At long last, an extraterrestrial civilization reached out and made the First Contact. However, no one on Earth took their communique for the genuine article. In a similar vein, very few people appreciated just how little time our new suzerains had promised to keep our planet safe.
Regardless, the end of their message showed humankind how to access a mysterious game. The objective of this game is unclear. No one can say where its servers are located, and its inner workings are beyond comprehension. But the game slowly gained momentum, pulling in more and more players. Soon enough, it became impossible to ignore the fact that things that happened in the game had a direct impact on our reality. And not only ours…
But as people figure out this mysterious game, the countdown timer ticks away. And no one can say exactly what will happen when Earth’s safety is no longer guaranteed.
Humanity pushed its way to the stars - and encountered the Gbaba, a ruthless alien race that nearly wiped us out.
Earth and her colonies are now smoldering ruins, and the few survivors have fled to distant, Earth-like Safehold, to try to rebuild. But the Gbaba can detect the emissions of an industrial civilization, so the human rulers of Safehold have taken extraordinary measures: with mind control and hidden high technology, they've built a religion in which every Safeholdian believes, a religion designed to keep Safehold society medieval forever.
800 years pass. In a hidden chamber on Safehold, an android from the far human past awakens. This "rebirth" was set in motion centuries before, by a faction that opposed shackling humanity with a concocted religion. Via automated recordings, "Nimue" - or, rather, the android with the memories of Lieutenant Commander Nimue Alban - is told her fate: she will emerge into Safeholdian society, suitably disguised, and begin the process of provoking the technological progress which the Church of God Awaiting has worked for centuries to prevent.
Nothing about this will be easy. To better deal with a medieval society, "Nimue" takes a new gender and a new name, "Merlin." His formidable powers and access to caches of hidden high technology will need to be carefully concealed. And he'll need to find a base of operations, a Safeholdian country that's just a little more freewheeling, a little less orthodox, a little more open to the new.
And thus Merlin comes to Charis, a mid-sized kingdom with a talent for naval warfare. He plans to make the acquaintance of King Haarahld and Crown Prince Cayleb, and maybe, just maybe, kick off a new era of invention. Which is bound to draw the attention of the Church...and, inevitably, lead to war.
Honor Harrington in trouble: Having made him look the fool, she's been exiled to Basilisk Station in disgrace and set up for ruin by a superior who hates her. Her demoralized crew blames her for their ship's humiliating posting to an out-of-the-way picket station. The aborigines of the system's only habitable planet are smoking homicide-inducing hallucinogens. Parliament isn't sure it wants to keep the place; the major local industry is smuggling, the merchant cartels want her head; the star-conquering, so-called "Republic" of Haven is Up to Something; and Honor Harrington has a single, over-age light cruiser with an armament that doesn't work to police the entire star system.
But the people out to get her have made one mistake.
A race for survival among the stars... Humanity's last survivors escaped earth's ruins to find a new home. But when they find it, can their desperation overcome its dangers?
WHO WILL INHERIT THIS NEW EARTH?
The last remnants of the human race left a dying Earth, desperate to find a new home among the stars. Following in the footsteps of their ancestors, they discover the greatest treasure of the past age—a world terraformed and prepared for human life.
But all is not right in this new Eden. In the long years since the planet was abandoned, the work of its architects has borne disastrous fruit. The planet is not waiting for them, pristine and unoccupied. New masters have turned it from a refuge into mankind's worst nightmare.
Now two civilizations are on a collision course, both testing the boundaries of what they will do to survive. As the fate of humanity hangs in the balance, who are the true heirs of this new Earth?
Special Circumstances had always been the Contact section's moral espionage weapon, the very cutting edge of the Culture's interfering diplomatic policy, the élite of the élite in a society which abhorred élitism. The man known as Cheradenine Zakalwe was one of SC's foremost agents, changing the destiny of planets to suit the Culture through intrigue, dirty tricks or military action.
The woman known as Diziet Sma had plucked him from obscurity and pushed him towards his present eminence, but despite all their dealings she did not know him as well as she thought.
The drone known as Skaffen-Amtiskaw knew both of these people. It had once saved the woman's life by massacring her attackers in a particularly bloody manner. It believed the man to be a burnt-out case. But not even its machine intelligence could see the horrors in his past.
In this brilliant, multilayered book, Iain Banks explores once again the universe of the Culture, which he has previously visited in Consider Phlebas and The Player of Games. Ferociously intelligent, both witty and horrific, Use of Weapons leaves no doubt that Banks is now the outstanding writer of science fiction in Britain.
National best-selling author and winner of three Hugo Awards, C.J. Cherryh returns to the universe of her acclaimed Foreigner trilogy-with an epic tale of the survivors of a lost spacecraft stranded on a planet inhabited by a hostile, sentient race.
The beginning of a second trilogy, Precursor follows a single human delegate living among aliens, who are just gaining access to space....
Praise for Precursor...
"An addition to Cherryh's superior alien-contact series...Another intriguing human/alien struggle."-Kirkus Reviews"A powerful look at the effects of alienation on individuals and societies."-Locus
...and C.J. Cherryh's Foreigner Universe:
"Superlatively drawn aliens and characterization...a return to the anthropological science fiction in which [Cherryh] has made such a name is a double pleasure."-Chicago Sun-Times
"An incisive study-in-contrast of what it means to be human."-Library Journal
THE CLONED STRANGERS Not everyone would envy young Lord Miles Naismith Vorkosigan, even though he had formed his own mercenary fleet before attending the naval academy, and even though his mother was the beautiful Cordelia, the ship captain who has taught the Lords of Barrayar much about the perils of sexism. Even the fact that Miles is third in line to the throne and personally owns a major chunk of his home planet would not tempt any normal person to change places with him.
When assassins came to rid the world of his father, his mother, pregnant with Miles, was in the line of fire, and Miles was but an egg for the omelet in an all too literal sense. Thanks to heroic medical intervention, Miles survived his near fatal brush with war gas-as a pain-filled dwarf with bones as weak and brittle as some malign composite of chalk and glass. Miles is often mistaken for a mutant by his mutant loathing countrymen.
But there is one who does envy him, who wants to be him: his brother, his cloned stranger formed from tissue stolen from Miles when he was a child. For Mark Vorkosigan was created and raised up for only one purpose: to become Miles, to murder and replace him. In Brothers in Arms that conspiracy was routed and Mark made more or less compliant to his new Miles-less fate. But in the intervening years Mark has learned that without Miles he is . . . nothing. The new and better Mark doesn't really want to kill his brother, but still it may come to that: Mark to stay, Miles to go. . . .
Abaddon's Gate is the third book in the New York Times bestselling Expanse series.
For generations, the solar system - Mars, the Moon, the Asteroid Belt - was humanity's great frontier. Until now. The alien artefact working through its program under the clouds of Venus has emerged to build a massive structure outside the orbit of Uranus: a gate that leads into a starless dark.
Jim Holden and the crew of the Rocinante are part of a vast flotilla of scientific and military ships going out to examine the artefact. But behind the scenes, a complex plot is unfolding, with the destruction of Holden at its core. As the emissaries of the human race try to find whether the gate is an opportunity or a threat, the greatest danger is the one they brought with them.
In the wake of unexpected planetary peace and the disappearance of the Dendarii payroll, mercenary captain Miles Naismith attempts to discover the link between the insufferable Captain Galeni and the Komarran rebel expatriates. Reissue.
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