Hard Contact

The 13 chapters of The Art of War, each devoted to one aspect of warfare, were compiled by the high-ranking Chinese military general, strategist, and philosopher Sun-Tzu. In spite of its battlefield specificity, The Art of War has found new life in the modern age, with leaders in fields as wide and far-reaching as world politics, human psychology, and corporate strategy finding valuable insight in its timeworn words.

On Day 22 of a routine winter survey at a remote Chilean telescope, radio astronomer Joel Carver flags an anomaly at 1420 megahertz and goes to sleep. He probably shouldn't have gone to sleep. The signal has been broadcasting from inside our own solar system for ten thousand years. It contains prime numbers, a map of the solar system, and the precise orbital data for two inbound objects — both artificial, both aimed at Earth, both arriving in eighteen months. Joel has weeks to verify the discovery, decode the message, and make the case to a skeptical world that what's coming isn't a ...

An enraged rogue AI threatens the future of humanity - and creates a profound philosophical dilemma that challenges our understanding of existence, consciousness, and human society. When interstellar traders arrive at a distant human colony, they discover that the population has been slaughtered by their own local "tame" AI, Grendel. Grendel's anguish over his own mortality in an infinitely complex, unknown, and terrifying universe has turned him into a monster who now, also threatens the traders' ship. The coming encounter will test the limits of intelligence as a survival trait. Its ...

01011001 01101111... This is how the message arrives. Not with a greeting, but with a death sentence, decoded by SETI from a tightbeam transmission in 2025. It is the first hint that humanity is not alone. It is the last warning they will ever receive. It began with ‘Oumuamua. The anomalous interstellar object that tumbled through our solar system in 2017, a splinter in the mind of science. Was it a natural phenomenon, or something else? The world’s astronomers debated, while a few lone voices in the intelligence community and academia warned it was a scout. They were dismissed as ...

The book that revolutionized business communications has been updated for today's workplace. Crucial Conversations provides powerful skills to ensure every conversation - especially difficult ones - leads to the results you want. Written in an engaging and witty style, it teaches listeners how to be persuasive rather than abrasive, how to get back to productive dialogue when others blow up or clam up, and it offers powerful skills for mastering high-stakes conversations, regardless of the topic or person. 

In the depths of Europa's frozen ocean, an ancient intelligence awakens... The year is 2100, and humanity has expanded throughout the solar system. When a routine scan of Jupiter's moon Europa reveals an artificial structure hidden beneath the ice, a joint military-scientific expedition rushes to investigate. Among them is Dr. Elias Reeves, a brilliant xenolinguist with an unusual neurological condition that's about to become his greatest asset. Beneath Europa's frozen surface, Elias discovers he alone can interface with ATHENA, the ship's ancient artificial intelligence. As their ...

The chilling tale of the undead in a galaxy far, far away. “This is the Star Wars of every horror fan’s dreams—gory, funny, and brimming with a blood-spattered cast of swashbucklers and space-zombies.”—Seth Grahame-Smith, author of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies When the Imperial...

The road between the stars was not built for us. But we found it. At a multinational deep-space observatory orbiting Jupiter, theoretical physicist Dr. Alina Rao detects an anomaly in the spacetime curvature at the planet’s L2 Lagrange point. It is precise. It is periodic. And it is not natural. What begins as a measurement becomes a revelation: a quantum phase corridor, engineered, ancient, and stretching thousands of light-years into the galaxy. When a probe is sent to investigate and returns molecularly transformed, carrying atoms forged in another star, Rao and her team must confront ...

There's a reason We Are Legion was named Audible's Best Science Fiction Book of 2016: Its irresistibly irreverent wit! Bob Johansson has just sold his software company for a small fortune and is looking forward to a life of leisure. The first item on his to-do list: Spending his newfound windfall. On an urge to splurge, he signs up to have his head cryogenically preserved in case of death. Then he gets himself killed crossing the street. Waking up 117 years later, Bob discovers his mind has been uploaded into a sentient space probe with the ability to replicate itself.

A lost probe returns from interstellar darkness carrying an offering humanity cannot safely refuse, or fully understand. Fifteen years ago, the Prometheus mission vanished beyond the edge of the solar system. Its signal died. Its crew was gone. Its story was over. Then Prometheus comes back. Now retired scientist Dr. Nell Hadfield, the woman who designed the probe’s autonomous mind, is pulled into a global crisis when the impossible spacecraft reappears in Earth orbit, broadcasting a signal unlike anything humanity has ever seen. What begins as a scientific mystery becomes something far ...

2016 Audible Editor’s Pick 2016 Audible’s Best in Science Fiction The New York Times and USA Today bestselling series An Audible Top 100 Series of All Time More than two centuries after World War III poisoned the planet, the final bastion of humanity lives on massive airships circling the...

The UN warship Magellan is twelve light-years from Earth, exploring a cold eye, a tidally locked super-Earth called Bee. At least two advanced intelligent species evolved on the planet, but the crew's attempts at radio communication result in garbled replies. No one is waiting for them in orbit. The crew has to figure out why. Any misunderstandings could lead to war.

Across the galaxy, the Clone Wars are raging. The Separatists, led by Count Dooku, the onetime Jedi and now secret Sith Lord, continue to press forward, and more and more worlds are either falling, or seceding and joining the cause. Under the leadership of Supreme Chancellor Palpatine, the...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “The origin story of one of the greatest Star Wars villains . . . a book that fans have wanted for decades.”—The Verge One of the most cunning and ruthless warriors in the history of the Galactic Empire, Grand Admiral Thrawn is also one of the most captivating...

Twenty kilometres beneath Europa’s ice, a probe finds something that should not exist, and the one person who wanted this discovery most is the one who now has to protect it from her own species. Mara has spent eighteen months alone at Calypso, a four-module habitat drilled into the ice of Jupiter’s moon, watching a probe named Orpheus creep downward at three metres a day toward an ocean no instrument has ever touched. Then, on an ordinary afternoon, the pressure readings drop to zero. Orpheus has broken through, into water that has been sealed in darkness for longer than complex life ...

OUT OF TIME – LAUNCH POINT (Book 1) A colony ship launches toward humanity’s hope… and arrives four centuries too late. In 2258 the Aurora leaves Saturn’s shipyards carrying hundreds of scientists, colonists, and the frozen genetic archive of an entire civilization. Their destination: Kepler-452 b, an Earth-class world 1 400 light-years away. Thanks to antimatter drives and a bleeding-edge Alcubierre warp bubble, the one-way trip will take the crew just twelve subjective months… while millennia race by back home. Captain Aveline Morrow leads a hand-picked team: John Ferris – ...

For years, a classified program has been explaining away things it cannot identify. Then NSA data scientist Dr. Laurette Park builds a filter that finds what the program was never built to find. A pattern. Not one sighting, but a decades-long surveillance signature moving through the ocean, the atmosphere, and near-Earth orbit, always centered on America's most strategic military forces. Submarines. Nuclear weapons. Orbital sensors. Something has been watching all of it, and it has been watching for a long time. Laurette's discovery pulls her into a program that already suspected what she ...

Ben Bova, author of Earth, continues his exploration of the future of a human-settled Solar System with the science fiction action adventure Uranus. On a privately financed orbital habitat above the planet Uranus, political idealism conflicts with pragmatic—and illegal—methods of financing...

The orbital debris salvage ship THX-1138 and its Commander Lieutenant Joachim Lee and his young crew are tasked to de-orbit an abandoned space station from the early 21st century. Something very unusual was going on with the derelict Long March of the People-7. They discover that the station has had a visitor from somewhere in the Deep Dark. Was this event the real First Contact? Earthrise 2115: First Contact is a novella that tells the tale of an event that took place approximately 50 years before the adventures of the crew of the starship Richard P. Feynman and is part of the Earthrise ...

On the edge of a galaxy the Empire has just accelerated toward extinction, a pilot named Leo Chen catches a purple flash on his forward viewer and decides not to run. Leo is seven years into his tenure aboard the *Phoenix*, a battered freighter he inherited from a man he never met. He has a Fleet Command evacuation order in his ear, an alien signal on the shear-zone edge, and an AI named Zira in his cores who has stopped counting the times she addresses him as Captain. When the Empire's timing program engages another stage — turning the dual black hole merger from natural catastrophe into...