race. Frank Herbert's classic novel that begins the epic Pandora Sequence (written with Bill Ransom), which also includes The Jesus Incident, The Lazarus Effect, and The Ascension Factor.

Big Damn Hero


James Lovegrove - 2018
    Yet the Browncoats had held the valley for weeks against all odds, before being ordered to lay down their arms. Command stated they refused to send in airpower because the ground war was "too hot." But the soldiers who were there insist that was not true...While picking up a new cargo on Persephone, Captain Malcolm Reynolds is kidnapped by a bunch of embittered veteran Browncoats who suspect him of sabotaging the Independents during the war. As the rest of the crew struggle to locate him, Mal is placed on trial for his life, fighting compelling evidence that someone did indeed betray them to the Alliance all those years ago. As old comrades and old rivals crawl out of the woodwork, Mal must prove his innocence, but his captors are desperate and destitute, and will settle for nothing less than the culprit's blood.

The Caves of Steel


Isaac Asimov - 1953
    Isaac Asimov's Robot novels chronicle the unlikely partnership between a New York City detective and a humanoid robot who must learn to work together. Like most people left behind on an over-populated Earth, New York City police detective Elijah Baley had little love for either the arrogant Spacers or their robotic companions. But when a prominent Spacer is murdered under mysterious circumstances, Baley is ordered to the Outer Worlds to help track down the killer. The relationship between Life and his Spacer superiors, who distrusted all Earthmen, was strained from the start. Then he learned that they had assigned him a partner: R. Daneel Olivaw. Worst of all was that the "R" stood for robot--and his positronic partner was made in the image and likeness of the murder victim!

The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress


Robert A. Heinlein - 1966
    It is a tale of a culture whose family structures are based on the presence of two men for every woman, leading to novel forms of marriage and family. It is the story of the disparate people, a computer technician, a vigorous young female agitator, and an elderly academic who become the movement's leaders, and of Mike, the supercomputer whose sentience is known only to the revolt's inner circle, who for reasons of his own is committed to the revolution's ultimate success.

The Space Between the Stars


Anne Corlett - 2017
    Even though she wasn’t forced to emigrate from Earth, she willingly left the overpopulated, claustrophobic planet. And when a long relationship devolved into silence and suffocating sadness, she found work on a frontier world on the edges of civilization. Then the virus hit... Now Jamie finds herself dreadfully alone, with all that’s left of the dead. Until a garbled message from Earth gives her hope that someone from her past might still be alive. Soon Jamie finds other survivors, and their ragtag group will travel through the vast reaches of space, drawn to the promise of a new beginning on Earth. But their dream will pit them against those desperately clinging to the old ways. And Jamie’s own journey home will help her close the distance between who she has become and who she is meant to be...

Pilot X


Tom Merritt - 2017
    Specifically the Verity. But the Guardians of Alenda, rulers of his people, throw him in the middle of a time war. When he makes peace they don’t seem pleased. In fact, his own people treat him like the enemy.See the book trailer at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHmPs...Pilot X was Tom Merritt’s National Novel Writing Month project in November 2014. Tom Merritt is the host of several podcasts about tech and geeky things.

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.