MainCategory: SCIENCE FICTION

Emphyrio by Jack Vance

Related Posts
Rich Man’s Sky

A NEW NOVEL OF REAL SF FROM WIL McCARTHY When billionaires control the space program, where does that leave the rest of us? Space: a tycoon’s playground. From a space station full of women to a monastery on the Moon, Read more

Theft of Fire: Orbital Space #1 by Devon Eriksen

At the frozen edge of the solar system lies a hidden treasure which could spell their fortune or their destruction—but only if they survive each other first. Marcus Warnoc has a little problem. His asteroid mining ship—his inheritance, his livelihood, and Read more

Emphyrio by Jack Vance
Date:
MainCategory:
Type:
trope:
Lenght:
Author:
Reception:

Halma is a planet forever shrouded by the mystical epic of Emphyrio. Governed by an antiquated feudal system, all but the powerful Lords are involved in the planet’s arts and crafts handiwork, which is exported and highly regarded throughout the galaxy. Work on machines is punishable by death, and profits are small. From his father Amiante, Ghyl Tarvoke learns that the inequalities of life on Halma can be remedied, and that the answer lies in legend. When Amiante dies a cruel and unjustifiable death, Ghyl begins his quest – to know the true story of Emphyrio.

Fractions: The First Half of The Fall Revolution

Fractions: The First Half of The Fall Revolution
Date:
MainCategory:
Type:
trope:
Lenght:
Author:

the 2 next book are available here

The first half of The Fall Revolution, Ken MacLeod’s landmark modern science fiction series, this volume comprises The Star Fraction and The Stone Canal.

In a balkanized future of dizzying possibilities, mercenaries contend with guns as smart as they are, nuclear deterrence is a commodity traded on the open market, teenagers deal in “theologically correct” software for fundamentalists, and anarchists have colonized a planet circling another star. Against this background, men and women struggle for a better future against the betrayals that went before. Death is sometimes the end, and sometimes something altogether different…

Both The Star Fraction and The Stone Canal won the Prometheus Award on their original publication. They are followed by The Cassini Division and the British Science Fiction Association Award-winning The Sky Road.

Cosmonaut Keep: The Opening Novel in An Astonishing New Future History (Engines of Light Book 1)

Cosmonaut Keep: The Opening Novel in An Astonishing New Future History (Engines of Light Book 1)
Date:
MainCategory:
Type:
Genre:
trope:
Lenght:
Seriesize:
Author:

Ranging from a gritty near-future Earth to a distant alien world, Ken MacLeod’s Cosmonaut Keep is contemporary science fiction at its highest level. A visionary epic filled with daring individuals seeking a place for themselves in a vast, complex, and enigmatic universe.

Matt Cairns is a 21st-century outlaw Programmer who takes on the shady jobs no one else will touch. Against his better judgment, he accepts an assignment to crack the Marshall Titov, a top-secret orbital station operated by the European Space Agency. But what Matt will discover there will propel him on an extraordinary and quite unexpected journey.

Gregor Cairns is an exobiology student and descendant of one of Terra Nova’s first families. Hopelessly infatuated with a lovely young trader’s daughter, he is unaware that his research partner, Elizabeth, has fallen in love with him. Together, Gregor and Elizabeth confront the great work his family began three centuries earlier-to rediscover the secret of interstellar travel.

The Complete LaNague (The LaNague Federation Series)

The Complete LaNague (The LaNague Federation Series)
Date:
MainCategory:
Type:
Genre:
trope:
Lenght:
Author:

“Highly enjoyable and meaningful. This book is for people looking for new ideas and new points of view.” (SF Booklog)

Bestselling author F. Paul Wilson is known for his thrillers and horror fiction, but he got his start as an award-winning science-fiction writer. Here for the first time ever in a single volume are all five novels and all five short stories from his classic LaNague Federation future history arranged in chronological order:

“Lipidleggin’”
AN ENEMY OF THE STATE
DYDEETOWN WORLD
THE TERY
“To Fill the Sea and Air”
“The Man with the Anteater”
“Higher Centers”
WHEELS WITHIN WHEELS
“Ratman”
HEALER

The Weapon Shops of Isher

The Weapon Shops of Isher
Date:
MainCategory:
Type:
Genre:
trope:
Lenght:
Author:
Reception:

With the publication, in the July 1941 issue of Astounding Science Fiction magazine, of the story Seesaw, van Vogt began unfolding the complex tale of the oppressive Empire of Isher and the mysterious Weapon Shops. This volume, The Weapon Shops of Isher, includes the first three parts of the saga

and introduces perhaps the most famous political slogan of science fiction: The Right to Buy Weapons is the Right to Be Free.

Born at the height of Nazi conquest, the Isher stories suggested that an oppressive government could never completely subjugate its own citizens if they were well armed. The audience appeal was immediate and has endured long beyond other stories of alien invasion, global conflict and post war nuclear angst.

Darkship Thieves

Darkship Thieves
Date:
MainCategory:
Type:
Genre:
trope:
Lenght:
Seriesize:
Author:
Protagonist:

Athena Hera Sinistra never wanted to go to space.

Never wanted see the eerie glow of the Powerpods. Never wanted to visit Circum Terra. She never had any interest in finding out the truth about the Darkships.
You always get what you don’t ask for. Which must have been why she woke up in the dark of shipnight, within the greater night of space in her father’s space cruiser, knowing that there was a stranger in her room. In a short time, after taking out the stranger—who turned out to be one of her father’s bodyguards up to no good, she was hurtling away from the ship in a lifeboat to get help.
But what she got instead would be the adventure of a lifetime and perhaps a whole new world—if she managed to survive….
A Prometheus Award Winning Novel, written by a USA Today Bestseller.

Kings of the High Frontier

Kings of the High Frontier
Date:
MainCategory:
Type:
trope:
Lenght:
Author:

Three-time Prometheus Award-winning novelist Victor Koman, who tracked down God in The Jehovah Contract and solved the abortion dilemma in Solomon’s Knife, brings you his epic novel of a past that might have been and a future that will drive humanity’s next stage of evolution: the jump into Space.

America, 1994. Nearly everything seems familiar: the World Trade Center twin towers watch proudly over Manhattan; the Russian space station Mir still orbits Earth; the International Space Station has yet to be built. This America, however, is not quite as we remember it: a sixth shuttle, Constitution, prepares to make its maiden voyage; Senator Ludlow Woolsey III and Dr. Barry Gibbon conspire to place the U.S. space program under the authority of the United Nations Interplanetary Treaty Organization; and the National Security Agency allies with NASA to prevent anyone from challenging the government’s monopoly on Space.

Tammy Reis, NASA Space Shuttle commander, works for the most highly funded, technologically advanced space program in the world. So why do nightmares of the Challenger disaster haunt her sleep? And why does her beloved NASA seem no longer capable of matching the stunning successes of its glorious past?

Billionaire Laurence Poubelle wants to build his own orbital X-15 spaceplane. Can his keen marketing skills overcome a decadent culture hostile to wealth and contemptuous of adventure? Can he single-handedly launch the greatest Space Race in history?

The great-great-great-great grand nephew of Davy Crockett and his cadre of college students secretly build a single-stage-to-orbit rocket-copter in an abandoned warehouse in the South Bronx. Can anyone stop them before their low-rent launch attempt sets the New York skyline ablaze?

Russian nuclear missile commander Col. Vladimir Tuchapski subverts a disarmament treaty to attempt an impossible theft. Can he hijack the abandoned space station Mir and restore the glory of the crumbled Soviet Union?

Rocket engineer Gerald Cooper struggles in a tiny spacecraft-design company in the Mojave Desert. Who wants him stopped — or dead?

NSA operative Montgomery Barron fights to construct his own answer to clandestine launch-vehicle efforts: the orbital killer-spaceplane Huntress. Will he achieve the goal of Project Stark Fist to control the spaceways?

Shadowy black-marketeer and smuggler Marcus Aurelius Grant — hidden from scrutiny in a failed African state — concocts an ambitious conspiracy more daring than anyone can imagine. Tammy Reis — stripped of her astronaut wings for resisting a politician’s brutal advances in orbit — is recruited by the National Security Agency to infiltrate Grant’s inner circle. When she discovers his deepest secret, she faces an impossible choice: duty to her government or loyalty to her heart, mind, and soul.

Across a Billion Years

Across a Billion Years
Date:
MainCategory:
Type:
Genre:
tropes: ,
Lenght:
Author:
Narrator:

A team of space archaeologists makes an astonishing discovery about an ancient alien race in this science fiction tale from “a master of his craft” (Los Angeles Times).
Graduate student Tom Rice is thrilled to embark on his first deep-space archeological expedition. He is part of a team from Earth, venturing out in search of artifacts from a civilization that ruled the universe many millennia ago. Called the High Ones, the members of this long-gone society left tantalizing clues about their history and culture scattered throughout space. One such clue, a “message cube” containing footage of the ancient ones, is more interesting than all of the others combined. It seems to indicate that the High Ones aren’t extinct after all—and just like that, Tom Rice’s archeological mission has become an intergalactic manhunt, one filled with ever-increasing danger that will send the explorers hurtling headlong into the greatest adventure—and peril—of their lives. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Robert Silverberg including rare images and never-before-seen documents from the author’s personal collection.

Probe

Probe
Date:
MainCategories: ,
Type:
Genre:
tropes: ,
Lenght:
Author:
Narrator:

What if First Contact doesn’t come the way we expect it—or with the sort of aliens we expect? When both sides have secrets within secrets to keep, how is anyone supposed to know the truth—or live long enough to tell it? Will it turn out to be the greatest discovery of all time… or the biggest hoax?

Bob Hanson, the chief scientist of a major aerospace corporation, has made an incredible discovery: a wrecked alien spacecraft adrift in the Asteroid Belt. The evidence is compelling—video images from the Prospector space probe he himself had created. The military enthusiastically embraces an investigation of the extraterrestrials, remarkably indifferent to the inconsistencies that begin to appear.

Undeterred, Hanson keeps digging… and finds much more than he had ever bargained for. Soon on the lam, he, and everyone to whom he turns, is hunted. Before long only one conclusion remains unassailable—that his mysterious opponents play for keeps. Are aliens manipulating events on Earth? Did unscrupulous corporate executives invent the aliens in search of giga-buck government contracts? Has the Pentagon fabricated an alien menace for its own purposes?

Or is the truth something really unimaginable?

About the Author

Author of fifteen SF novels (five of them collaborations with Larry Niven) and dozens of shorter works, Edward M. Lerner won the inaugural Canopus Award for fiction “honoring excellence in interstellar writing.” His stories have also been nominated for Locus, Prometheus, and Hugo awards.

The Duke of Uranium (Jak Jinnaka Book 1)

The Duke of Uranium (Jak Jinnaka Book 1)
Date:
MainCategory:
Type:
Genres: ,
Lenght:
Seriesize:
Author:
Narrator:

A “wildly entertaining homage to the best ’60s Heinlein juveniles,” from a multiple Nebula finalist (Publishers Weekly).

Jak Jinnaka’s teenage life in the thirty-sixth century has been nothing but fun—ignoring school, partying outrageously with his beautiful girlfriend, Sesh, and spending his uncle Sib’s huge fortune. But then, while they are out for a wild night of post-graduation clubbing, Sesh is kidnapped by the dangerous, enigmatic Duke of Uranium.

Bruised and battered, Jak wakes up to a whole new reality. Sweet, superficial Sesh is actually Princess Shyf of Greenworld, daughter of the rulers of a powerful faraway spaceport. Kind and slightly dotty old Uncle Sib is a legendary spymaster. And Jak’s whole life has been preparation for the world of espionage . . .

Now, his maiden mission is to rescue his girlfriend from one of the most powerful aristocrats in the solar system—or is it? The world Uncle Sib has plunged him into has wheels within every wheel and hidden forces in every shadow, in this action-packed tale by the acclaimed author of Directive 51 and the Timeline Wars series.

“Rollicking space opera with outlaws, space travel, kidnappings, rescues, chases, and the abrupt coming of age of the protagonist.” —Science Fiction Chronicle

“Barnes plays with old-fashioned space opera in this far-future SF adventure. . . . This is a fun romp.” —Locus