First Civilization

America’s favorite astrophysicist has written the most entertaining and universally appealing book of his stellar career: a practical guide for dealing with Alien visitors, an exploration of how it might happen, and a cultural history of our fascination with extraterrestrials. “Ever since...

Orphaned and six and sent to an orphanage, Jericho Rolland discovers an interstellar sim when he’s eight. Soon realizing actual trading like this will be the focus of his life. He applies his massive intellect and drive toward preparing himself for that goal. Knowing he can go to space at twelve, Jericho starts setting things up six months before his birthday. The only resistance he runs into is with the interstellar bank. The bank officials really don’t know who they are tangling with, but they find out much to their regret. At Twelve, when many of his almost always brilliant ancestors...

The oldest stories ever written. The gods who came before all other gods. The myths that built every civilization that followed. Five thousand years ago, in the world's first cities, a civilization pressed its beliefs into clay. Those tablets contained the original versions of the stories the modern world thinks it knows — the Great Flood, the creation of humanity, the descent into the underworld, the hero who could not accept death. The Sumerians told these stories first, told them without apology, and told them with a brutal honesty about the nature of gods and humans that every ...

The inspiration for the Netflix series 3 Body Problem! WINNER OF THE HUGO AWARD FOR BEST NOVEL Over 1 million copies sold in North America “A mind-bending epic.”—The New York Times “War of the Worlds for the 21st century.”—The Wall Street Journal “Fascinating.”—TIME ...

The inspiration for the Netflix series 3 Body Problem! Over 1 million copies of the Three-Body Problem series sold in North America PRAISE FOR THE THREE-BODY PROBLEM SERIES: “A mind-bending epic.”—The New York Times “War of the Worlds for the 21st century.”—The Wall Street...

An out-of-work paleontologist stumbles on evidence that an ancient, non-human civilization that once ruled Earth has returned to reclaim the planet.

The inspiration for the Netflix series 3 Body Problem! Over 1 million copies of the Three-Body Problem series sold in North America PRAISE FOR THE THREE-BODY PROBLEM SERIES: “A mind-bending epic.”—The New York Times “War of the Worlds for the 21st century.”—The Wall Street...

Three thousand years ago, kings on opposite sides of the known world called each other "brother." They traded tin and gold across thousands of miles of open sea. They sent their daughters to marry foreign rulers they would never meet. They wrote letters in a shared diplomatic language, demanding respect, negotiating treaties, and complaining about the quality of gifts. Then the whole system collapsed and none of it survived. The Late Bronze Age — roughly 1500 to 1200 BCE — was the first era of true international civilization. Egypt, the Hittite Empire, Babylonia, Assyria, and Mycenaean ...

Blending history, science, and culture, a stunning and highly engaging evolutionary story exploring how walking on two legs allowed humans to become the planet’s dominant species. Humans are the only mammals to walk on two, rather than four legs—a locomotion known as bipedalism. We strive to...

Who wore the first pants? Who painted the first masterpiece? Who first rode the horse? Who invented soap? This madcap adventure across ancient history uses everything from modern genetics to archaeology to uncover the geniuses behind these and other world-changing innovations. Who invented the...

Fans of Hugh Howey and Kim Stanley Robinson will find much to love in Silo 42: Arrival—a hopeful post-apocalyptic novel about building a better world after the old one has failed. After surviving the exodus from Silo 42 and the long march east to the Atlantic Ocean, the pioneers finally reach the coast—only to discover that freedom is far more complicated than escape. As the community begins building Sunrise Village from the ground up, new alliances, old conflicts, and unexpected realities reshape how they build a resilient life. Calen, one of the silo engineers, is invited into the ...

This program is read by Rosalind Chao, who stars as Ye Wenjie in the Netflix adaptation, 3 Body Problem. WINNER OF THE HUGO AWARD FOR BEST NOVEL Over 1 million copies sold in North America “A mind-bending epic.”—The New York Times “War of the Worlds for the 21st century.”—The...

In December 1872, a self-taught engraver named George Smith stood in front of the Prime Minister of Great Britain and read a story off a fragment of broken clay. A great flood. A man warned by a god. A boat, the animals, the mountaintop. The audience assumed they were hearing a Babylonian rewrite of Noah. They were hearing the source — older than Genesis, older than Homer, older than any text the Western canon had ever acknowledged. Tablet XI of the Epic of Gilgamesh. This is the book about the king, the poem, and the recovery. The historical Gilgamesh ruled the Sumerian city of Uruk ...

Earth already had its apocalypse. Humanity barely survived it. Unfortunately for Major Ethan Irons, that was just the warm-up act. When the scattered remnants of humanity stumble into a much larger problem—namely a galaxy locked in a brutal, centuries-old war—Ethan finds himself promoted from “guy trying to keep a few thousand survivors alive” to “unwilling participant in an interstellar disaster.” Now he’s stuck negotiating with suspicious alien powers, dodging fleets that can vaporize planets for breakfast, and relying heavily on a sarcastic AI who believes Ethan’s ...

The must-read exploration of the earliest human ghost stories from leading expert Irvine Finkel, author of The Ark Before Noah 'It's enthralling stuff, mixing the scholarly with the accessible and placing storytelling right at the heart of the human experience.' - History Revealed There are few...

A 2026 Audie Awards finalist for Best Science Fiction! The inspiration for the Netflix series 3 Body Problem! This program is read by Jess Hong, who plays Jin Cheng in 3 Body Problem. Over 1 million copies of the Three-Body Problem series sold in North America. "[Jess] Hong, who stars in the...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Were World Wars I and II inevitable? Were they necessary wars? Or were they products of calamitous failures of judgment? In this monumental and provocative history, Patrick Buchanan makes the case that, if not for the blunders of British statesmen—Winston...

In 1177 BC, the Bronze Age world collapsed. Palaces burned. Trade networks vanished. Writing stopped. But people didn't disappear. For three hundred years, survivors adapted to a world without palaces, without long-distance trade, without the systems their ancestors had built over millennia. They simplified. They migrated. They forgot old skills and invented new ones. And eventually, they built something new—the foundation of the classical world we still inherit today. The First Dark Age tells the forgotten story of what happened after the collapse: How ordinary people lived when the ...

Updated throughout with recent developments and additional illustrations Reveals how solar outbursts caused the end of the last ice age, unleashed catastrophe upon ancient advanced civilizations, and led to six millennia of a Solar-Induced Dark Age Includes evidence from solar...

“Fifty years later, the world we became—and what we left behind.” Fifty years after the sky opened and humanity learned the truth, the world is unrecognizable. Floating cities drift on antigravity anchors. Illnesses that once defined entire eras have vanished. The planet has healed. War has quietly retired from human vocabulary. And what we once called “paranormal” is now simply physics we were too young to understand. In this final installment of the Disclosure Day series, Dr. Lena Morales—now ninety years old but appearing forty-five thanks to post-contact regenerative ...