Showing results by publisher "Blackstone Publishing" in Hard Science Fiction

Juliette, now mayor of Silo 18, doesn’t trust Silo 1, especially its leader, Donald. But in the world of the Silos, there is no black and white—everything is shades of gray. Donald may not be the monster Juliette thinks he is, and may in fact be key to humanity’s continued survival. But can they work together long enough to succeed?

In the far reaches of the solar system, the outer planets - billions of miles from Earth, unknown for millennia - are being settled. Neptune, the ice giant, is swathed in clouds of hydrogen, helium, and methane and circled by rings of rock and dust. Three years ago, Ilona Magyr’s father, Miklos, disappeared while exploring the seas of Neptune. Everyone believes he is dead - crushed, frozen, or boiled alive in Neptune’s turbulent seas.

Grand Master of the Science Fiction Writers of America and winner of countless awards—including the Hugo, Nebula, Edgar Allan Poe, and Bram Stoker—Harlan Ellison proved once more that he was both unpredictable and irrepressible in this second collection of innovative science fiction. Again, Dangerous Visions—the middle installment in a planned three anthology series—includes award-winning stories from incomparable writers such as Ursula K. Le Guin, Gene Wolfe, Ray Bradbury, Kurt Vonnegut, Piers Anthony, Dean Koontz, and James Tiptree, among many others.

Signs of life have been found on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. A group of visionaries led by NASA’s Paula Benacerraf plan a daring one-way mission that will cost them everything. Taking nearly a decade, the billion-mile voyage includes a ‘slingshot’ transit of Venus, a catastrophic solar storm, and a constant struggle to keep the ship and crew functioning. But it is on the icy surface of Titan itself that the true adventure begins. In the orange methane slush, the astronauts will discover the secrets of life’s origins and reach for a human destiny beyond their wildest dreams.

Terraform hones the predictive capacity of science fiction and seeks new, vivid, and visceral ways to depict the future we’re hurtling toward, translating the decay and anxiety that surround us into something else, something unexpected, something that burns like a beacon and upends the conventional ideas of where we’ll end up next. Section by section—Watch/Worlds/Burn—the book takes on surveillance, artificial intelligence, and climate collapse. With a potent roster of established names and rising talents, it confronts the issues that orbit our everyday existence.

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.

On a privately financed orbital habitat above the planet Uranus, political idealism conflicts with pragmatic - and illegal - methods of financing. Add a scientist who has funding to launch a probe deep into Uranus‘ ocean depths to search for signs of life, and you have a three-way struggle for control. Humans can’t live on the gas giants, making instead a life in orbit. Kyle Umber, a religious idealist, has built Haven, a sanctuary above the distant planet Uranus.

This anthology, with an introduction by Robert Silverberg, offers a sweeping survey of robots as depicted throughout literature. Since the Iliad—in which we are shown golden statues built by Hephaestus “with minds and wisdoms”—humans have been fascinated by the idea of artificial life. From the Argonautica to the medieval Jewish legend of the Golem and Ambrose Bierce’s tale of a chess-playing robot, the idea of what robots are—and who creates them—can be drastically different.

It doesn’t matter that Ray Garcia-Strickland’s father was one of the first men on Mars. The now overdeveloped planet has lost its hip factor, its luxurious hotels - like the one Ray’s father manages - overrun with gravity-dependent tourists from Earth. Ray is over the Red Planet. Soon he gets his own chance at interplanetary adventure when an unknown object hits Earth and causes a massive tsunami. Ray heads back to Florida to help family and friends who’ve survived the devastation - and soon learns the so-called natural disaster could have unnatural consequences.

As Chinese and US spacecraft compete to be the first to land on Mars, a former astronaut, his cousin, and four teens from Florida decide to take matters into their own hands. If they can quickly build their own space-worthy ship using scrap metal, appliances, and power tools, they have a chance to come from behind - thanks to an inventive new power source that can propel them to the Red Planet within three days. No guts, no glory.

Imperium is the most expensive structure ever created. Once an orbiting laboratory, it is now a space hotel for the fantastically wealthy. But as the station preps for its first group of space tourists, Dr. Chloe Bonilla, Imperium’s resident biophysicist, finds herself questioning whether babysitting a passel of space glampers is worth the distraction from her research.

For centuries, men and women have manned lighthouses to ensure the safe passage of ships. It is a lonely job and a thankless one for the most part. Until something goes wrong. Until a ship is in distress. In the twenty-third century, this job has moved into outer space. A network of beacons allows ships to travel across the Milky Way at many times the speed of light. These beacons are built to be robust. They never break down. They never fail. At least, they aren’t supposed to.

Not content with investing his fortune and watching it grow, multibillionaire Howard Christian buys rare cars that he actually drives, acquires collectible toys that he actually plays with, and builds buildings that defy the imagination. But now his restless mind has turned to a new obsession: cloning a mammoth. In a barren province of Canada, a mammoth hunter financed by Christian has made the discovery of a lifetime: an intact frozen woolly mammoth. But what he finds during the painstaking process of excavating the huge creature baffles the mind.

Best-selling author Matthew Mather presents the first two books in the Nomad series, now available in a single audiobook collection. Nomad: When exoplanet researcher Dr. Ben Rollins is told by NASA that a massive object in space could end the world, his first instinct is to call his daughter and wife: something is coming, he tells them. We can’t see it, we don’t know what it is, but it’s there. They’re calling it Nomad, and it’s coming fast. Sanctuary: Jessica Rollins survived, but at what cost?

It started the night Geena and Henry broke up. What was that strange light in the sky? A new star? A comet? Neither. It was the death of Venus. As if to commemorate the end of NASA’s golden couple, our neighbor planet exploded into a brilliant cloud of dust and debris, showering the Earth with radiation and bizarre particles as big as bacteria - a 10-dimensional superstring nanovirus that literally eats rock, transforming it into liquid, and then into molecule-size black holes that devour the very fabric of space-time.

Avalon was thriving. The cold sleep colonists from Earth had settled on a verdant, livable world. The fast and cunning predators humans named “grendels” were under control, and the mainland outposts well established. Avalon’s new mainland hydroelectric power station was nearly complete, and when on-line would compensate for the nuclear power systems lost in the Grendel Wars. Humans would have power, and with power came the ability to make all the necessities for life. They would survive. They would not survive as a spacefaring people.

With the Death Wave no longer a threat to humanity, humans have spread out and colonized all the worlds of the solar system. The technology of the Predecessors has made Earth a paradise, at least on the surface. But a policy of exiling discontented young people to the outer planets and asteroid mines has led to a deep divide between the new worlds and the homeworld, and those tensions are about to explode into open war.

It is time to start colonizing the solar system. Ex-astronaut, current space advisor, and all-out troubleshooter for the president, Jake, is determined to make it happen. And what better way than to return to America’s glory by returning to the moon and setting up a permanent moon-base which can then serve as the launching pad for Mars and beyond. But as usual, political intrigue and conflicting priorities are threatening the whole program.

In their Noon Universe novels, they imagined twenty-second-century Earth as a space-faring communist utopia, devoted to guiding the progress of civilization on alien worlds. But as the authors became increasingly disillusioned with life in the Soviet Union, their Noon Universe stories grew darker and more complex as well. The Waves Extinguish the Wind provides the epic conclusion to the Noon Universe saga, as eighty-nine-year-old Maxim Kammerer looks back at his most earth-shattering investigation, which brought an entire era of human civilization to an end.

This collection of science-fiction writings by Jayant V. Narlikar offers listeners a unique glimpse into the world-famous Indian astrophysicist’s vivid and highly imaginative concepts and stories.