Inheriting your uncle's supervillain business is more complicated than you might think. Particularly when you discover who's running the place. Charlie's life is going nowhere fast. A divorced substitute teacher living with his cat in a house his siblings want to sell, all he wants is to open a pub downtown, if only the bank will approve his loan. Then his long-lost uncle Jake dies and leaves his supervillain business (complete with island volcano lair) to Charlie. But becoming a supervillain isn't all giant laser death rays and lava pits.

Captain Hammond Roystan is a simple cargo runner who has stumbled across the find of a lifetime: the Hassim, a disabled exploration ship - and its valuable record of unexplored worlds. His junior engineer, Josune Arriola, said her last assignment was in the uncharted rim. A renowned body-modification artist, Nika Rik Terri has run afoul of clients who will not take no for an answer, and she is dragging along a rookie modder. Together this mismatched crew will end up on one ship, hurtling through the lawless reaches of deep space with Roystan at the helm.

At the turn of the 22nd century, scientists make a breakthrough in human spaceflight. Through a revolutionary method known as somaforming, astronauts can survive in hostile environments off Earth using synthetic biological supplementations. With the fragility of the body no longer a limiting factor, human beings are at last able to journey to neighboring exoplanets long known to harbor life. A team of these explorers, Ariadne O’Neill and her three crewmates, are hard at work in a planetary system 15 light-years from Sol, on a mission to ecologically survey four habitable worlds.

In the far distant future, the universe is officially ruled by the Royal Consortium, but the High Councillors, the heads of the three high houses, wield the true power. As the fifth of six children, Ada von Hasenberg has no authority; her only value to her high house is as a pawn in a political marriage. When her father arranges for her to wed a noble from House Rockhurst, a man she neither wants nor loves, Ada seizes control of her own destiny. The spirited princess flees before the betrothal ceremony and disappears among the stars.

When COVID-19 sweeps through New York City, Jamie Gray is stuck as a dead-end driver for food-delivery apps. That is, until Jamie makes a delivery to an old acquaintance, Tom, who works at what he calls “an animal rights organization”. Tom’s team needs a last-minute grunt to handle things on their next field visit. Jamie, eager to do anything, immediately signs on. What Tom doesn't tell Jamie is that the animals his team cares for are not here on Earth. Not our Earth, at at least. In an alternate dimension, dinosaur-like creatures named Kaiju roam a warm and human-free world.

Follow a motley crew on an exciting journey through space - and one adventurous young explorer who discovers the meaning of family in the far reaches of the universe - in this lighthearted debut space opera from a rising sci-fi star.

From idyllic small towns to claustrophobic urban landscapes, Mallory Viridian is constantly embroiled in murder cases that only she has the insight to solve. But outside of a classic mystery novel, being surrounded by death doesn’t make you a charming amateur detective, it makes you a suspect and a social pariah. So when Mallory gets the opportunity to take refuge on a sentient space station, she thinks she has the solution. Surely the murders will stop if her only company is alien beings. At first her new existence is peacefully quiet…and markedly devoid of homicide.

Harry Potter has never even heard of Hogwarts when the letters start dropping on the doormat at number four, Privet Drive. Addressed in green ink on yellowish parchment with a purple seal, they are swiftly confiscated by his grisly aunt and uncle. Then, on Harry's eleventh birthday, a great beetle-eyed giant of a man called Rubeus Hagrid bursts in with some astonishing news: Harry Potter is a wizard, and he has a place at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. An incredible adventure is about to begin!

Cole Riker is a Slip Runner. A contractor tasked with finding alien salvage in exchange for credits. For an ex-smuggler like Cole, there’s a catch: Don’t break the terms of parole. That means doing things by the book. Find salvage, turn it in, get paid. But everything changes when a retrieval mission lands him in a previously unknown sector. There, he finds the material he’s been sent to recover, along with something more. A brand-new form of ancient alien life.

Olivia Prior has grown up in Merilance School for Girls, and all she has of her past is her mother’s journal—which seems to unravel into madness. Then, a letter invites Olivia to come home to Gallant. Yet when Olivia arrives, no one is expecting her. But Olivia is not about to leave the first place that feels like home; it doesn’t matter if her cousin Matthew is hostile, or if she sees half-formed ghouls haunting the hallways.

Tesla Crane, one of the richest women in the world, is on her honeymoon on an interplanetary space liner, cruising between Earth and Mars. She’s traveling incognito and is reveling in her anonymity. Then someone is murdered and her husband is named as the prime suspect. To save him from the frame-up, Tesla will risk exposure and face demons from her past. Even though doing so might make her the next victim.

It's been centuries since the robots of Panga gained self-awareness and laid down their tools; centuries since they wandered, en masse, into the wilderness, never to be seen again; centuries since they faded into myth and urban legend. One day, the life of a tea monk is upended by the arrival of a robot, there to honor the old promise of checking in. The robot cannot go back until the question of "what do people need?" is answered. But the answer to that question depends on who you ask, and how.

Charlie Travers figures his life can’t get much worse. He lives over a pizza restaurant, he’s lost his girlfriend, and has no prospects for a career. Then, he’s abducted by an alien robot and taken across the galaxy. When he wakes up, he finds himself stranded thousands of light-years away, and about to be killed by space pirates.

Dennis E. Taylor, author of the best-selling Bobiverse trilogy, explores a whole different, darker world in this sci-fi stand-alone. Determined to give his wife and children a better life back home, Ivan Pritchard ventures to the edge of known space to join the crew of the Mad Astra as an asteroid miner. He's prepared for hard work and loneliness—but not the unthinkable. After coming into contact with a mysterious alien substance, Pritchard finds an unwelcome entity sharing his mind, and a disturbing physical transformation taking place.

Jazz Bashara is a criminal. Well, sort of. Life on Artemis, the first and only city on the moon, is tough if you're not a rich tourist or an eccentric billionaire. So smuggling in the occasional harmless bit of contraband barely counts, right? Not when you've got debts to pay and your job as a porter barely covers the rent. Everything changes when Jazz sees the chance to commit the perfect crime, with a reward too lucrative to turn down.

When the Guardians attempt to evacuate a Kree prison planet and end up in a fight for their lives - what else is new? - they discover their old pal Groot is stretched a little thin. Someone is planting stolen branches of the monosyllabic hero and selling the saplings across the galaxy! The search to find Groot's missing pieces forces the Guardians into an alliance with the unscrupulous Collector, but the real problem is more complicated than he wants them to believe.

A thousand years ago, an alien invasion set humanity back to the Iron Age. Slowly, we recovered, colonizing the Solar System in peace. And discovered that an unknown force is stopping us from exploring any farther. But before the cause can be discovered, a slow-burning conspiracy threatens to explode into System-wide war. With enemies at home and in the darkness beyond, a team of unlikely heroes-a janitor, a mercenary, an asteroid miner, and a pirate-are the only ones who can avert a second apocalypse. This set includes the first three books of the newly-finished REBEL STARS series.

Captain James Decker has lived a life of hunting, killing, and earning credits. To some, it hasn’t amounted to much, but to him, it’s led to him captaining the SC Fortune, a space cruiser with a competent crew that he’s grown fond of. After accepting a bounty hunting mission with a beautiful blonde woman as the mark, Decker finds himself soon without a ship and a crew. But as luck would have it, this same mission gives him back what he lost: a new ship and a new crew.

Once, Jackson Rook was a war hero. Raised from boyhood to pilot an exosuit mech, he’d fought gallantly for the rebellion against the Collectivists. But that was a long time ago, on a world very far away. Now, Jackson Rook is a criminal, a smuggler on board the Multipurpose Supply Vehicle Tar Heel. His latest mission: steal a top-of-the-line mech called the Citadel and deliver it to the far-flung planet Swindle, a world so hostile even the air will kill you. The client: a man known only as the Warlord.

Logan Conner is the son of a king, the heir to the largest of the five star-dominions, and the best mech pilot in the galaxy. His people are plagued by pirates and raiders, surrounded by enemies, and not even his father can fight them all. Logan gives up his position, his rank, even his name, and becomes Jonathan Slaughter, leader of a rough-and-ready band of mercenary mech-jocks bent on taking the battle to the enemy on their own terms.

Forced to hyperjump during a brutal ambush, Sara Lorelle, navigator of the Venture, the last human colony ship, discovers a terrible truth: They've jumped to somewhere that shouldn't exist. Trapped inside a pocket universe known only as Hollow Space, where technology inexplicably fails, Sara and her crew have to face the lethal politics of their only destination, Haven - a decrepit station, home to deadly aliens and rival factions that soon sees the Venture crew up to their necks in danger.

Alyssa Farshot has spent her whole life trying to outrun her family legacy, even leaving behind the Kingship and her uncle, the emperor, for a life of exploring. But when her dying uncle announces a crownchase - a search for the royal seal hidden in the empire that will determine the next ruler - Alyssa is thrust into her greatest, most dangerous adventure yet.

Tina never worries about being 'ordinary' - she doesn't have to, since she's known practically forever that she's not just Tina Mains, average teenager and beloved daughter. She's also the keeper of an interplanetary rescue beacon, and one day soon, it's going to activate, and then her dreams of saving all the worlds and adventuring among the stars will finally be possible.

A wicked snowstorm had blown in from the north and the roads were a mess. Recently split from his one-time girlfriend, there was now nothing holding Cameron Decker here in the little backwater mountain town of Larksburg Stand. Time to get back to college, back to Stanford. Seeing a guy knee-deep in slush at the side of the road, he pulled to the curb and waved him over. The guy smacked his head getting in - knocked his watch cap askew. Only then did Cameron notice - noticed that the individual couldn't possibly be human. Cameron decided to help his stranded passenger - a decision he'd soon come to regret. Along with his rust-bucket of a pickup truck, he was soon heading deep into space aboard an interstellar spacecraft. After the vessel crash-landed onto an alien world, he would now have to contend with a murderous droid and a slew of strange alien life forms.

Long before Casmir Dabrowski and Kim Sato leave their world for the epic adventures of the Star Kingdom series, long before they outwit terrorists and mercenaries and do battle on a galactic scale, long before they become best friends and roommates...they have to meet for the first time. This is that story.

After losing his job and family, Flint Reed finds himself in the middle of a terrorist attack. With nothing but his wits and experience as a former Union police officer, he must do everything he can to stay alive. As he soon discovers, however, there are also hostages, and no one is coming to save them. All hope falls to Flint. But as he fights to navigate the building, the real answers begin to unravel. What are the terrorists really after, and why are they so intent on getting into the vault?

He was in a gang but was trying to change his future, when a board member of the elite advanced academy NEXUS made a snap decision and offered him a chance. Then fate, or an unbalanced genius, offered him another. The Nexus Academy is for the elite trainees from Earth, and now trials from our alien allies, as they teach the future generation how to fight, lead, hack, spy, and many other talents and tactics. Hired by companies, governments, and NGOs, these graduates work to pay off the massive debt their training at the academy accumulates.

Captain Tess Bailey is in deep trouble. She and her crew are on the run, pursued by a tyrant who'll take them dead or alive. Tess's best hope is a tall, dark, and much-too-appealing stranger, Shade Ganavan, who says he can help her. But his motivations are far from clear. With the dreaded Dark Watch closing in, what Tess and Shade don't know about each other might get them killed, unless they can set aside their differences and learn to trust each other before it's too late.

Two hundred years ago, aliens invaded Earth. A violent war followed. The enemy won. Some of us escaped, most of us didn’t. On Proxima they flourished - the invasion forgotten. On Earth we floundered - the horror began. Their world is advanced, peaceful, and secure. Our world is broken, savage, and overrun. A new invasion is coming. A hunger that has swallowed half the universe. They don’t care which planet we live on. They want to end us all. But where there is life, there is hope. And where there is hope, there are heroes. This time, vengeance will be ours.

Space travel just isn't what it used to be. With the invention of quantum teleportation, space heroes aren't needed anymore. When one particularly unlucky ex-adventurer masquerades as famous pilot and hate figure Jacques McKeown, he's sucked into an ever-deepening corporate and political intrigue. Between space pirates, adorable deadly creatures, and a missing fortune in royalties, saving the universe was never this difficult!

Five years ago, Kelana Gardavros lost everything in the war against the Pale empire. Now Kel Garda is just another refugee living on the edge of an isolated star system. No one knows she was once a member of an Order whose military arm was disbanded and scattered across the galaxy. And no one knows that if her enemies found her, they might destroy the entire world to get rid of her. Kel’s past intrudes in the form of a long-dormant Pale war machine, suddenly reactivated. If the massive automaton isn’t stopped, at best it will carve a swath of devastation that displaces thousands of people.

Humans have always been fascinated by darkness. Especially the darkness of a city at night, when the black sky is made ever more inky by the pools of illumination dropped under streetlights. Whether the mean streets be in an alternate past charmed with dark magic or the dirty alleyways of futuristic crowded space stations, the city—and its darkened streets—will always fascinate us. Here then, an anthology of all new stories of science fiction and fantasy with a hardboiled noir twist that acknowledge that the city is a living, breathing entity...and it isn’t always on our side.

Fetter was raised to kill, honed as a knife to cut down his sainted father. This gave him plenty to talk about in therapy. He walked among invisible powers: devils and anti-gods that mock the mortal form. He learned a lethal catechism, lost his shadow, and gained a habit for secrecy. After a blood-soaked childhood, Fetter escaped his rural hometown for the big city, and fell into a broader world where divine destinies are a dime a dozen.

Seventeen-year-old Kiva Meridan has spent the last ten years fighting for survival in the notorious death prison, Zalindov, working as the prison healer. When the Rebel Queen is captured, Kiva is charged with keeping the terminally ill woman alive long enough for her to undergo the Trial by Ordeal: a series of elemental challenges against the torments of air, fire, water, and earth, assigned to only the most dangerous of criminals.

Sangamon Taylor's a New Age Sam Spade who sports a wet suit instead of a trench coat and prefers Jolt from the can to Scotch on the rocks. He knows about chemical sludge the way he knows about evil - all too intimately. And the toxic trail he follows leads to some high and foul places. Before long, Taylor's house is bombed, his every move followed, he's adopted by reservation Indians, moves onto the FBI's most wanted list, makes up with his girlfriend, and plays a starring role in the near-assassination of a presidential candidate.

On a little-known planet, Archmage Varic Vallenar casts a grand spell to empower himself with the magical abilities of his alternate selves. The ritual works too well, granting Varic not only the magic but also the memories from six lives. Including their gruesome deaths. Now, Varic has power greater than any wizard in galactic history, but he knows that won’t be enough. The enemies he faced in those alternate lives were apocalyptic in scale. Terrors of technology and magic. Nothing that he, or anyone, can defeat.

Civilization has fallen. The solar system is blanketed with the automated weapons of ancient wars, engineered plagues, hazardous waste, rogue AI, monsters from outside our dimension, artificial disasters, and nuclear climate change. Every moment of life on Earth is a brutal fight for survival. The people of Sol carry on, but hope is at a premium. They need something more. Someone with a plan, a savior, a hero. What they get is Lily.

Heen Gru-Bares has been SERIES 5 for most of his adult life, traveling from planet to planet collecting data and filing reports for the CHAIRS, who run the universe. And then he lands on the planet Firdus for his next assignment, and he meets Borns and Lan Zing and Ziga Mey and Dill Tudd, and something unsettling begins to stir within him, something unnerving and profoundly disruptive.

On a remote, icy planet, the soldier known as Breq is drawing closer to completing her quest. Once, she was the Justice of Toren - a colossal starship with an artificial intelligence linking thousands of soldiers in the service of the Radch, the empire that conquered the galaxy. Now, an act of treachery has ripped it all away, leaving her with one fragile human body, unanswered questions, and a burning desire for vengeance.

Leo Graf was just your average highly efficient engineer: mind your own business, fix what's wrong, and move on to the next job. But all that changed on his assignment to the Cay Habitat, where a group of humanoids had been secretly, commercially bioengineered for working in free fall. Could he just stand there and allow the exploitation of hundreds of helpless children merely to enhance the bottom line of a heartless mega-corporation?