Showing results by publisher "Skyboat Media" in Science Fiction

An ongoing, episodic "prose comic" from which the pictures are summoned by the magic of words, Goon Squad is set in an alternate version of modern-day Manchester. Its biggest divergence from the real city is that it - along with most other large urban centers - has a team of superheroes to protect it against unusual threats with which the conventional forces of law and order would have problems. Goon Squad: Year One offers three action-packed volumes in a single collection.

Madison Wayward, niece to the most notorious captain among the outlaw Stardrifters, has a plan. She’ll stop at nothing to give humanity a flicker of hope in its darkest hour. If she would consider pausing, her plans might not blow up in her face quite so much. Kirehe Mahono, a skilled warrior with an uncommon gift, has a dragon. She’ll stop at nothing to protect her people from the enemy machines infesting her planet. If she had something better than a knife to bring to a laser fight, she might have better luck. Taken prisoner, both will have to harness their strengths to survive.

Yakoub was once the legendary king of the Rom, the Gypsy race that has evolved from the days of caravans into lords of the spaceways - the only pilots capable of steering ships safely between the many worlds of the galaxy. Weary and proud, Yakoub has relinquished his power and lives in exile on a distant, icy world. In his absence, chaos fills the vacuum of power. The fate of the entire galactic empire hangs in the balance.

Nickie Haflinger had lived several lifetimes...but technically never existed. He was originally a fugitive from Tarnover, the incredibly powerful government think tank that educated him. First he had broken his identity code - then he made his escape. Now he needed to find a way to restore sanity and freedom to the computerized masses and save a world nearing the brink of disaster. He didn’t care how he accomplished this - but the government did. That’s when his Tarnover teachers took him back into their labs, where Nickie Haflinger was set up to receive a whole new education.

Prescient and scientifically accurate, Heart of the Comet is known as one of the great hard SF novels of the 1980s. First published in 1986, it tells the story of an ambitious manned mission to visit Halley's Comet, alter its orbit, and mine it for resources. But all too soon, native cells - that might once have brought life to Earth - begin colonizing the colonists. As factions battle over the comet's future - and that of Earth - only love, courage, and ingenuity can avert disaster and spark a new human destiny.

Silvariah Frandelle, a brilliant and beautiful business woman, falls from wealth and success into exile and poverty, indentured - barely one step above slavery - as an off-world laborer to escape prison. Her last calculated risk as a free woman, paid for with years of service, becomes the key to surviving hostile environments. Space, gravity, and Mars wastelands were expected. Intrusive AIs, obscure experiments, and shadowy foes were not.

As the world continues to change around them, new friendships are forged, answers are found, and lives are lost as the survivors journey deeper into treacherous areas. New dangers rise each day, and the survivors find themselves faced with only one conclusion … Sometimes the end of everything they knew is only the beginning of something more.

Beneath the rolling seas and deadly atmosphere of Venus are the Keeps - fully enclosed cities that house descendants of the survivors who first harbored atomic energy to escape a dying earth. In massive superstructures built beneath the Venusian seas, a complex feudal society devoted simply to decadence has evolved. Presiding over that society are Immortals - genetic throwbacks to the mutant atomic survivors.

The original teleplay that became the classic Star Trek episode, with an expanded introductory essay by Harlan Ellison, The City on the Edge of Forever has been surrounded by controversy since the airing of an "eviscerated" version - which subsequently has been voted the most beloved episode in the series' history. In its original form, The City on the Edge of Forever won the 1966-67 Writers Guild of America Award for Best Teleplay. As aired, it won the 1967 Hugo Award.

Given that the suns of Draco stretch almost 16 light-years from end to end, it stands to reason that the cost of transportation is the most important factor driving the 32nd century. And since Illyrion is the element most needed for space travel, Lorq von Ray is plenty willing to fly through the core of a recently imploded sun in order to obtain seven tons of it.

The world didn't end with a bang, it didn't go out in a ball of fire and fury, nor did it end in ice. But in some strange way, ice was the end - or maybe it was the beginning of something more. When Bethany finds herself suddenly alone in a world that was alive only moments before, she flees into the streets of her town in search of her family. Panicked by the immobile people surrounding her, she is almost captured by the monsters hunting her until Cade steps in.

Goon Squad, Volume 2: Without Sin is composed of "A Star in Strange Ways", "Holy Fool", "Dead Man Tells Tale", "A Brief History of the Goon Squad", "Tale of Terror", and "Pomona Island", as well as an introduction read by the author.

John Bandicut and his company have been rewarded for their heroism in saving Shipworld. The prize: to be flung back into inhabited space — not to their home planets, as they had hoped, but to the bottom of an alien sea. Helpless and sinking, they are rescued by strange mer-creatures and brought to an undersea city, where a race of sea-people known as the Neri live in perpetual twilight. The Neri are well adapted to their world, but their survival is in jeopardy.

Ray Bradbury warned of a world where our literary history is taken from us. In Burn the Ashes, some of the best science-fiction authors working today continue to explore the dystopic worlds they introduced in Ignorance Is Strength.

Bears Discover Fire is the first short-story collection by the most acclaimed science fiction writer of the decade, the author of such brilliant novels as Talking Man and Voyage to the Red Planet. It brings together nineteen of Terry Bisson's finest works for the first time in one volume, among them the darkly comic title story, which garnered some of the field's highest honors, including the Hugo, Nebula, Theodore Sturgeon, and Locus Awards.

Into the darkness within; or else the light.... When Margaret Atwood wrote these words, she left open the possibility that even our darkest tales may harbor a glimmer of hope. In Or Else the Light, the third and final entry in the Dystopia Triptych, more than a dozen of the best minds in science fiction conclude their stories with a descent into darkness, or perhaps a ray of light.

Richard Muller was an honorable diplomat who braved unimaginable dangers to make contact with the first-known race of intelligent aliens. But those aliens left a mark on him: a psychic wound that emanates a telepathic miasma that his fellow humans can neither cure nor endure. Muller is exiled to the remote planet of Lemnos, where he is left, deeply embittered, at the heart of a deadly maze - until a new alien race appears, seemingly intent on exterminating humanity.

A mathematical genius. A formula that speeds up space travel called SHORTCUT. His loving wife. When Laura Maxx disappears after an attack that leaves Jason Maxx in the hospital, his only goal is to find her and bring her back. Then he gets a message from Voyager One: Laura is alive. In space. To get her back, he’ll do whatever it takes—even taking on government agents who might try to stop him.

Untouched by Human Hands consists of 13 stories of beings who dwell on the strange borders of reality. Some of these stories tell of people you know or of events that might happen - but haven't yet. Some will take you to the furthermost reaches of the sky and to planets whose names are unknown this side of Arcturus. And some - perhaps the richest and most memorable of these stories - open into the interior of strange minds to reveal the reflection of ourselves.

Sixteen-year-old Delaney Archer always waits until the last moment to do everything. Nevertheless, she is the top student in her class. She's even about to graduate as valedictorian - until one morning when she wakes up in a strange place. Suddenly, she finds herself in graduate school. Seven years of her life have disappeared without a trace since she went to bed last night, but how? But it's not all bad, right? After all, she can drink alcohol now, and she has almost finished school. Then she wakes up the next day and another seven years have passed.