Genre Science Fiction

2312: Mars

The year is 2312. Scientific and technological advances have opened gateways to an extraordinary future. Earth is no longer humanity's only home; new habitats have been created throughout the solar system on moons, planets, and in between. But in this year, 2312, a sequence of events will force humanity to confront its past, its present, and its future.

The first event takes place on Mercury, on the city of Terminator, itself a miracle of engineering on an unprecedented scale. It is an unexpected death, but one that might have been foreseen. For Swan Er Hong, it is an event that will change her life. Swan was once a woman who designed worlds. Now she will be led into a plot to destroy them.

Farnham's Freehold

Hugh Farnham was a practical, self-made man and when he saw the clouds of nuclear war gathering, he built a bomb shelter under his house. What he hadn't expected was that when the apocalypse came, a thermonuclear blast would tear apart the fabric of time and hurl his shelter into a world with no sign of other human beings.

Parasites Like Us

Hailed as remarkable by the New Yorker, Emporium earned Adam Johnson comparisons to Kurt Vonnegut and T.C. Boyle. In his acclaimed first novel, Parasites Like Us, Johnson takes us on an enthralling journey through memory, time, and the cost of mankind's quest for its own past.Anthropologist Hank Hannah has just illegally exhumed an ancient American burial site and winds up in jail. But the law will soon be the least of his worries. For, buried beside the bones, a timeless menace awaits that will set the modern world back twelve thousand years and send Hannah on a quest to save that which is dearest to him. A brilliantly evocative apocalyptic adventure told with Adam Johnson's distinctive dark humor, Parasites Like Us is a thrilling tale of mankind on the brink of extinction.

The 3rd Transition

Walter Rothschild has nothing but his work. Estranged from his wife and adult daughter, he spends his days and nights lost in translation -- constantly working and reworking the riddles inscribed on ancient funereal stones. A gifted American Egyptologist, he was hired by the British Museum in London to try to crack the code of one of the greatest remaining hieroglyphic mysteries -- the Stela of Paser. Stuck, with no new inspiration, he meets a seductive young woman who seems interested in him and his work. When Walter invites her back to the museum to get a closer look at his work, she secretly steals an antiquity and disappears. Thus begins Walter's frantic search to repair the damage he's caused. Threatened by villains real and imagined, Walter races against time to win back the antiquity and his reputation, without losing his life in the process. Utterly original and told in electric prose, this is a novel that beautifully weaves together exceptional insight into the inner yearnings of men with a fast-paced plot about ancient mystery and modern conspiracy. Ingenious, witty, and compelling, it is a novel to be savored and urged on all of your friends.

Heaven's War

When it first appeared, the astronomers named the asteroid Keanu.

A Near Earth Object, from a distant constellation, it was headed directly toward our sun.

But when we went to meet it, it turned out to be far more than a huge rock hurtling through space...

The two teams of astronauts sent to explore Keanu discovered it is, in fact, a spacecraft, a giant ship with an alien crew. A ship that had headed to Earth with a mission and a message: Help Us. A brave new frontier beckons. But we are about to learn that it comes with a price...

Without warning, the aliens transport small groups of humans from the competing scientific communities of Houston, Texas and Bangalore, India to the vast interior habitats of Keanu. Their first challenge is to survive. Their second; to discover why The Architects—the unknown, unseen aliens controlling the asteroid—brought them there. And soon a third emerges: they must find a way to take control of Keanu.

Because the NEO is moving again—away from Earth. The Architects are headed home...

Heaven's Shadow

Three years ago, an object one hundred miles across was spotted on a trajectory for Earth's sun. Now, its journey is almost over. As it approaches, two competing manned vehicles race through almost half a million kilometers of space to reach it first. But when they both arrive on the entity, they learn that it has been sent toward Earth for a reason. An intelligent race is desperately attempting to communicate with our primitive species. And the message is: Help us.

World War Z

The Zombie War came unthinkably close to eradicating humanity. Max Brooks, driven by the urgency of preserving the acid-etched first-hand experiences of the survivors from those apocalyptic years, traveled across the United States of America and throughout the world, from decimated cities that once teemed with upwards of thirty million souls to the most remote and inhospitable areas of the planet. He recorded the testimony of men, women, and sometimes children who came face-to-face with the living, or at least the undead, hell of that dreadful time. World War Z is the result. Never before have we had access to a document that so powerfully conveys the depth of fear and horror, and also the ineradicable spirit of resistance, that gripped human society through the plague years.

Ranging from the now infamous village of New Dachang in the United Federation of China, where the epidemiological trail began with the twelve-year-old Patient Zero, to the unnamed northern forests where untold numbers sought a terrible and temporary refuge in the cold, to the United States of Southern Africa, where the Redeker Plan provided hope for humanity at an unspeakable price, to the west-of-the-Rockies redoubt where the North American tide finally started to turn, this invaluable chronicle reflects the full scope and duration of the Zombie War.

Most of all, the book captures with haunting immediacy the human dimension of this epochal event. Facing the often raw and vivid nature of these personal accounts requires a degree of courage on the part of the reader, but the effort is invaluable because, as Mr. Brooks says in his introduction, "By excluding the human factor, aren't we risking the kind of personal detachment from history that may, heaven forbid, lead us one day to repeat it? And in the end, isn't the human factor the only true difference between us and the enemy we now refer to as 'the living dead'?"

Legacy

The New York Times bestselling author of Leviathan and Primeval is back at full throttle with an adrenaline-pumping addition to the Event Group Thriller Series.

The United States is ready to make a triumphant return to the moon, striking out boldly into the solar system in an attempt to regain the confidence of the heady days of the Apollo program. The first of what are to be many missions to the lunar surface was designed to find the frozen water needed to prepare to build a base to launch an assault on Mars.

But a shocking discovery at Shackleton Crater brings the first Prometheus mission to an abrupt halt. Remote robots uncover human skeletal remains and a base that had been destroyed countless millennia ago. The information is sent back to earth where forensic analysis at NASA reveals the corpse to be over seven hundred million years old.

A secret this devastating cannot be kept forever, and the news is leaked to the world. Soon nations are thrown into a head-long collision, pitting governments against their own citizens as the flames of fundamentalism start a conflagration that threatens to engulf the world as a race to return the moon is on.

The Event Group is tasked to unravel the mystery and to offer something that can either explain our ancient visitor or, at least, keep the world from descending into chaos. Colonel Jack Collins once again leads a team of the world's greatest scientists and philosophers on a journey that will take the Event Group to the airless world of space. But while a battle rages over the truth of our heritage, the Event Group realizes that this may not be humanity's war alone. Could something else—someone else—be coming to finish a war that they started almost a billion years ago?

Existence

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.”

The Lost Memory of Skin

Lost Memory of Skin is a provocative novel of spiritual and moral redemption from Russell Banks, the author of Affliction, Rule of the Bone, Continental Drift, Cloudsplitter, and other acclaimed masterworks of contemporary American fiction.  Uncompromising and complex, Lost Memory of Skin is the story of The Kid, a young sex offender recently released from prison and forced to live beneath a South Florida causeway. When The Professor, a man of enormous intellect and appetite, takes The Kid under his wing, his own startling past will cause upheavals in both of their worlds. At once lyrical, witty, and disturbing, Banks’s extraordinary novel showcases his abilities as a world-class storyteller as well as his incisive understanding of the dangerous contradictions and hypocrisies of modern American society.

Dead Lines

For the last two years, Peter Russell has mourned the death of one of his twin daughters—who was just ten when she was murdered. Recent news of his best friend’s fatal heart attack has now come as another devastating blow. Divorced, despondent, and going nowhere in his career, Peter fears his life is circling the drain. Then Trans comes along. The brainchild of an upstart telecom company, Trans is (as its name suggests) a transcendent marvel: a sleek, handheld interpersonal communication device capable of flawless operation anywhere in the world, at any time. “A cell phone, but not”—transmitting with crystal clarity across a newly discovered, never-utilized bandwidth . . . and poised to spark a new-technology revolution. When its creators offer Peter a position on their team, it should be a golden opportunity for him. If only he wasn’t seemingly going mad.

Everywhere Peter turns, inexplicable apparitions are walking before him or reaching out in torment. After a chilling encounter with his own lost child he begins to grasp the terrifying truth: Trans is a Pandora’s box that has tapped into a frequency not of this world . . . but of the next. And now, via this open channel to oblivion, the dead have gained access to the living. For Peter, and for humankind, a long, shadowy night of the soul has descended, bringing with it the stuff of a horrifying nightmare from which they may never awaken.

By turns spine-tingling, provocative, and heart-wrenching, Dead Lines marks a major turning point in the consistently dazzling storytelling career of Greg Bear. Alongside its hero, Dead Lines peers into the darkest place we can imagine and wonders—fearfully—what might be peering back.

The Long War

A generation after the events of The Long Earth, mankind has spread across the new worlds opened up by Stepping. Where Joshua and Lobsang once pioneered, now fleets of airships link the stepwise Americas with trade and culture. Mankind is shaping the Long Earth - but in turn the Long Earth is shaping mankind... A new 'America', called Valhalla, is emerging more than a million steps from Datum Earth, with core American values restated in the plentiful environment of the Long Earth - and Valhalla is growing restless under the control of the Datum government...

Meanwhile the Long Earth is suffused by the song of the trolls, graceful hive-mind humanoids. But the trolls are beginning to react to humanity's thoughtless exploitation... Joshua, now a married man, is summoned by Lobsang to deal with a gathering multiple crisis that threatens to plunge the Long Earth into a war unlike any mankind has waged before.