Showing results for "One for the Books" in Science Fiction

Humans have been pushed to the brink of extinction by an ever-evolving demonic threat. Portals are opening faster than ever, Towers are bursting into the skies, and Dungeons are being mined below the last safe havens of society. The demons are winning. Quest Academy stands defiantly against them as a place to train the next generation of Heroes. The Guild Association is holding the line but is in dire need of new blood and the powerful abilities they could bring to the battlefront. To be the saviors that humanity needs, they need to surpass the limits of those that came before them.

Still haunted by the disappearance of his little sister, Amy, over 20 years ago, Joseph Bridgeman’s life has fallen apart. When a friend talks him into seeing hypnotherapist Alexia Finch to help with his insomnia, Joseph accidentally discovers he can time travel. His first trip only takes him back a few minutes, but his new-found ability gives him something he hasn’t felt for the longest time: hope.

"In The Falling World", Jade, sister queen of the Indigo Cloud Court, has traveled with Chime and Balm to another Raksuran court. When she fails to return, her consort, Moon, along with Stone and a party of warriors and hunters, must track them down. Finding them turns out to be the easy part; freeing them from an ancient trap hidden in the depths of the Reaches is much more difficult. "The Tale of Indigo and Cloud" explores the history of the Indigo Cloud Court, long before Moon was born.

A teenage mage of humble birth and slightly above-average skill, Zorian is attending his third year of education at Cyoria's magical academy. A driven and quiet young man, he is consumed by a desire to ensure his own future and free himself of the influence of his family, resenting the Kazinskis for favoring his brothers over him. Consequently, Zorian has no time for pointless distractions, much less other people's problems.

A secret buried in the Antarctic. A puzzle unsolved for thousands of years. And a Brooklyn-born master gunnery sergeant who's royally pissed that he has to babysit the researchers sent to figure it all out. But when Patrick "Wic" Finnegan finally sees what the team has uncovered, he can't believe his eyes, nor is he prepared for the violence to come. Soon, the portal opens and unleashes a storm of unbridled fury upon humanity.

When the cultivators came to Earth, they destroyed our entire civilization in a matter of hours. Armies fell, cities burned, and that was before the moon turned red and filled our world with monsters. Now, over a decade later, what's left of humanity slaves under the heels of our Qi-infused masters. The luckiest of us might even become one of them, they say—if we serve the Dynasty well enough and harness the power of Qi. But I want none of that. I'm sick of serving, and I want nothing to do with their world. Instead, I want them to pay for what they did to mine.

Earth has fallen under the influence of the Fermion Party, whose members believe humanity’s future lies in the metaverse, a simulated environment to which people can upload their consciousness to become immortal. As a simulant, one cannot get sick, grow old, or die. Human beings have no business risking their lives in the betaverse, where injury and illness can kill them. And those who wish to explore beyond the solar system blaspheme what the Fermions believe is the natural order.

A company of Army Rangers is sent on an interstellar colony ship to secure a foothold on a dangerous, alien planet through violence of action. Leaving behind a warring Earth flung headfirst into a conflict of mutual assured destruction, the Rangers and the accompanying crew of first colonists are guided on a 40-year journey by an unprecedented artificial intelligence. But when they emerge from the frigid embrace of cryosleep, they awake to a nightmare, finding themselves greeted by the same ruthless enemy that brought about the ruin of Earth.

First Lieutenant Mike Sandhurst led an elite infantry platoon on a rescue mission to Tycho-3. Wearing state-of-the-art ATLAS powered armor, Sandhurst's unit faced down a relentless, wasp-like enemy who tore through them and left Sandhurst for dead.

The Shadow of the Torturer is the first volume in the four-volume epic, the tale of a young Severian, an apprentice to the Guild of Torturers on the world called Urth, exiled for committing the ultimate sin of his profession - showing mercy towards his victim.

Gene Wolfe's "The Book of the New Sun" is one of speculative fiction's most-honored series. In a 1998 poll, Locus Magazine rated the series behind only "The Lord of the Rings" and The Hobbit as the greatest fantasy work of all time.

Every modern city has one week’s worth of food to feed itself. Then it will collapse. Cut off the resources to New York, Sydney, or even a mid-size metropolis, and millions will soon starve. In Zero Day Code we see those immense and open, hyper-complex, networked supercities of the new millennium die. And in the last moments we see their vengeance take form as all the best and worst traits of humanity bubble to the surface.

When Alice Verianna went to sleep, she was just another teen from the Denver suburbs. She definitely didn't expect to be transported to a magical alternate dimension, inhabited by monsters and presided over by a mysterious System. Here, people resemble RPG characters and everyone has access to their own status screens. Grappling with the mechanics of the elusive System isn't the only challenge Alice faces. It seems an underground organization known as the Society of Starry Eyes has taken a particular interest in other dimensions.

Joe Colsco boarded a flight from San Francisco to Chicago to attend a national chemistry meeting. He would never set foot on Earth again. On planet Anyar, Joe is found unconscious on a beach of a large island inhabited by humans where the level of technology is similar to Earth circa 1700. He awakes amid strangers speaking an unintelligible language and struggles to accept losing his previous life and finding a place in a society with different customs, needing a way to support himself and not knowing a single soul.

Merritt Alder is done with Earth. The planet is polluted and overpopulated, and its people are hungry. Earth's first colony, Galena, is a pioneer world 10,000 light years away. It has clean air, unpolluted water, and continents of arable land. Anyone can start a new life…if they can get there. For Merritt, the journey is only the beginning. Obstacles arise every step of the way, forcing compromise and sacrifice. And not everyone on his ship is pure of heart. The bonds he forges on the journey will be the key to surviving on another world—a world anyone has yet to fully explore.

Daniel Rice is a government science investigator whose specialty is solving seemingly intractable problems through scientific inquiry. But Daniel's intellectual strength is sorely tested by the bizarre realities he finds in the quantum world. Extra dimensions of space trap the unwary, probability replaces cause and effect, and time isn't what anyone imagined. The other side of the mirror is a place full of dangers, but it's also somewhere a dedicated scientist can uncover secrets that connect humans with something greater.

Darrow is a Red, a member of the lowest caste in the color-coded society of the future. Like his fellow Reds, he works all day, believing that he and his people are making the surface of Mars livable for future generations. Yet he toils willingly, trusting that his blood and sweat will one day result in a better world for his children. But Darrow and his kind have been betrayed. Soon he discovers that humanity reached the surface generations ago. Vast cities and lush wilds spread across the planet. Darrow—and Reds like him—are nothing more than slaves to a decadent ruling class.

I signed up for a research mission with five other women. Instead, we crashed on an alien planet with too many dangers to count. Separated from the other women, I’m on my own until a huge alien with color-changing skin and a massive sword gets me out of a bad spot. I don’t understand Savair’s language, but I think he’s under the impression that I’m his. I am NOT his. I’m a 34-year old divorced scientist with no time for such nonsense. But if he can help me find the others in my group then perhaps I can play at being “his” for a while.

Elijah Hart is dying. Wracked by cancer and weakened by chemotherapy, all he wants is to spend what little time he has left with his sister and her family in Washington. But fate has other plans. When the mysterious World Tree extends its branches to Earth, Elijah's Seattle-bound flight crashes into the Pacific Ocean and a game-like system takes hold—reshaping humanity's future as well as his own destiny.

Now available in a single collection, the explosive Sons of War series is a harrowing and realistic depiction of what a second American Civil War and the aftermath might look like, from former Homeland Security Disaster Mitigation Officer and New York Times bestselling author Nicholas Sansbury Smith.

In the high mountains of Tibet, rumors are spreading. People whisper of an outbreak, of thousands of dead, of bodies pushed into mass graves. It is some strange new disease...a disease, they say, that can kill in minutes. The Chinese government says the rumors aren't true, but no one is allowed in or out of Tibet. At the Pentagon, admiral James Curtiss learns that satellite images prove that a massive genocide is underway. This is no disease. It's a weapons test. Chinese scientists have developed a way to kill based on a person's genetic traits.