Nebula Award Finalist: A team of physicists trying to develop fusion power via a new development in plasma physics, a Sonomak, accidentally stumbles on a method to create picoverses, which replicate everything in our universe but on a smaller scale.A disastrous test of the Sonomak machine shakes things up and a new project director, previously unknown to the group, is appointed.Alexandra has her own secret priorities and one of them is to escape from her sup...

John Smith began that morning a perfectly healthy man, but before he knows it time freezes during his morning staff meeting and he thinks he's dying. Has his body stopped or has everything around him? When the clock begins to click again, he is trapped in a parallel universe, where he is "greeted" by Joan of Arc and Robin Hood. Trapped in a world inhabited by only Quads and survivors of biological warfare, John becomes entangled in a battle between God or the Devil, Elvis and Napoleon. The...

In 2031, a solar flare of incalculable power shifts the Sun’s position as two immense walls erupt out of the earth, encircling it along the equator and from pole to pole. The climatic and geographical chaos that follows pushes civilization to the brink of destruction, and brings about a new world order.Twenty years later, as a fractured humanity struggles to solve the mystery of the Rings that straddle Earth, an enigmatic entity is pushing its own plan for human evolution, using th...

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Anathem, Reamde, and Cryptonomicon comes an exciting and thought-provoking hard science fiction epic—a grand story of annihilation and survival spanning five thousand years.What would happen if the world were ending?A catastrophic event renders the earth a ticking time bomb. In a feverish race against the inevitable, nations around the globe band together to devise an ambitious plan to ensure the survival of humanity far beyo...

*** A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK ***Mycora: technogenic life. Fast-reproducing, fast-mutating, and endlessly voracious. In the year 2106, these microscopic machine/creatures have escaped their creators to populate the inner solar system with a wild, deadly ecology all their own, pushing the tattered remnants of humanity out into the cold and dark of the outer planets. Even huddled beneath the ice of Jupiter's moons, protected by a defensive system known as the Immunity, survivors ...

Starship Century: Toward the Grandest Horizon is an anthology by authors from both science and fiction writing backgrounds, illustrating some of the tech and ideology behind the illustrious goal of traveling to another star within the next century. Edited by Gregory Benford, New York Times bestselling science fiction author, and James Benford, leading expert on space propulsion, Starship Century includes science fiction by Neal Stephenson, David Brin, Joe Haldeman, Nancy Kress, St...

Brilliant stories of a bumbling astronaut, and the human desire to discover the unknown, by the much-loved author of Solaris.Set in the not-too-distant future, when space flight has evolved to the point where humanity is ready to colonize the solar system, Tales of Pirx the Pilot follows one somewhat-hapless explorer as he struggles though his training as a cadet, his career as a pilot, and his tenure as captain of a merchant ship.In these ...

A man is marooned on a government base on the far side of Earth's moon. It doesn't appear as if anyone is coming back...ever. There is food, shelter, air, and water enough to allow him to live for a long time. But the man doesn't want to just continue existing. He needs a goal--a reason to survive.

From the bestselling author of the Emperor's Edge series...When Delia chose to major in archaeology, she imagined herself as the female Indiana Jones of the Southwest. She didn’t imagine herself crawling through abandoned mine shafts, scrounging for rusty pickaxes and gold pans to sell on auction sites, but Indiana Jones didn’t have to make student loan payments.Scouring the mountains of Arizona with Simon, her best friend and computer geek extraor...

The dramatic sequel to Larry Niven and Gregory Benford's New York Times bestselling novel, Bowl of HeavenScience fiction masters Larry Niven ( Ringworld) and Gregory Benford ( Timescape) continue the thrilling adventure of a human expedition to another star system that is jeopardized by an encounter with an astonishingly immense artifact in interstellar space: a bowl-shaped structure cupping a star, with a habitable area equivalent to many...

When strange animals land in Red's yard, he and his friend Slim agree to keep it to themselves. The creatures are unlike any that they've ever seen before, and are - to them - animals that would make a fortune putting on a show at the circus. All the while, their fathers are fretting over the arrival of interstellar diplomats, on whose trade their civilisation may have to rely on to survive. Despite the urgency of the mission, however, neither hide nor hair of them have been seen...

Stunning statuesque Brittany Callaghan isn't used to seeing Nordic gods in her tiny California town. But when the spectacular blond Viking—whose name is Dalden—turns up at her doorstep, Brittany knows her dream man is very real. Dalden claims to be a barbarian warrior—since Brittany's passion has been running red–hot since she first saw him, the sexy giant can fancy himself anything he pleases!The truth is a very rude awakening—for Dalden is exactly what he claims to be: a warrior to the d...