On the backwater world of Cayelle, Tina Freeman runs a shop with her son Rex, 15 years old, half-human, half-android with a massive chip on his shoulder about having been born without arms or legs. The shop makes a modest profit, but when a creditor turns up wanting his money back, everything goes pear-shaped. She needs money, and needs it fast.

When you've got nothing left, why not risk it all? They say life in the Coalition is idyllic, utopian. Tell that to Caspian Robeaux, who was tried, convicted, and thrown in prison. When an early chance for parole comes up, it seems his luck may have changed, though something isn't quite right about where they're sending him. And he might just have to take the biggest chance of his life if he wants to survive.

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

Nora Devi is a xeno-archaeologist with a complicated past. She has buried more secrets than she’s dug up. Widowed in the recently ended twelve year war between Capitoline and Palantine, she now makes a living as an independent tagger in border space. Captain Liam Kimani could be credited with ending the latest royal war. Instead, he’s blamed for it. Dirty commoners aren’t meant to lay their hands on royalty. He has no regrets.

Out of the blue, a young Space Fleet officer's dream becomes reality: He's made captain of a starship. Just in time for the return of humanity's most terrible enemy, after 50 years of peace. To survive against this enemy, Captain Tad Thatcher will have to do more than learn how to become an effective commander, or how to wrangle his wayward crew. He will need to reinvent space combat. From scratch.

Zero is just one of 20,000 people aboard a spaceship bound for a new planet set to be colonized. The journey is over a century long but luckily, everyone is in stasis, so they’ll be safe and sound asleep during the trip. Everyone that is, except for Zero, whose pod has malfunctioned, waking him up a hundred years early. His initial excitement in roaming the ship alone quickly turns to a heart-stopping interstellar adventure when a family of space pirates show up, trying to hijack the ship and take the colonizers hostage.

2057. Humanity has raised exploiting the solar system to an art form. Bella Lind and the crew of her nuclear-powered ship, the Rockhopper, push ice. They mine comets. And they're good at it. The Rockhopper is nearing the end of its current mission cycle, and everyone is desperate for some much-needed R & R, when startling news arrives from Saturn: Janus, one of Saturn's ice moons, has inexplicably left its natural orbit and is now heading out of the solar system at high speed.

Qi’ra listened to the dreams and promises of a boy with a reckless smile, only to be torn away from him and returned to the White Worms gang while Han made his way to freedom. Now freedom seems like a luxury she can’t afford while she concentrates on survival and despairs of ever leaving Corellia. But her fortunes seem to turn when a representative of the crime syndicate Crimson Dawn plucks Qi’ra from captivity and brings her to the syndicate’s leader, the mysterious and mercurial Dryden Vos.

Geophysicist Jack Greer believes he may finally have found the resting place of the meteorite that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. A few miles off the Yucatán coast, Jack and a team of scientists tow an aging drilling platform over the impact crater with the aim of securing a sample. But buried deep beneath the earth lies a shocking discovery that threatens to shatter everything we think we know about our species.

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.

With Earth rapidly becoming inhospitable to human life, GS Archean carries a one-way crew of courageous passengers to Uelara, an Earth-like planet in the Cieri star system. Uelara is ideal, except for one minor detail - its distance from Earth. Traveling at sub-light speed, the generation ship won’t reach Uelara within the original crew’s lifetime. Eager to reach Uelara, the second-gen crew prepares, as planned, to assume their parents’ responsibilities - that is, until someone goes missing and a devastating secret is discovered, putting the future of the human race in jeopardy.

Extensive training molded Bruce into a finely tuned mercenary. A man capable of scouring the galaxy to protect the innocent and vanquish the corrupt. An assignment to a distant outer system brings mystery, death, and mayhem. During his mission, a chance encounter with a stunning royal in a dimly lit bar results in all hell breaking loose. Save the damsel, figure out the mystery, and kill all the bad guys. If only saving humanity was that simple.

In 2108, Colony Ship Voyager departed Earth for the planet of Promissa with 18,000 of the world’s best and brightest on board. 250 years and 27 light years later, an arrival is imminent. But all is not well. The probes that they’ve sent ahead to gather the data needed to establish any kind of settlement aren’t responding, and the information they have received has presented more questions than answers. It’s a time when the entire crew should be coming together to solve the problem, but science officer Sheila Jackson can’t get people to listen.

The first of the acclaimed Vatta's War books, the exciting military science fiction series that features a swashbuckling spaceship-captain heroine who mixes commerce with combat.

Karr is a teenage boy like many others in the galaxy. He goes to school, helps his parents with the family business, likes speeders and droids. But Karr also has a secret: When he touches certain objects, he gets searing headaches and blacks out. And along with the pain sometimes come visions of people he doesn't know and places he's never been. Karr's parents worry that he's sick; his grandmother is convinced the visions come from the Force. But it's been years since anyone has heard from the last of the Jedi - Luke Skywalker. Are there any Jedi left to guide Karr?

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.

When Simon and Katherine Hawke stumble upon an alien shuttle that has landed on earth, it’ll not only change the course of their lives, but of the entire world. Taking the shuttle into orbit, they discover a much larger ship left adrift with no one on board. Commandeering it, they confirm that we’re not alone in the universe and must prepare the human race for what is about to come. Recruiting from all over the world, they begin to expand their fleet and build a federation to give humans a foothold in the galaxy.

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!

The West has been devastated by epidemics, bio-terrorism, war, and famine. Asia has shut its borders to keep the threats at bay, and some with power and influence have already abandoned Earth. Now an escape route a century in the making - the Nomad mission - finally offers hope to a small town and a secret research centre hidden in a rural American backwater. Shrouded in lies and concealed even from the research centre's staff, Nomad is about to fulfil its long-dead founder's vision of preserving the best of humanity to forge a new future. But who decides who's worthy?

The plot by the Galactic Union’s Mercenary Guild against the Four Horsemen has culminated in an invasion of Earth. Faced with an overwhelming force, the human mercs had no choice. They’ve fled, leaving Sansar Enkh to go to the Mercenary Guild headquarters on Capital Planet to stand trial for humanity. On the run, Jim Cartwright and Nigel Shirazi have travelled to the Winged Hussars’ secret base of New Warsaw, in an effort to convince Alexis Cromwell to join the fight, while the other mercenaries who escaped the fall of Earth have gone to the perceived safe haven of Karma.

Cities all around the world reported strange alien vessels descending. Some saw them as the heralds of a new age; others fired everything they had at them. All were taken as the beams lashed down and drew them into the sky. Dean was left behind, seemingly the last man on Earth. A trail of clues left by his dead wife guides Dean on a perilous journey across America and beyond to learn the truth behind the mysterious ships and save humanity from its doom.

Aboard the Starship Shenzhou, Lieutenant Michael Burnham, a human woman raised and educated among Vulcans, is promoted to acting first officer. But if she wants to keep the job, she must prove to Captain Philippa Georgiou that she deserves to have it.

Set on the coast of South Carolina, an unknown infection has caused people to die and come back to life as reanimated corpses, attacking any living person. This is the story of the survival of one man who was the benefactor of a shelter that helped him to live through the onslaught of the infected dead.

They’ve watched us for centuries through the Rift. They’ve prepared. Invasion is inevitable. The Earth Fleet has known of the Watchers for years, unwilling to share the knowledge with humanity. Now it might be too late. Hidden away from the Fleet, one man is creating a new colony ship destined for the other side of the Rift, but he’s missing a few pieces. Three other people have varied paths to get there. Ace goes from the streets of Earth to the Fleet training facility on the moon. Flint, an ex-Fleet pilot, must decide if a job is worth his life.

You think you’re struggling to find your place in the universe? Consider poor old Colin Douglass, a terminally ill insurance agent who awakens from centuries in cryogenic freeze to find Earth is a devastated wasteland. Now, he’s being pursued by a homicidal interstellar tourist board, and calculating insurance dividends is as outdated as making stone axes. Sci-fi-hating technophobe Colin seeks a cure for his illness in this strange new galaxy where toilets talk back, and door handles are a long-forgotten relic.

Any kind of death annuls everything except his present knowledge and returns him to the past. This is a good way to test all sorts of things. That is, it would be, if not for one little thing.... This loop has real lords and it's unlikely that they'll be happy to hear about an uninvited guest. And that isn't his only problem - all of his memories of the last year have simply disappeared, but the world around him has changed in the meantime.

The future has amazing technology. Our alien allies have magic. Together, we are building a training system to teach the best of humanity to go to the stars. But the training is monumentally expensive. Stephanie Morgana is a genius, she just doesn't know it. Join her on the first half of her adventure with this collected edition, including the first three megabooks in the Federal Histories series.

In the year 2031, a robot probe detects traces of biological activity on Enceladus, one of Saturn's moons. This sensational discovery shows that there is indeed evidence of extraterrestrial life. Fifteen years later, a hurriedly built spacecraft sets out on the long journey to the ringed planet and its moon. The international crew is not just facing a difficult twenty-seven months: if the spacecraft manages to make it to Enceladus without incident it must use a drillship to penetrate the kilometer-thick sheet of ice that entombs the moon.

Higgens has the best job in the galaxy. Except for the fact that he’s technically a janitor on a galactic mining vessel. When he discovers an unknown alien species, his world gets turned upside down. He will have to find unlikely allies if he is going to save his new friend and help her build a new home. The Mimic and the Space Engineer boxed set contains the first three books in the Space Shifter Chronicles. If you like fast-paced space adventures with engaging, and quirky, characters, you will love Higgens, Mimic, and their adventures in space.

NASA finally made it. The very first human has just set foot on the surface of our neighbor planet. This is the start of a long research expedition that sent four scientists into space. But the four astronauts of the NASA crew are not the only ones with this destination. The privately financed "Mars for Everyone" initiative has also targeted the Red Planet. Twenty men and women have been selected to live there and establish the first extraterrestrial settlement.