Showing titles in Hard Science Fiction

Es treibt Antonia Gleichweit – Apothekerin in einem verschlafenen Stadtviertel von Graz – und Martin Moser – Opernsänger mit Talent, aber ohne Engagement – zueinander und auseinander. Es wirbelt das Leben von Erwin Schrempf – Landesbeamter zuständig für die Beobachtung von Sekten, insbesondere Islamgemeinschaften – durcheinander. Und es bringt eine fremde Frau.

Harry can build a perfect android, but no one likes them unless he can make them more human. Harry's dead wife lends a hand, but Eva, the android, hates him. A first contact goes so smoothly that Ethan falls in love with a blue alien, but soon realizes that some erroneous assumptions have been made... An explorer becomes best friends with an artificial person that he found in his salvaged ship, and the mystery of why such a valuable machine was wiped and left for junk haunts them both. Cobb had an interest in both the vast AI systems that ran everything and how they came to be.

An interstellar object is hurtling toward Earth. It isn't natural. When astronomers detect a massive kinetic impactor on a collision course with Earth, the math is undeniable: the impact will be an extinction-level event. Humanity has eighteen months to stop it — or cease to exist. But stopping it requires something unprecedented. Earth and Mars — two civilizations separated by millions of miles and decades of distrust — must cooperate on a mission that pushes physics, engineering, and human endurance to their absolute limits. The science is unforgiving. The distances are real.

In this thrilling entry in the renowned Robot series, interplanetary detective Elijah Baley embarks on a mind-stretching journey after the universe’s most advanced robot is found murdered. Detective Elijah Baiey is called to the Spacer world Aurora to solve a bizarre case of roboticide. The...

A high-stakes treasure hunt…A twisted trail of murder…A secret one woman may die to discover… Number one New York Times bestselling author Iris Johansen last electrified readers with Dead Aim and No One to Trust. Now she offers a new pulse-pounding thriller that takes suspense writing to...

The extermination of Earth is at hand. With his increasingly irrational leadership Basil Wenceslas, chairman of the Hansa, has driven humanity into a corner. His punitive treatment of the Hansa colonies and the Roamers, as well as his refusal to aid an embattled Theroc, have made enemies for the people of Earth.

In 3001: The Final Odyssey, Arthur C. Clarke brings the greatest and most successful science fiction series of all time to its magnificent, stunningly unforeseen conclusion. As we hurtle toward the new millennium in real time, Clarke brilliantly, daringly leaps one thousand years into the future...

George Galen is a brilliant scientist, a pioneer in gene therapy. But Galen is dangerously insane. He has created a method to alter human DNA, not just to heal diseases, but also to "improve" people - make them stronger, make them able to heal more quickly...and make them compliant to his will.

David Ryan is the designer of ELOPe, an email language optimization program, that if successful, will make his career. But when the project is suddenly in danger of being canceled, David embeds a hidden directive in the software accidentally creating a runaway artificial intelligence. David and his team are initially thrilled when the project is allocated extra servers and programmers.

Andrew Harlan’s job is to range through past and present centuries monitoring and even altering Time’s myriad cause-and-effect relationships. As a Technician with the Allwhen Council, he initiates Reality Changes that may affect the lives of as many as fifty billion people – and a million or more of them may be so drastically affected as to be considered new individuals. Above all, therefore, a Technician must be dispassionate. An emotional make-up is a distinct handicap. Then Harlan meets Noÿs and falls victim to a phenomenon older than Time itself – love.

A monstrous apparatus has been found on the surface of the moon. It devours and destroys in ways so incomprehensible to humans that a new language must be invented to describe it and a new kind of thinking to understand it. So far, the human guinea pigs sent there in hopes of unraveling the murderous maze have all died terrible deaths - except the last, now on suicide watch. The ideal candidate won't go insane, even as he feels the end approaching. And now they think they've found their man. Al Barker has already stared into the face of death - he can handle it again.

Could a robot ever show true creativity? Is it wise to trust self-driving cars? Will robotic body parts transform human beings into machines? Will organic technology allow robots to become human? Featuring Dr. Susan Calvin, Donovan and Powell, and the detective Elijah Baley, hero of the Robot novels, this is the ultimate collection of short stories from a genius of the genre.

Hard-core military science fiction at its very best, John Scalzi's The Last Colony is the third in The Old Man's War series. They must save themselves – or die trying. John Perry was living peacefully on one of humanity's colonies – until he and his wife were offered an opportunity these...

In a time before the Foundations, psychohistory’s creator Hari Seldon is made to stand before the Emperor of the crumbling Galactic Empire to present how his scientific theory of predicting the future might be applied to the real world. However, Hari refuses to deploy his theory for political gain, setting off instead with reporter Chetter Hummin in quest of a place to safely apply his theory: Earth, the original home of humanity. All records of Earth have been lost to time. Hari will therefore have to look back into the past, in order to seal the future of humanity for ever.

Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award, June 2023. 'There are few who write science fiction like Ann Leckie can. There are few who ever could' John Scalzi The mystery of a missing translator sets three lives on a collision course that will have a ripple effect across the stars in this powerful new...

The Voyage of the Sable Keech returns to Neal Asher's water-bound world of Spatterjay, teeming with bizarre characters and gruesome monsters. Taylor Bloc is a walking dead man, determined to live again. He also wants adulation, power and control – and will do anything to get them. Of Bloc’s...

Throughout the Fourteen Worlds of humanity, no race is as feared and respected as the Dorsai. The ultimate warriors, they are known for their deadly rages, unbreakable honor, and fierce independence. No man rules the Dorsai, but their mastery of the art of war has made them the most valuable mercenaries in the known universe. Donal Graeme is Dorsai, taller and harder than any ordinary man. But he is different as well, with talents that maze even his fellow Dorsai. And once he ventures out into the stars, the future will never be the same....

One thousand years after Earth was destroyed in an unprovoked attack, humanity has emerged victorious from a series of terrible wars to assure its place in the galaxy. But during celebrations on humanity’s new Homeworld, the legendary Captain Pantillo of the battle carrier Phoenix is court-martialed then killed, and his deputy, Lieutenant Commander Erik Debogande, the heir to humanity’s most powerful industrial family, is framed with his murder.

Neal Stephenson is a blazing new force on the sci-fi scene. With the groundbreaking cyberpunk novel Snow Crash, he has "vaulted onto the literary stage." It weaves virtual reality, Sumerian myth, and just about everything in between with a cool, hip cybersensibility - in short, it is the gigathriller of the information age.

I’m usually alone in my head, and that’s where 90 plus percent of my problems are. When Murderbot's human associates (not friends, never friends) are captured and another not-friend from its past requires urgent assistance, Murderbot must choose between inertia and drastic action. Drastic action it is, then.