Book Club Fiction Sci-Fi Fantasy Science Fiction Space Space Opera Young Adult

The Palladium Wars #4

Descent

Name: Descent
Rating: 4.31 (3486 reviews)
Author: Marko Kloos

Marko Kloos July 16, 2024

4.31 3.5k Ratings

Ongoing Status

12 Views

Start Reading

Synopsis

A nationalist uprising triggers an interstellar wrest for control in an epic novel of embattled worlds by the author of Citadel and the Frontlines series.

POW Aden Jansen has lost a decade of his life to both the war and internment when he’s recruited by the Alliance. He’s to return to Gretia as an undercover Blackguard operative and destroy Odin’s Wolves—an insurgency that’s setting his home world afire. The mission comes with a full pardon and a chance to reclaim his identity. It also means rejoining his friends and family in space. That’s motive enough. If he can succeed—and survive.

Dunstan Park is on piracy patrol to track down the spaceborne arm of the uprising. Meanwhile, the rebels’ insidious terrorist cells are targets for battle-hardened insurgent hunter Idina Chaudhary and her Palladian commandos. As for Aden’s sister, Solveig, she’s put herself in the line of fire before, but discovering who’s bankrolling Odin’s Wolves is as dangerous as it is personal.

As Aden works his way back into the confidence of his comrades, the stealth campaign to sow discontent descends into chaos. At Aden’s legacy, and the very stability of a galaxy struggling for peace against all odds.

Books similar to Descent

Engines of Oblivion

★ 3.99

Karen Osborne

Karen Osborne continues her science fiction action and adventure series the Memory War with Engines of Oblivion, the sequel to Architects of Memory—the corporations running the galaxy are about to learn not everyone can be bought.

Natalie Chan gained her corporate citizenship, but barely survived the battle for Tribulation.

Now corporate has big plans for Natalie. Horrible plans.

Locked away in Natalie's missing memory is salvation for the last of an alien civilization and the humans they tried to exterminate. The corporation wants total control of both—or their deletion.

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Tiamat’s Wrath

★ 4.57

James S.A. Corey

Thirteen hundred gates have opened to solar systems around the galaxy. But as humanity builds its interstellar empire in the alien ruins, the mysteries and threats grow deeper.

In the dead systems where gates lead to stranger things than alien planets, Elvi Okoye begins a desperate search to discover the nature of a genocide that happened before the first human beings existed, and to find weapons to fight a war against forces at the edge of the imaginable. But the price of that knowledge may be higher than she can pay.

At the heart of the empire, Teresa Duarte prepares to take on the burden of her father's godlike ambition. The sociopathic scientist Paolo Cortázar and the Mephistophelian prisoner James Holden are only two of the dangers in a palace thick with intrigue, but Teresa has a mind of her own and secrets even her father the emperor doesn't guess.

And throughout the wide human empire, the scattered crew of the Rocinante fights a brave rear-guard action against Duarte's authoritarian regime. Memory of the old order falls away, and a future under Laconia's eternal rule -- and with it, a battle that humanity can only lose - seems more and more certain. Because against the terrors that lie between worlds, courage and ambition will not be enough...

Hard Knocks

★ 4.52

Nathan Lowell

It pays to take a second look.In the Deep Dark, it's a long walk home.The Marva Collins runs into unexpected problems a long way from port. Faced with some hard decisions, and uncertain about the choices, Ishmael has to roll the dice with inadequate information.Is he sailing too close to the edge of forever?

Pilots Choice

★ 4.51

Sharon Lee

Lee and Miller mix a compelling fictional society governed by a strict code of honor with romantic, funny, touchingly real characters and great storytelling in "Pilots Choice". Its two tales are prequels to "Partners in Necessity", the long-awaited reprinting of their first three novels, Conflict of Honors, Agent of Change, and Carpe Diem. You need not have read their other books before diving into this one. But be you may read straight through until you've finished the sequel to Partners, "Plan B". In Local Custom, Er Thom yos'Galen is at odds with his to match with a proper Liaden bride and provide clan Korval with an heir. His mother observes, "You have consistently refused every contract-alliance the head of your line has brought to your attention for the past three years. Permit me to wonder why." Er Thom can't forget Terran scholar Anne Davis, though they agreed to part. Revisiting her one last time he finds Shan yos'Galen, his son. Shan needs Liaden training and Korval needs his skills. Anne loves Er Thom and knows he risks his melant'i (honor, reputation) if he takes a Terran wife. But she won't be parted from her son. Er Thom and Anne are aided by Er Thom's cousin and foster brother, the Delm (head) of Korval, Daav yos'Phelium. Scout's Progress finds Daav facing contract-marriage himself. Then he meets Aelliana Caylon, a gifted mathematician who needs a pilot's license. Daav becomes her copilot and instructor. Aelliana begins to plan a future far from Liad and her sadistic older brother, Ran Eld, heir to the Delm of her clan. She doesn't know that her friend Daav can't leave with her, and is promised to another woman.

Zoe’s Tale

★ 3.78

John Scalzi

How do you tell your part in the biggest tale in history?

I ask because it's what I have to do. I'm Zoe Boutin Perry: A colonist stranded on a deadly pioneer world. Holy icon to a race of aliens. A player (and a pawn) in a interstellar chess match to save humanity, or to see it fall. Witness to history. Friend. Daughter. Human. Seventeen years old.

Everyone on Earth knows the tale I am part of. But you don't know my tale: How I did what I did — how I did what I had to do — not just to stay alive but to keep you alive, too. All of you. I'm going to tell it to you now, the only way I know how: not straight but true, the whole thing, to try make you feel what I felt: the joy and terror and uncertainty, panic and wonder, despair and hope. Everything that happened, bringing us to Earth, and Earth out of its captivity. All through my eyes.

It's a story you know. But you don't know it all.

Babylon’s Ashes

★ 4.25

James S.A. Corey

The sixth book in the New York Times bestselling Expanse series.

NOW A MAJOR TV SERIES

A revolution brewing for generations has begun in fire. It will end in blood.

The Free Navy - a violent group of Belters in black-market military ships - has crippled the Earth and begun a campaign of piracy and violence among the outer planets. The colony ships heading for the thousand new worlds on the far side of the alien ring gates are easy prey, and no single navy remains strong enough to protect them.

James Holden and his crew know the strengths and weaknesses of this new force better than anyone. Outnumbered and outgunned, the embattled remnants of the old political powers call on the Rocinante for a desperate mission to reach Medina Station at the heart of the gate network.

But the new alliances are as flawed as the old, and the struggle for power has only just begun. As the chaos grows, an alien mystery deepens. Pirate fleets, mutiny and betrayal may be the least of the Rocinante's problems. And in the uncanny spaces past the ring gates, the choices of a few damaged and desperate people may determine the fate of more than just humanity.

The End of All Things

★ 4.01

John Scalzi

Humans expanded into space…only to find a universe populated with multiple alien species bent on their destruction. Thus was the Colonial Union formed, to help protect us from a hostile universe. The Colonial Union used the Earth and its excess population for colonists and soldiers. It was a good arrangement...for the Colonial Union. Then the Earth said: no more.
　
Now the Colonial Union is living on borrowed time—a couple of decades at most, before the ranks of the Colonial Defense Forces are depleted and the struggling human colonies are vulnerable to the alien species who have been waiting for the first sign of weakness, to drive humanity to ruin. And there’s another problem: A group, lurking in the darkness of space, playing human and alien against each other—and against their own kind —for their own unknown reasons.
　
In this collapsing universe, CDF Lieutenant Harry Wilson and the Colonial Union diplomats he works with race against the clock to discover who is behind attacks on the Union and on alien races, to seek peace with a suspicious, angry Earth, and keep humanity’s union intact...or else risk oblivion, and extinction—and the end of all things.

The Prefect

★ 4.17

Alastair Reynolds

Tom Dreyfus is a Prefect, a policeman of sorts, and one of the best. His force is Panoply, and his beat is the multi-faceted utopian society of the Glitter Band, that vast swirl of space habitats orbiting the planet Yellowstone. These days, his job is his life.

A murderous attack against a Glitter Band habitat is nasty, but it looks to be an open-and-shut case—until Dreyfus starts looking under some stones that some very powerful people would really rather stayed unturned. What he uncovers is far more serious than mere gruesome murder...