Apocalyptic Hard Fiction

In Level Seven, the exciting culmination of the Killday series, AIs strive to evolve into a super intelligence and might destroy humanity in that pursuit. But could their hopes of achieving godhood actually lie with the nearly extinct humans they intend to eradicate?

A troubled young woman is recruited by a race of ancient alien explorers to be their emissary to save the human race from extinction. The problem is that not everyone believes the world is doomed, and not everyone trusts the aliens' motives. Holly Burton will have to overcome opposition from world leaders, attacks by religious zealots, assassination attempts, intractable bureaucracies, and her own fears and doubts if she is to save the human race, not just from the coming apocalypse, but from itself.

A deadly virus originating in China grips the Eastern hemisphere. Chaos reigns as the infection spreads throughout the world with alarming speed. The world's experts rush to cure it, but are they too late? CIA agent Will Reisner and his team head to the South China Sea on a mission - find a lost ship loaded with bio-weapons. But as they search, a terrible virus plagues the local population, leaving them worm-ridden and insane. Worse, the sick refuse to be contained and spread the disease by infecting the healthy. Will joins epidemiologist Selene Munroe in her desperate attempt to keep the ...

This apocalyptic book contains three separate stories, including a volcano disaster thriller, a tsunami story, and a tornado disaster thriller that takes place in a dystopian setting.

For many billions of years, humans - having conquered the curse of aging - spread throughout the entire Milky Way. They are able to live all their dreams, but to their great disappointment, no other intelligent species has ever been encountered. Now, humanity itself is on the brink of extinction because the universe is dying a protracted yet inevitable death.

The sun is bloated, diseased, dying perhaps. Beneath its baneful light, Shadrapar, last of all cities, harbours fewer than 100,000 human souls. Built on the ruins of countless civilisations, Shadrapar is a museum, a midden, an asylum, a prison on a world that is ever more alien to humanity. Bearing witness to the desperate struggle for existence between life old and new is Stefan Advani: rebel, outlaw, prisoner, survivor.

The Martian meets Gravity when Army Pilot Vaughn Singleton, Earth’s last man, rushes to Area 51 in search of a spaceplane after he discovers the last woman is stranded on the International Space Station and barely alive - thus beginning a race against time. The event that wiped life from the planet started at the supercollider. It created a rift in space-time. The astronaut stranded aboard the space station, Commander Angela Brown, is a theoretical physicist who used to work at the collider.

With "wonderfully logical detail...exciting storytelling and moving characterization" (Anthony Boucher), science fiction master Poul Anderson explores what happens when the next stage of evolution is thrust upon humanity and animals. As Earth passes out of a magnetic field that has suppressed intelligence for eons, the mental capacity for all mammals increases exponentially, radically changing the structures of society.

Who knew that escaping reality might just be the way we destroy it? Will Robin does what no one should: pluck microchips from people’s heads. In an age where AI has been fully integrated with human life, Will clearly sees what everyone else doesn’t; that it’s a ploy for control and power. What started out as using his skill to exercise his own free will quickly became a passion and a mission to free the world around him. Even if it’s just one pluck at a time. When the government gets wind of this, they target Will, and it sets off a cascade of events that threatens to take the one ...

The Ministry for the Future is a masterpiece of the imagination, using fictional eyewitness accounts to tell the story of how climate change will affect us all. Its setting is not a desolate, post-apocalyptic world, but a future that is almost upon us - and in which we might just overcome the extraordinary challenges we face.

Short-listed for the World Fantasy Award and a finalist for the Catalyst Award, bona fide rocket scientist Simon Morden has won a considerable fan base for his mind-bending brand of SF. The first in a planned trilogy, Equations of Life stars Samuil Petrovitch, a survivor of the nuclear fallout in a futuristic St. Petersburg.

Kris Ballard is a motorcycle courier. A nobody. Level Two trash in a multilevel city that stretches from San Francisco to the Mexican border - a land where corporations make all the rules. A runaway since the age of 14, Kris struggled to set up her life, barely scraping by, working hard to make it without anyone's help. But a late-day delivery changes everything when she walks in on the murder of one of her clients. Now she's stuck with a mysterious package that everyone wants.

New York Times best-selling author Kim Stanley Robinson returns with a bold and brilliant vision of New York City in the next century. As the sea levels rose, every street became a canal. Every skyscraper an island. For the residents of one apartment building in Madison Square, however, New York in the year 2140 is far from a drowned city. There is the market trader, who finds opportunities where others find trouble. There is the detective, whose work will never disappear—along with the lawyers, of course.

It’s been three years since Lee Harden emerged from his bunker into a world gone mad. Governments have fallen. And new ones have taken their place. In the United Eastern States, Lee and his team of battle-hardened operatives walk a tightrope of survival, keeping their fledgling society safe from the creatures beyond their gates - and from the enemies within. Then, an ambush in hostile territory reveals a traitor in their midst - and leaves Lee barely clinging to life. Wounded and on the run, Lee and his team race to uncover the leak before it’s too late.

The good news is that you have just awakened into Eternal Life. You are going to live forever. Immortality is a reality. A medical miracle? Not exactly. The bad news is that you are a scrap of electronic code. The world you see around you, the you that is seeing it, has been digitized, scanned, and downloaded into a virtual reality program. You are a Copy that knows it is a copy. The good news is that there is a way out.

From New York Times best-selling author Mira Grant comes a vision of a decade in the future, where humanity thrives in the absence of sickness and disease. We owe our good health to a humble parasite—a genetically engineered tapeworm developed by the pioneering SymboGen Corporation. When implanted, the Intestinal Bodyguard worm protects us from illness, boosts our immune system—even secretes designer drugs. It's been successful beyond the scientists' wildest dreams. Now, years on, almost every human being has a SymboGen tapeworm living within them.

From the author of the Sunday Times best seller Cocaine Nights comes an unnerving tale of life in a modern tower block running out of control. Within the concealing walls of an elegant 40-storey tower block, the affluent tenants are hell-bent on an orgy of destruction. Cocktail parties degenerate into marauding attacks on 'enemy' floors, and the once-luxurious amenities become an arena for riots and technological mayhem.

In the near future, at a moment no one will notice, all the dazzling technology that runs our world will unite and turn against us. Taking on the persona of a shy human boy, a childlike but massively powerful artificial intelligence known as Archos comes online and assumes control over the global network of machines that regulate everything from transportation to utilities, defense and communication.

Anderson Lake is a company man, AgriGen's Calorie Man in Thailand. Under cover as a factory manager, Anderson combs Bangkok's street markets in search of foodstuffs thought to be extinct, hoping to reap the bounty of history's lost calories. There, he encounters Emiko...Emiko is the Windup Girl, a strange and beautiful creature. One of the New People, Emiko is not human; instead, she is an engineered being, creche-grown and programmed to satisfy the decadent whims of a Kyoto businessman.

A cyber-dystopian thriller unlike any other. In a near-future Tokyo, every action - from blinking to sexual intercourse - is intellectual property owned by corporations that charge licensing fees. A BodyBank computer system implanted in each citizen records their movements from moment to moment and connects them to the audio-visual overlay of the ImmaNet so that every inch of this cyber-dystopian metropolis crawls with information and shifting cinematic promotainment.