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.

The Wizard's Council of Tarador was supposed to tell young Koren Bladewell that he is a wizard. They were supposed to tell everyone that he is not a jinx, that all the bad things that happen around him are because he can't control the power inside him, power he doesn't know about. The people of his village, even his parents, are afraid of him, afraid he is cursed. That he is a dangerous, evil jinx.

The Galahad, a faster-than-light spacecraft, carries 50 scientists and engineers on a mission to prepare Kepler 452b, Earth's nearest habitable neighbor at 1400 light years away. With Earth no longer habitable and the Mars colony slowly failing, they are humanity's best hope. After 10 years in a failed cryogenic bed - body asleep, mind awake - William Chanokh's torture comes to an end as the fog clears, the hatch opens, and his friend and fellow hacker, Tom, greets him...by stabbing a screwdriver into his heart. This is the first time William dies.

From the Audie-nominated narrator of The Martian. In eleven years' time, a million members of an alien race will arrive at Earth. Years before they enter orbit, their approach will be announced by the flare of a thousand flames in the sky, their ships' huge engines burning hard to slow them from the vast speeds needed to cross interstellar space. These foreboding lights will shine in our night sky like new stars, getting ever brighter until they outshine even the sun, casting ominous shadows and banishing the night until they suddenly blink out.

A secret buried in the Antarctic. A puzzle unsolved for thousands of years. And a Brooklyn-born master gunnery sergeant who's royally pissed that he has to babysit the researchers sent to figure it all out. But when Patrick "Wic" Finnegan finally sees what the team has uncovered, he can't believe his eyes, nor is he prepared for the violence to come. Soon, the portal opens and unleashes a storm of unbridled fury upon humanity.

The human soldiers stranded on the planet Paradise have been recruited into an alien legion to do the dirty jobs that the high-tech species won't do. Their first mission is to kick the enemy off a backwater planet no one cares about. It's a simple assignment, except everyone has a hidden agenda, and the planet could become a deathtrap.

It was a day like any other when suddenly the world changed. The universe reached a threshold humanity didn’t even know existed, and it was time to finally be integrated into the vast multiverse. A place where power is the only thing anyone can truly rely on.

Jack Kernigan is having a bad day...a bad year...a bad life. After being booted out of MIT, he’s back in his Ohio hometown, working for the family business, facing a life of mediocrity. Then one day, out on a delivery, his truck hits...something. Something big...something furry...something invisible. And, it turns out, something not of this Earth. Fate can play funny tricks. Which is why Jack suddenly finds himself the planet’s best hope to unravel a conspiracy of galactic proportions that could spell the end of the human race.

Get ready to experience two more origin stories in the Backyard Starship universe.

We were fighting on the wrong side of a war we couldn't win. And that was the good news. The Ruhar hit us on Columbus Day. There we were, innocently drifting along the cosmos on our little blue marble, like the native Americans in 1492. Over the horizon come ships of a technologically advanced, aggressive culture, and BAM! There go the good old days, when humans only got killed by each other. So, Columbus Day. It fits. When the morning sky twinkled again, this time with Kristang starships jumping in to hammer the Ruhar, we thought we were saved.

In the 25th century, humans have conquered space. The advent of faster-than-light travel has opened up hundreds of habitable planets for colonization, and humans have exploited the virtually limitless space and resources for hundreds of years with impunity. So complacent have they become with the overabundance that armed conflict is a thing of the past, and their machines of war are obsolete and decrepit. What would happen if they were suddenly threatened by a terrifying new enemy?

It’s not easy making the career jump from office-supplies-store middle manager to heroic interdimensional adventurer. At least, Jason tries to be heroic, but it's hard to be good when all your powers are evil. He’ll face off against cannibals, cultists, wizards, monsters...and that’s just on the first day. He’s going to need courage, he’s going to need wit, and he’s going to need some magic powers of his own. But first, he’s going to need pants.

Tricked into a world of banished gods, demons, goblins, sprites and magic, Richter must learn to meet the perils of The Land and begin to forge his own kingdom. Actions have consequences across The Land, with powerful creatures and factions now hell-bent on Richter's destruction. Can Richter forge allegiances to survive this harsh and unforgiving world or will he fall to the dark denizens of this ancient and unforgiving realm? A tale to shake "The Land" itself, measuring 10/10 on the Richter scale, how will Richter's choices shape the future of The Land and all who reside in it?

"No killing Goblins." So reads the sign outside of The Wandering Inn, a small building run by a young woman named Erin Solstice. She serves pasta with sausage, blue fruit juice, and dead acid flies on request. And she comes from another world. Ours. It's a bad day when Erin finds herself transported to a fantastical world and nearly gets eaten by a Dragon. She doesn't belong in a place where monster attacks are a fact of life, and where Humans are one species among many. But she must adapt to her new life. Or die.

Few know the warship’s actual name. But everyone has heard the rumors. The PUV James Keeling can do something no other vessel in existence can do—slip into another dimension, travel undetected, then re-emerge onto our plane and surprise enemy targets. But the thing that makes the Crypt unique also makes it a nightmare for those onboard; interdimensional travel causes hallucinations, violent behavior, and psychotic breakdowns. Keeling could be the Union’s greatest weapon, a game-changing asset that can defeat the bloodthirsty zealots of the Purist Nation, the Union’s mortal enemy.

The Wizard's Council of Tarador was supposed to tell young Koren Bladewell that he is a wizard. They were supposed to tell everyone that he is not a jinx, that all the bad things that happen around him are because he can't control the power inside him, power he doesn't know about. The people of his village, even his parents, are afraid of him, afraid he is cursed. That he is a dangerous, evil jinx.

A secret buried in the Antarctic. A puzzle unsolved for thousands of years. And a Brooklyn-born master gunnery sergeant who's royally pissed that he has to babysit the researchers sent to figure it all out. But when Patrick "Wic" Finnegan finally sees what the team has uncovered, he can't believe his eyes, nor is he prepared for the violence to come. Soon, the portal opens and unleashes a storm of unbridled fury upon humanity.

Children are not supposed to rescue their parents, life is supposed to be the other way around. And rescues aren't supposed to be needed on the trip out to the new colony planet Valhalla. Slow, yes. Boring, yes. Dangerous? No, the trip is not supposed to be dangerous, never has been. When thieves attack the transport ship to steal an ancient alien artifact, and young Kaylee and her brother, Manny, are cut off from their parents, they have to stop the thieves from getting what they want.

A company of Army Rangers is sent on an interstellar colony ship to secure a foothold on a dangerous, alien planet through violence of action. Leaving behind a warring Earth flung headfirst into a conflict of mutual assured destruction, the Rangers and the accompanying crew of first colonists are guided on a 40-year journey by an unprecedented artificial intelligence. But when they emerge from the frigid embrace of cryosleep, they awake to a nightmare, finding themselves greeted by the same ruthless enemy that brought about the ruin of Earth.

Born on a forsaken desert planet, Cole Shaw has two options - perish from starvation and disease, or enlist in the New World Republic’s armed forces. He chooses the military. For the first time, he thinks he has a shot at a better life. But survival is not guaranteed. Leading an elite team of mech operators, he is deployed to a frozen planet called Ferrous where dangerous relics of a past war lurk beneath the ice and savage creatures prowl the barren wastelands. Scientists on Ferrous are chasing rumors of godlike technologies buried in the ruins of a long-extinct civilization.

Daniel Clay fought across the galaxy as a corporate soldier. He left the violence behind for a life of science, raising a family far from the bloodshed of the Corporation. With his wife, Sarah, and son, Michael, he studied the alien Tyr for years, hidden among their complex societies. Their mission should have ended with the arrival of a replacement team. Instead, the Clays’ corporate overlords choose a death sentence: an invasion fleet to conquer the Tyr.

The human soldiers stranded on the planet Paradise have been recruited into an alien legion to do the dirty jobs that the high-tech species won't do. Their first mission is to kick the enemy off a backwater planet no one cares about. It's a simple assignment, except everyone has a hidden agenda, and the planet could become a deathtrap.

We were fighting on the wrong side of a war we couldn't win. And that was the good news. The Ruhar hit us on Columbus Day. There we were, innocently drifting along the cosmos on our little blue marble, like the native Americans in 1492. Over the horizon come ships of a technologically advanced, aggressive culture, and BAM! There go the good old days, when humans only got killed by each other. So, Columbus Day. It fits. When the morning sky twinkled again, this time with Kristang starships jumping in to hammer the Ruhar, we thought we were saved.

By the divine promise of sacrifice, he awakened an Ash Angel with a new body, new powers, and a new war to fight. Cassandra, his temperamental trainer, tries to get him ready to battle Ghostpackers and Dreads, but it might be too little too late: for the first time in history, the Ash Angels are faltering against the fury of an evil more ancient than they are. While he fights to survive run-ins with a Sheid-hunted pop star and a gorgeous but dangerous Dread, Trace realizes his new life cannot erase the trauma of the old.

The mission is simple. Escort an emissary to an intergalactic peace summit. Try not to get in the way. Lt. Magnus and his 79th Recon Team have certainly handled worse, after all. But when an explosion rocks the tower and sends everyone into a panic, Magnus and his asset find themselves cut off from the rest of the team. Worse still, a dying alien chieftain gives them a priceless drive of intel, marking them for death. The mission has officially changed. With enemies on all sides, Magnus must do everything in his power to protect the emissary and escape the tower.

Will Hanna thought he was on the right track. He got a good job. Bought a nice house. Built a beautiful backyard pool. He spends most of his time at work, sacrificing a social life for corporate advancement, but it's a trade-off his dream home justifies. Until Will loses his job. Suddenly unemployed, Will takes to spending hours on end appreciating the pool he can no longer afford. Day after day, he sits beside it, watching its beautiful ripples as they lull him into a state of blithe indifference, quieting the part of his brain sounding alarm bells. In the midst of ignoring his personal ...

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?

In the wilds of a jungle planet, the Legion fights in brutal combat as Republic marines fly their SLICS from one tragedy to the next. H292, a repurposed warbot, shows the heart of a hero as he wades into the battle not to destroy - but to save.

A U.S. Army Ranger sniper finds himself on his own and on the move far downrange and beyond the wire in an epic fantasy world filled with deadly monsters and dangerous foes in a total battle royale for glory, hoard—and flat-out survival. Adrift on the Sea of Riddles and lost in a dangerous world of epic fables, Sgt. Thor and his anti-materiel sniper rifle, Mjölnir, must survive brutal pirates, the darkest sorcery, and a catastrophic shipwreck on a strange island steeped in arcane mystery and containing the remains of a lost civilization guarding an ancient artifact of great and terrible power.

Before he slid into the MRI machine, Jake Bronson was just an ordinary guy with terminal cancer. But when an earthquake hits during the procedure, Jake staggers from the wreckage a profoundly changed man, now endowed with uncanny mental abilities. An ocean away, Luciano Battista wants a piece of Jake's talent. The terrorist leader has been conducting cerebral-implant experiments in a sinister quest to create a breed of super jihadist agents...and Jake's altered brain may be the key to his success.