Genre Science Fiction

Snare

The author of the beloved Deverry series (Dragonspell, Darkspell, and The Red Wyvern) turns her hand to a new kind of tale.

On the planet known as Snare, the descendants of Islamic fundamentalist emigrants have created beautiful enclaves, where they can sit on a patio enjoying green grass and "true-roses," but the nomadic tribes live in a much harsher landscape. Where the grass is purple, the trees are orange, and the huge and dangerous sentient Cha'Meech lizards roam the landscape.

Idres Warkannan and his companions seek to find the only man who can redeem their Islamic civilization from its despotic ruler and restore justice to the population. Zayn Hassan, refugee from the despot's service, finds himself living among the tribes of the "comnee," where Healer and Spirit Rider Ammadin, seeing the dangers all around her, is beginning to doubt the gods who are her only protection.

To save herself and her people, Ammadin journeys eastward into war, intrigue, and adventure - and finds more than she bargained for on all counts.

The Racketeer

Who is the Racketeer? And what does he have to do with the judge’s untimely demise? His name, for the moment, is Malcolm Bannister. Job status? Former attorney. Current residence? The Federal Prison Camp near Frostburg, Maryland.

On paper, Malcolm’s situation isn’t looking too good these days, but he’s got an ace up his sleeve. He knows who killed Judge Fawcett, and he knows why. The judge’s body was found in his remote lakeside cabin. There was no forced entry, no struggle, just two dead bodies: Judge Fawcett and his young secretary. And one large, state-of-the-art, extremely secure safe, opened and emptied.

What was in the safe? The FBI would love to know. And Malcolm Bannister would love to tell them. But everything has a price—especially information as explosive as the sequence of events that led to Judge Fawcett’s death. And the Racketeer wasn’t born yesterday . . .

Nothing is as it seems and everything’s fair game in this wickedly clever new novel from John Grisham, the undisputed master of the legal thriller.

Reamde

Four decades ago, Richard Forthrast, the black sheep of an Iowa family, fled to a wild and lonely mountainous corner of British Columbia to avoid the draft. Smuggling backpack loads of high-grade marijuana across the border into Northern Idaho, he quickly amassed an enormous and illegal fortune. With plenty of time and money to burn, he became addicted to an online fantasy game in which opposing factions battle for power and treasure in a vast cyber realm. Like many serious gamers, he began routinely purchasing virtual gold pieces and other desirables from Chinese gold farmers—young professional players in Asia who accumulated virtual weapons and armor to sell to busy American and European buyers.

For Richard, the game was the perfect opportunity to launder his aging hundred dollar bills and begin his own high-tech start up—a venture that has morphed into a Fortune 500 computer gaming group, Corporation 9592, with its own super successful online role-playing game, T’Rain. But the line between fantasy and reality becomes dangerously blurred when a young gold farmer accidently triggers a virtual war for dominance—and Richard is caught at the center.

In this edgy, 21st century tale, Neal Stephenson, one of the most ambitious and prophetic writers of our time, returns to the terrain of his cyberpunk masterpieces Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon, leading readers through the looking glass and into the dark heart of imagination.

Atlantis Code

A thrill-seeking Harvard linguistics professor and an ultrasecret branch of the Catholic Church go head-to-head in a race to uncover the secrets of the lost city of Atlantis. The ruins of the technologically-advanced, eerily-enigmatic ancient civilization promise their discoverer fame, fortune, and power... but hold earth-shattering secrets about the origin of man.

While world-famous linguist and archaeologist, Thomas Lourds, is shooting a film that dramatizes his flamboyant life and scientific achievements, satellites spot impossibly ancient ruins along the Spanish coast. Lourds knows exactly what it means: the Lost Continent of Atlantis has been found. The race is on, and Lourds' challengers will do anything to get there first.Whoever controls the Lost Continent will control the world.

Day Break Zero

In late 2024, Daybreak, a movement of post-apocalyptic eco-saboteurs, smashed modern civilization to its knees. In the losing, hopeless struggle against Daybreak, Heather O'Grainne played a major role. That story was told in Directive 51.

Now Heather's story continues in Daybreak Zero. In the summer of 2025, she leads a tiny organization of scientists, spies, scouts, entrepreneurs, engineers, dreamers, and daredevils based in Pueblo, Colorado. Both of the almost-warring governments of the United States have charged them with an all but impossible mission: find a way to put the world back together.

But Daybreak's triumph has flung the world back centuries in technology, politics, and culture. Pro-Daybreak Tribals openly celebrate ending the world as we know it. Army regiments have to fight their way in and out of Pennsylvania. The Earth's environment is saturated with plastic-devouring biotes and electronics-corroding nanoswarm. A leftover Daybreak device drops atom bombs from the moon on any outpost of the old civilization it can spot.

Confined to her base in Pueblo to give birth to her first child, Heather recruits and monitors a coterie of tech wizards, tough guys, and modern-day frontier scouts: a handful of heroes to patrol a continent. All the news is bad: Tribals have overrun Indiana and Illinois; the last working aircraft carrier sits helplessly out in the Indian Ocean, not daring to come closer to land; the crash of one of the last working airplanes kills a vital industrialist; Tribals try to force appeasement on the Provi government while the Temper government faces a rebellion of religious fanatics; seventeen states are lost to the Tribals as California drifts into secession andhereditary monarchy, and everywhere, Provis and Tempers lurch toward civil war. Her agents have exceptional courage, initiative, skill, intelligence, and daring, but can they be enough? For the sake of everything from her newborn son to her dying nation, can she forge them into a the weapon that can at last win the world back from the overwhelming, malevolent force of Daybreak? Her success or failure may change everything for the next thousand years, beginning from

Daybreak Zero.

Woken Furies

This is high action, ideas driven noir SF of the highest order. Morgan has already established himself as an SF author of global significance.

Takeshi Kovacs has come home. Home to Harlan's World. An ocean planet with only 5 percent of its landmass poking above the dangerous and unpredictable seas. Try and get above the weather in anything more sophisticated than a helicopter and the Martian orbital platforms will burn you out of the sky.

And death doesn't just wait for you in the seas and the skies. On land, from the tropical beaches and swamps of Kossuth to the icy, machine-infested wastes of New Hokkaido the hard won gains of the Quellist revolution have been lost. The First Families, the corporations and the Yakuza have a stranglehold on everything.

Embarked on a journey of implacable retribution for a lost love, Kovacs is blown off course and into a maelstrom of political intrigue and technological mystery as the ghosts of Harlan's World and his own violent past rise to claim their due. Quellcrist Falconer is back from the dead, they say and hunting her down for the First Families is a savage young Envoy called Kovacs who's been in storage.

Destroyer of Worlds

The brilliant, xenophobic Pak are fleeing the chain reaction of supernovae at the galaxy’s core. Nothing and no one is going to impede their migration. Devastated worlds -- any civilization that could possibly have interfered -- lie shattered in their wake. And now the Fleet of Worlds is in their sights.

The trillion Puppeteers who inhabit the Fleet might have the resources to confront the threat -- but Puppeteers are philosophical cowards. They don't confront anyone. They need allies to investigate the situation and then take action. Who better than the Puppeteers' newly independent one-time slave world, New Terra?

Sigmund Ausfaller, former Earth intelligence agent and current paranoid, finds himself leading the war against the Pak. With his own allies, the enigmatic, aquatic Gw'oth, Sigmund prepares to face everyone's mutual enemy. And neither humans nor Gw'oth have any intention of becoming cannon fodder.

Flashback

The United States is near total collapse. But 87% of the population doesn't care: they're addicted to flashback, a drug that allows its users to re-experience the best moments of their lives. After ex-detective Nick Bottom's wife died in a car accident, he went under the flash to be with her; he's lost his job, his teenage son, and his livelihood as a result.

Nick may be a lost soul but he's still a good cop, so he is hired to investigate the murder of a top governmental advisor's son. This flashback-addict becomes the one man who may be able to change the course of an entire nation turning away from the future to live in the past.

The Diamond Age

The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer is a postcyberpunk novel by Neal Stephenson. It is to some extent a science fiction coming-of-age story, focused on a young girl named Nell, and set in a future world in which nanotechnology affects all aspects of life. The novel deals with themes of education, social class, ethnicity, and the nature of artificial intelligence.

StarWars: Choices of One

From #1 New York Times bestselling author Timothy Zahn comes a brand-new Star Wars adventure, set in the time between A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back and featuring the young Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Princess Leia Organa, and the beloved Mara Jade.

The fate of the Rebellion rests on Luke Skywalker’s next move.
But have the rebels entered a safe harbor or a death trap?

Eight months after the Battle of Yavin, the Rebellion is in desperate need of a new base. So when Governor Ferrouz of Candoras Sector proposes an alliance, offering the Rebels sanctuary in return for protection against the alien warlord Nuso Esva, Luke, Leia, Han, and Chewie are sent to evaluate the deal.

Mara Jade, the Emperor’s Hand, is also heading for Candoras, along with the five renegade stormtroopers known as the Hand of Judgment. Their mission: to punish Ferrouz’s treason and smash the Rebels for good.

But in this treacherous game of betrayals within betrayals, a wild card is waiting to be played.
 
Don’t miss the new novella by Timothy Zahn, “Crisis of Faith,” featured in the 20th anniversary edition of Star Wars: Heir to the Empire

How Firm a Foundation

The Charisian Empire, born in war, has always known it must fight for its very survival. What most of its subjects don't know even now, however, is how much more it's fighting for. Emperor Cayleb, Empress Sharleyan, Merlin Athrawes, and their innermost circle of most trusted advisers do know. And because they do, they know the penalty if they lose will be far worse than their own deaths and the destruction of all they know and love.

For five years, Charis has survived all the Church of God Awaiting and the corrupt men who control it have thrown at the island empire. The price has been high and paid in blood. Despite its chain of hard-fought naval victories, Charis is still on the defensive. It can hold its own at sea, but if it is to survive, it must defeat the Church upon its own ground. Yet how does it invade the mainland and take the war to a foe whose population outnumbers its own fifteen to one? How does it prevent that massive opponent from rebuilding its fleets and attacking yet again?

Charis has no answer to those questions, but needs to find one… quickly. The Inquisition's brutal torture and hideous executions are claiming more and more innocent lives. Its agents are fomenting rebellion against the only mainland realms sympathetic to Charis. Religious terrorists have been dispatched to wreak havoc against the Empire's subjects. Assassins stalk the Emperor and Empress, their allies and advisers, and an innocent young boy, not yet eleven years old, whose father has already been murdered. And Merlin Athrawes, the cybernetic avatar of a young woman a thousand years dead, has finally learned what sleeps beneath the far-off Temple in the Church of God Awaiting's city of Zion.

The men and women fighting for human freedom and tolerance have built a foundation for their struggle in the Empire of Charis with their own blood, but will that foundation be firm enough to survive?

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