A volume of visions of future wars, fought with weapons out of nightmare, by today’s top writers of military science fiction, as well as some writers who are not usually associated with military SF, such as best-selling writer Gregory Benford, and award-winning author Kristine Katherine Rusch. Also present are Michael Z. Williamson, author of the strong selling novels “Freehold” and “The Weapon”, award-winning author of “Bolo Strike”, William H. Keith, and more.

Through the centuries, weapons have changed radically, but the soldier has remained much the same. But in the future, soldiers, too, may undergo radical changes. As editor Joe Haldeman puts it, “Weapons are an extension of the soldier, and also an extension of the culture or species that produced the soldier. And they are sometimes more dangerous to the soldier than the enemy…”

To protect his young family from merciless corporate tyranny, Samuel Hyst signs up for the hazardous life of a salvage marine, the foot soldiers of a militarized deep space operation. Hazard pay is high for a reason, and Samuel must endure grueling tours of duty in the abandoned scrapyard quadrants of a war-torn universe. Endless wars rage across every galaxy, leaving damaged starships, rusted factories, and broken planets in their wake, all ripe for plunder by the desperate and the daring. Samuel must seize his destiny in frenzied combat against murderous scavengers, horrific monsters, and the elite mercenaries of rival corporations. Left with no choice but to fight, he must win freedom with a combat rifle and his blowtorch.

They are bold, daring, reliable… and doomed. The salvage marines of Tango Platoon have gone up against everything from space pirates and resistance fighters to savage mutants and the heavily armed elite troopers of Helion Corporation. By all accounts they are some of the most battle-hardened veterans in the fleet and experts at hostile salvage operations. The marines are pulled off a low risk contract and placed at the vanguard of tremendous planetary scale conflicts that will have them locked in furious battle for control of a subterranean underworld infested with brutal street gangs and monstrous creatures before pushing them to the bleeding edge of the known universe and pitting them against a city of the mechanized undead. For Samuel Hyst freedom is just out of reach and always seems one more volatile mission away.

Business is war, and business is booming. Economic competition has escalated into a full scale galactic conflict, and the salvage marines are pulling hard duty at the center of the catastrophe. All around them vast armies of conscripts, convicts, and contractors are fighting their way across hostile alien worlds and through the cold void of space at the will of their corporate masters. Whether the marines are boldly piloting their scrap wagons through the debris fields of defeated battle fleets one step ahead of deadly slave traders, speeding in makeshift boats across a backwater planet towards a bloody conflict with the creatures that lurk just beneath the surface, or storming the trenches of a tomb world defended by pitiless mercenaries, everything is a race against other violent factions looking to cash in. Samuel Hyst is surviving the war one day at a time, though while he is away at war his family must contend with new enemies and dangers of their own, and to reach them he will join a revolution.

During an apocalyptic battle against murderous machines and hardened soldiers a lone salvage marine turns the tide with a devastating counter attack. Having revealed herself as a consummate warrior, Jada Sek is welcomed into the ranks of the Dire Swords, an elite fighting force loyal only to the contract. As the other marines return to their salvage duties Jada and her new comrades, each as haunted by the ghosts of their past as she is, plunge yet further into necrospace. They are repeatedly deployed to disrupt and destroy the endeavors of corporate competitors, and along the way discover that the enigma of the machine race is more sinister and complex than any imagined. Surrounded by the specters of an ancient holocaust and forced to face her inner conflict, Jada must make a choice. When the money ceases to matter, when surviving loses its significance, and the thrill of taking the fight right into the teeth of the enemy seems like the only truth left in this scrapyard of a universe, it is time to let the marine die so that the mercenary can be born.

Hostile salvage confirmed. Rhett Calibos is a bounty scrapper, his life as an indentured soldier a welcome alternative to imprisonment on a penal colony. A man haunted by his past, Rhett throws himself into the work, his only sanctuary. Sokol Targe is the leader of a mech warrior squad, stationed aboard an ancient and deadly warship, and conducts violent raids on behalf of a Red List commune. Cast away from corporate society, they have embraced the ravager way of life. As these troubled men endure furious combat across the ragged edges of civilization, neither of them realize they’ve become entangled in the deeper mysteries of necrospace. It’s a hard universe, and nobody gets away clean.

The most wanted salvage marine in the universe thought he was done fighting. He was wrong. For Samuel Hyst the nightmare was over, left behind upon dead worlds and within the derelict ships drifting through space, he and his family having fled to the edges of the frontier to begin a new life of peace. In the aftermath of a violent raid by slave traders, the long suffering marine discovers that a relic of the ancient machine civilization has been left at the doorstep of his pristine forest homestead. He feels the menace radiating from it, and knows that the various powers and factions that rule necrospace will soon come for all of them. Samuel cuts a deal with Captain Dar of the freelance prospecting ship Rig Halo, who years ago saved Samuel’s wife and son from the trade war. Tension is high aboard the ship, as the Hyst family adjusts to being in the rough company of the Halo and a life on the run. As it turns out, the Rig is also a ship full of mercenaries, and once more Samuel finds himself with rifle in hand and squeezing the trigger just to stay alive. The hunt has already begun and Grotto predators are closing in.

A triumph of the New Space Opera: fast, complicated, wonder-filled!

Hugo Award finalist and Robert A. Heinlein Award–winning SF writer Michael Flynn now turns to space opera with stunningly successful results. Full of rich echoes of space opera classics from Doc Smith to Cordwainer Smith, tells the fateful story of an ancient pre-human artifact of great power, and the people who found it.

Starting with Captain Amos January, who quickly loses it, and then the others who fought, schemed, and killed to get it, we travel around the complex, decadent, brawling, mongrelized interstellar human civilization the artifact might save or destroy. Collectors want the Dancer; pirates take it, rulers crave it, and they’ll all kill if necessary to get it. This is a thrilling yarn of love, revolution, music, and mystery, and it ends, as all great stories do, with shock and a beginning.

The Hound Bridget ban has vanished and the Kennel (the mysterious superspy agency) has given up looking for her. But her daughter, the harper Mearana, has not, and she has convinced the scarred man, Donovan, to aid in her search.

But Donovan’s mind has been shattered by Those of Name, the rulers of the Confederacy, and no fewer than seven quarreling personalities now inhabit his skull. How can he hope to see Mearana safely through her quest?

Together, they follow Bridget ban’s trail to the raw worlds of the frontier, edging ever closer to the de-civilized and barbarian planets of the Wild. Along the way, they encounter evidence that they too are being followed—by a deadly agent of Those of Name.From BooklistOn the harper Mearana’s home planet, up Jim River is a saying indicating a journey ever further into danger and the unknown. Mearana’s mother, Bridget ban, has disappeared on mysterious business. Even the Kennel, her employer and one of the galaxy’s two sources of secret agents, didn’t know what she was looking for or where she went. Mearana is determined, though, to discover her mother’s fate. She manages to convince the scarred man, the Fudir, who was once Donovan but became six or seven personalities after a botched experiment by Those of Name, to join her out of a sense of nostalgia. The worlds inhabited by these people are sufficient reason to read the novel. The extrapolations of linguistic drift and remnants of ancient history that Flynn conjures constitute a fascinating story in themselves. Adding to them a tense and thrilling search from the bar on Jehovah to the very Wild itself, through strange cultures and dangerous ports, just makes the book all the more engaging.

It’s a big Spiral Arm, and the scarred man, Donavan buigh, has gone missing in it, upsetting the harper Mearana’s plans for a reconciliation between her parents. Bridget ban, a Hound of the League, is unconvinced that reconciliation is either possible or desirable; but nonetheless has dispatched agents to investigate the disappearance. After all, Donovan had once done the favor for her ().

There is a struggle in the Lion’s Mouth, the bureau that oversees the Shadows—a clandestine civil war of sabotage and assassination between those who would overthrow Those of Name and the loyalists who support them. And Donovan, one time Confederal agent, has been recalled to take a key part, willingly or no.

The first installment of the trilogy, , centers on disgraced captain Kel Cheris, who must recapture the formidable Fortress of Scattered Needles in order to redeem herself in front of the Hexarchate.

Captain Kel Cheris of the hexarchate is disgraced for using unconventional methods in a battle against heretics. Kel Command gives her the opportunity to redeem herself by retaking the Fortress of Scattered Needles, a star fortress that has recently been captured by heretics. Cheris’s career isn’t the only thing at stake. If the fortress falls, the hexarchate itself might be next.

Cheris’s best hope is to ally with the undead tactician Shuos Jedao. The good news is that Jedao has never lost a battle, and he may be the only one who can figure out how to successfully besiege the fortress.

The bad news is that Jedao went mad in his first life and massacred two armies, one of them his own. As the siege wears on, Cheris must decide how far she can trust Jedao–because she might be his next victim.

First Contact: Assess human with the flawed, rudimentary, mind… Unbeknownst to simpleton Cuddy Perkins, his dependable, uneventful, life was about to be turned completely upside down. It’s a moonless summer night when a severely damaged intergalactic spacecraft enters Earth’s upper orbit. The alien pilot is desperate. Needs to hold up long enough to make repairs—before his pursuers find him. Cuddy Perkins lives a simple life with his mother, his dog Rufus, and a scattering of farm animals that still inhabit their old, dilapidated, Woodbury Tennessee ranch. He was used to the insults; retard… simpleton… village idiot. Momma says to just ignore them… people can be heartless. But Cuddy already knew he had been different, ever since the accident back when he was seven. He didn’t know how long ago that was, exactly, but he did know he was pretty big now—taller than his older brother, Kyle… who was in prison, and the Woodbury Sherriff—the man who put him there.

The Fourth Science Fiction Megapack selects 25 more modern and classic science fiction stories, by talented authors new and old. Included in this volume: Mary A. Turzillo, E.C. Tubb, Murray Leinster, Theodore Sturgeon, Philip K. Dick, Katherine MacLean, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Jason Andrew, Larry Hodges, Carmelo Rafala, Ray Cluley, Henry Kuttner, Cynthia Ward, George H. Scithers, John Gregory Betancourt, James C. Stewart, Milton Lesser, John Russell Fearn, Marissa Lingen, Donald A. Wollheim, James K. Moran, Harry Harrison, Edgar Pangborn, Isaac Asimov, and Ayn Rand.

David Conway leads a quiet life in picturesque Magenta Bay on the colony world of Chalcedony. Nothing much has happened for five years, but all that is about to change. First he meets the mysterious holo star Carlotta Chakravorti-Luna, who regrets the lost loves of her past and dreams of learning what the future might hold. Then Conway’s alien friend Kee heads inland to take part in an Ashentay ritual with potentially fatal consequences. What follows is a convoluted and poignant tragedy which entangles Conway and his friends.

That winter David Conway was enjoying a quiet life with his friends, not especially looking for love, but finding it anyway. The artist Matt Sommers was due to stage an exhibition of Epiphany Stones from Acrab IV, a show which attracted the attention of one Darius Dortmund, the famous empathy. Dortmund could see into the minds of men ‘some said into their very souls’ and when he met David and his friends, and looked into their minds, what he found there would lead to murder… Starship Winter, the third volume in the Starship Seasons sequence, continues the quiet adventures of Conway and his friends on the backwater colony world of Addenbrooke, Delta Pavonis IV.

Set a course for intercourse with this raucous space opera from Yoss, “Cuba’s premiere science-fiction writer” (VICE), where humans explore the limits of the Milky Way—and their libidos. In the 24th century, Josué Valdés’ rise from an orphan in the slums of Rubble City, Cuba to one of the galaxy’s most accomplished explorers was nothing short of meteoric. Josué used to race cockroaches for cash on the streets until he discovered his true-calling: as a sexual ambassador for humanity and the Nu Barsa colony. Every so-called “condomnaut” knows that trade deals in the galactic community depend on sexual pacts, which makes every encounter a close encounter. While some condomnauts have been trained and genetically enhanced to meet the needs of any tentacled insectoid in the galaxy, Josué is a natural whose ego could eclipse the big dipper. Josué and his fellow intrepid condomnauts travel light years across the galaxy and discover that old rivalries—and prejudices—are never far behind. When the first extragalactic beings arrive in the Milky Way, and with them the potential to negotiate for extraordinary new technologies, Josué must call upon every ounce of his talent to seal the deal for his colony and all of humanity. Indirectly investigating current sexual mores, Cuban science fiction rock star Yoss plays upon stereotypes while making it clear that in Communist Cuba what is daring is not always funny and vice versa. Following the success of Super Extra Grande and A Planet for Rent, Yoss brings us another uproarious space adventure with Condomnauts, a wildly inventive and unapologetic tale that would make even Barbarella blush.

From New York Times best-selling author Yoon Ha Lee. The shattering conclusion to the Hugo Award nominated Machineries of Empire series! When Shuos Jedao wakes up for the first time, several things go wrong. His few memories tell him that he's a seventeen-year-old cadet--but his body belongs to a man decades older. Hexarch Nirai Kujen orders Jedao to reconquer the fractured hexarchate on his behalf even though Jedao has no memory of ever being a soldier, let alone a general. Surely a knack for video games doesn't qualify you to take charge of an army? Soon Jedao learns the situation is even worse. The Kel soldiers under his command may be compelled to obey him, but they hate him thanks to a massacre he can't remember committing. Kujen's friendliness can't hide the fact that he's a tyrant. And what's worse, Jedao and Kujen are being hunted by an enemy who knows more about Jedao and his crimes than he does himself...

War. Heresy. Madness.

Shuos Jedao is unleashed. The long-dead general, preserved with exotic technologies and resurrected by the hexarchate to put down a heretical insurrection, has possessed the body of gifted young captain Kel Cheris.

Now, General Kel Khiruev’s fleet, racing to the Severed March to stop a fresh incursion by the enemy Hafn, has fallen under Jedao’s sway. Only Khiruev’s aide, Lieutenant Colonel Kel Brezan, appears able to shake off the influence of the brilliant but psychotic Jedao.

The rogue general seems intent on defending the hexarchate, but can Khiruev – or Brezan – trust him? For that matter, can they trust Kel Command, or will their own rulers wipe out the whole swarm to destroy one man?

Our universe is a mother. Don’t be fooled by her adorable exterior. The heart of a vicious killer lies within Jelly Anderson. Soon, she’ll be fighting for two… It impregnated her with a gift she must protect at all costs. Jelly and her crew on Space Opera Beta are outnumbered and outgunned. Aliens have invaded the ship and are on the hunt for fresh blood. They’re waiting for their sister ship to come and save them. Rescue or death. Only one will come first. The crew will train Jelly to defend herself. Wool will teach her to suppress her catty instincts. Jaycee will teach her how to use weapons. Bonnie will teach her how to kick ass. It’s their only shot at survival. In training an animal, they may have created a monster. Prey is about to become predator. Jelly Anderson came to save the universe and kick some ass. Now, she’s all out of universe… Scroll up and one click Star Cat 3: War Mage right now. The young adult sci-fi action behemoth that sinks its claws in and refuses to let go… The STAR CAT Series: Star Cat: Infinity Claws Star Cat 2: Pink Symphony Star Cat 3: War Mage Star Cat 4: Killer Instinct (Coming Soon: July 2018.) Star Cat: Origins - The short story prequel (Download this book for FREE here: )

Nebula Award-winning author Elizabeth Moon makes a triumphant return to science fiction with a thrilling series featuring Kylara Vatta, the daring hero of her acclaimed Vatta’s War sequence. After nearly a decade away, Nebula Award–winning author Elizabeth Moon makes a triumphant return to science fiction with a thrilling new series featuring the daring hero of her acclaimed Vatta’s War sequence. Summoned to the home planet of her family’s business empire, space-fleet commander Kylara Vatta is told to expect a hero’s welcome. But instead, she is thrown into danger unlike any other she has faced and finds herself isolated, unable to communicate with the outside world, commanding a motley group of unfamiliar troops, and struggling day by day to survive in a deadly environment with sabotaged gear. Only her undeniable talent for command can give her ragtag band a fighting chance. Yet even as Ky leads her team from one crisis to another, her family and friends refuse to give up hope, endeavoring to mount a rescue from halfway around the planet—a task that is complicated as Ky and her supporters find secrets others will kill to protect: a conspiracy infecting both government and military that threatens not only her own group’s survival but her entire home planet.