Showing results for "the quest" in Science Fiction

In the near future in a broken down rural America, Flynne Fisher scrapes a living as a gamer for rich players. One night, working a game set in a futuristic but puzzlingly empty London, she sees a death that's unnervingly vivid. Soon after she gets word that it isn't a game after all—the future she saw is all too real, she's the only witness to a murder and someone from that unreal tomorrow now wants her dead. The story of a young woman caught between two worlds, The Peripheral interweaves two futures to tell a story which gets right to heart of the way we live now.

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.

Between the end of Frank Herbert's Dune and his next novel, Dune Messiah, lies a mystery: how a hero adored by a planet became a tyrant hated by a universe. Paul of Dune begins the story of those 12 fateful years and the wars of the jihad of Paul Muad'Dib. It is an epic of battle and betrayal; of love and idealism; of ambition and intrigue. Above all, it is the story of how Paul Atreides - who achieved absolute power when scarcely more than a boy - changes from an idealist into a dictator who is the prisoner of the bureaucrats and fanatics who surround him.

Now Kirek's a full-grown Rystani warrior with the most powerful mind in the galaxy. During his previous mission, Kirek learned the Zin are about to decimate the Federation. To stop them, he must sneak into enemy territory—and he's targeted just the right woman to help him. When Captain Angel Taylor "finds" the sexy psi-warrior stowed away on her space salvage—and he claims he needs her help—she's cautious. Angel's a self-made captain and barely scraping by with her antiquated ship. But after Kirek promises her sole access to the galaxy's richest salvage haul, she's drawn into his mission.

Surviving in a tough situation is not always the best option; sometimes dying is much better than staying alive. The Academy showed Paladin Yaropolk what makes the world go round: pragmatism and personal gain. Restart was set in motion, but it only makes players more frantic. Now everyone plays only for themselves. Yaropolk faces the same dilemma: be like all of them, or keep his humanity and be known as an odd duck. Because there is only one rule in this world: kill or be killed....

Take the most sophisticated AI-designed mind that has ever existed, encase it in over 50 million cubic kilometres of diamond nano-rods and send it off on a 20-thousand-year odyssey towards the centre of the galaxy. Then screw it all up by allowing 32 million humans to go along for the ride. 

Victor and Eli started out as college roommates - brilliant, arrogant, lonely boys who recognised the same sharpness and ambition in one another. A shared research interest in adrenaline, near-death-experiences and seemingly supernatural events reveals an intriguing possibility: that under the right conditions, someone could develop extraordinary abilities. But when their thesis moves from the academic to the experimental, things go horribly wrong. They become EOs, ExtraOrdinaries, leaving a body in their wake and turning on each other.

The excursion was a mess. Sal's trust in his team is at rock bottom from the actions of another in the final fight. He now needs to enter the Tower and fight demons with the same person who betrayed him. As if that wasn't enough, he's pretty sure the former Super-Rookie and wonder kid on his team is actually a ticking time bomb, just waiting to explode.

One day, the power goes off and the world falls silent. And in two very different parts of America, two very different nightmares are about to begin. In Manhattan, Elizabeth and her brother Henry are all alone in their parents' apartment. Looking out the window, they can see the carnage slowly spreading through the city. But as hopes fade for their parents to come back, Elizabeth and Henry discover that dangers might already have entered the building. 

Humanity is within months of losing an interstellar war to a species of aliens known as Fangrin. Giving up isn’t an option. Victory doesn’t seem like an option either. When Commander Jake Griffin is sent out with the Eternity carrier group to hunt down and destroy enemy facilities, he has no idea what’s coming to him. The planet Graxol-4 out in the middle of nowhere hides a critical enemy base with vital resources just waiting to be stolen.

Lieutenant Becky Keller’s brain is fitted with a processing core which can outthink and outfly the most advanced battle computers in the Space Corps. Joe Nation is packed with so many augmentations, he can’t remember which parts of his body are real anymore. All he knows is covert ops, and there’s no one better than Nation. The pair of them are given a mission - infiltrate the Isob-2 processing facility of a semi-hostile alien species known as Estral and find out if they’re breaking the terms of a peace treaty. 

World War III is a month old. After sinking the Destroyer USS Stacy Heath, the Chinese invade Tibet and India counterattacks. Rather than allow the Chinese to seize control, the US sends 20,000 soldiers to join the fight. The Russians use the opportunity to invade Ukraine. American forces are spread thin, and the decision is made to evacuate all personnel from Afghanistan. Meanwhile, the Russians are holding a training exercise called Red Ice. Except that it isn’t a training exercise.

The Ancient Egyptian gods have defeated all the other pantheons and claimed dominion over the earth, dividing it into warring factions. Lt. David Westwynter, a British soldier, stumbles into Freegypt, the only place to have remained independent of the gods’ influence. There, he encounters the followers of a humanist leader known as the Lightbringer, who has vowed to rid mankind of the shackles of divine oppression. As the world heads towards an apocalyptic battle, there is far more to this freedom fighter than it seems.

Ashley is a time-travel journalist who has fought to prove herself in a world that that believes her road in life was paved by her parents' fortune. After winning a prestigious award, she is selected to travel through time and interview a historical figure. Choosing her childhood hero, Alexander the Great, she voyages back in time for less than a day to interview a man whose legend has survived to the present day. He mistakes her for Persephone, goddess of the dead, and kidnaps her. Stranded in the past, cold and aloof, Ashley has to learn to befriend, to trust...and to love.

Ever since Martin Banks and his fellow computer geeks discovered that reality is just a computer program to be happily hacked, they've been jaunting back and forth through time, posing as medieval wizards and having the epic adventures that other nerds can only dream of having. But even in their wildest fantasies, they never expected to end up at the mercy of the former apprentice whom they sent to prison for gross misuse of magic and all-around evil behavior.

When a human team is sent to scout a few hundred light-years in front of the death wave, it encounters a civilization far in advance of our own, a civilization of machine intelligences.These sentient, intelligent machines have existed for eons and have survived earlier "death waves" - gamma-ray bursts from the core of the galaxy. They are totally self-sufficient, completely certain that the death wave cannot harm them, and utterly uninterested in helping to save other civilizations.

One hundred and ten centuries from now, humanity has spread across space. And all-powerful machines rule the humans who were once their masters. It began in the Time of Tyrants, when ambitious men and women used high-powered computers to seize control of the heart of the Old Empire including Earth itself. The tyrants translated their brains into mobile mechanical bodies and created a new race, the immortal man-machine hybrids called cymeks. 

Fleeing from the monstrous Honored Matres - dark counterparts of the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood - Duncan Idaho, the military genius Bashar Miles Teg, a woman named Sheeana who can talk to sandworms, and a group of desperate refugees explore the boundaries of the universe. Aboard their sophisticated no-ship, they have used long-stored cells to resurrect heroes and villains from the past, including Paul Muad'Dib, in preparation for a final confrontation with a mysterious outside Enemy so great it can destroy even the terrible Honored Matres.

From the acclaimed critic and award-winning author of Anno Dracula comes a bitingly satirical story of superheroism, soap opera and alternative reality -- for readers of Austin Grossman’s Soon I Will Be Invincible and George R.R. Martin’s Wild Cards. When Chrissie Chambers (model actress...

Paul Atreides is the man who overthrew a corrupt empire and then launched a terrible jihad across the galaxy, shedding the blood of trillions. The now-hated tyrant, the blind Emperor Paul Muad'Dib, has walked off into the endless desert of the planet Arrakis, known as Dune, leaving his turbulent empire without guidance. It's up to his mother, Jessica, with her daughter, Alia, the brave troubadour-warrior Gurney Halleck, the resurrected Duncan Idaho, the Fremen leader Stilgar, as well as Paul's wife-in-name and biographer, Princess Irulan, to try to hold an empire together.