Deep within the Congo, a team of scientists prepares for the greatest event in the history of humanity, making first contact with an intelligent extraterrestrial species. Only the jungle is no place for doubts. Could first contact be our last?

Jackson is an astronaut testing a prototype interstellar craft in deep space. When he returns home, there's no one to greet him. Earth has fallen silent. Now he must decide: stay in orbit, watching a dead planet roll slowly by beneath his windows, or land on Earth and fight for life.

Mankind has long dreamed of reaching out to live on other planets, and with the establishment of the Mars Endeavour colony, that dream has become reality. The fledgling colony consists of 120 scientists, astronauts, medical staff, and engineers. Buried deep underground, they're protected from the harsh radiation that sterilizes the surface of the planet. The colony is prepared for every eventuality except one - what happens when disaster strikes Earth?

The day that changed Melody's life was like any other over the previous two years. She'd found she had a gift for writing, and her career as an author had almost healed the pain of losing her job. When the Secret Service rang her bell, everything changed. Something was nearing Saturn…and it was slowing down. Had she been right about the object?

Dalton Greaves is a hero. He’s one of humankind’s first representatives to Unity, a pan-species confederation working to bring all sentient life into a single benevolent brotherhood. That’s what they told him, anyway. The only actual members of Unity that he’s ever met are Boreau, a giant snail who seems more interested in plunder than spreading love and harmony, and Boreau’s human sidekick, Neera, who Dalton strongly suspects roped him into this gig so that she wouldn’t become the next one of Boreau’s crew to get eaten by locals while prospecting.

As a teenager, Quinn Starkweather builds a computer program that accurately predicts world events. He has created a Nostradamus machine. While Quinn becomes very wealthy, the program predicts the world will be torn apart by financial inequity. The 99.9% will rise up against the billionaires in what is dubbed The Rage Wars. The world stands on the razor’s edge of disaster. With enough warning of the coming apocalypse, Quinn builds an ark in the desert—a self-sufficient domed city he calls Altor.

Humans have reached the stars. There is no evidence any other species survived its own sentience long enough to do the same. Until now, when the Magellanix deep-space scout Accipiter discovers the Artifact, a million-year-old alien construct resting in a dormant volcano on a faraway world.

In Lake Maracaibo, in the northwestern part of Venezuela, a long-hidden extraterrestrial artifact underneath the ocean floor triggers a disaster. The United States military launches an expedition, sending a cutting-edge team of international researchers to the source of a magnetic instability that's destroying any electronics in the region.

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.

James Patterson is a gay accountant living in Keyes, Oklahoma - deep in the Bible Belt - the religious heartland of America. He's also the first person to make contact with an extraterrestrial intelligence seeking to understand our world, and that makes him the most important person on the planet.

The Hygrometric Dehabitation Region, or the "Zone," is a growing band of rainforest on the equator, where the heat and humidity make it impossible for warm-blooded animals to survive. A human being without protection in the Zone is dead in minutes. Twenty years ago, Marks went into the rainforest with a group of researchers led by Doctor Elaine Fell, to study the extraordinary climate and see if it could be used in agriculture. The only thing she learned was that the Zone was no place for people. There were deaths, and the program was cut short. Now, they're sending her back in.

Indiana Jones meets The X-Files in this thrilling, globe-spanning adventure about the greatest treasure hunt of all time—where ancient secrets collide with cutting-edge technology. In the high-stakes world of ancient artifacts and clandestine organizations, a trio of unlikely misfits are drafted into a desperate race to prevent the assembly of a long lost device.

The planet of Kiln is where the tyrannical Mandate keeps its prison colony, and for inmates, the journey there is always a one-way trip. One such prisoner is Professor Arton Daghdev, xeno-ecologist and political dissident. Soon after arrival, he discovers that Kiln has a secret. Humanity is not the first intelligent life to set foot there. In the midst of a ravenous, chaotic ecosystem are the ruins of a civilization, but who were the vanished builders and where did they go?

Nick Morrison always wanted to be an astronaut. When a start-up company recruits him to build a lunar launch system at the moon’s south pole, Nick gladly leaves behind his troubled life on Earth—but Nick doesn’t know that the company is in financial and legal trouble. Deprived of support from Earth, the team on the moon must figure out how to survive on their own. Worse yet, there’s another base at the lunar south pole, run by a ruthless contractor who has big plans for the moon...and for Earth.

A chain of subglacial volcanoes erupt in Iceland. The melting ice floods the countryside. Poisonous gas descends on Scotland. A tsunami devastates the Norwegian coastline. An ash cloud rises into the atmosphere, blotting out the sun across Europe, ushering in a new Ice Age. Dozens of nuclear power plants, flooded by ocean water, experience meltdowns. Millions perish. Many more are displaced. All on the first day.

Deep within the Congo, a team of scientists prepares for the greatest event in the history of humanity, making first contact with an intelligent extraterrestrial species. Only the jungle is no place for doubts. Could first contact be our last?

The year is 2164. Humanity has slipped the surly bonds of its golden sun, and prospers as it finds a way across the stars. A new era of exploration dawns, its citizens asking the question eagerly: “Is there anyone out there?” Now, the answer comes suddenly and violently, a surprise attack on a peaceful colony. Deadly conflict, long forgotten by the governments of Man, makes itself known once more. New enemies emerge from the void: children of war, heirs to its terror and splendor. But this foe too has questions to answer, faced as it is with a civilization previously unimagined.

In the depths of an ancient Egyptian tomb, archaeologists make a baffling discovery: the mummified body of a man clad in a space suit. Halfway around the globe, exobiologist Dr. Katherine Shepard and intelligence officer Colonel Devon Peters are summoned to the site of a downed UFO. To their amazement, they find one of the occupants alive. Even more shocking, he appears to be human. As Shepard and Peters delve deeper into the enigma, they expose a chilling truth: aliens have inhabited Earth far longer than anyone could have imagined, and they are not alone.

Mankind has long dreamed of reaching out to live on other planets, and with the establishment of the Mars Endeavour colony, that dream has become reality. The fledgling colony consists of 120 scientists, astronauts, medical staff, and engineers. Buried deep underground, they're protected from the harsh radiation that sterilizes the surface of the planet. The colony is prepared for every eventuality except one - what happens when disaster strikes Earth?

Hello World represents a decade of science fiction by author Peter Cawdron. This collection of 16 short stories and novellas, including four previously unpublished stories, will take you out of this world.