This week’s science fiction new releases have unearthed derelict ships, genetically-engineered heroes, an armored fist of mecha tales, and sleeping threats best left undisturbed.
Children of Ruin – Adrian Tchaikovsky
The astonishing sequel to Children of Time, the award-winning novel of humanity’s battle for survival on a terraformed planet.
Thousands of years ago, Earth’s terraforming program took to the stars. On the world they called Nod, scientists discovered alien life – but it was their mission to overwrite it with the memory of Earth. Then humanity’s great empire fell, and the program’s decisions were lost to time.
Aeons later, humanity and its new spider allies detected fragmentary radio signals between the stars. They dispatched an exploration vessel, hoping to find cousins from old Earth.
But those ancient terraformers woke something on Nod better left undisturbed.
Mech – Isaac Hooke
An alien-infested colony. A trapped platoon. The one man who will stop at nothing to lead his unit to safety.
Rade Galaal and his team of special operators are deployed to a colony under attack by a strange new alien race. Their mission: find the extraterrestrial base and destroy it.
The operation should be easy, given that his men pilot Brigand mechs: massive, 25-foot-tall war machines armed to the teeth with electrolasers, rockets, incendiary throwers, and more.
But it’s not easy. Rade and his team soon find themselves in over their heads.
Surrounded by an entire world of enraged aliens, they must rely on their wits, their training, and their mechs to survive.
Because their only way out is each other.
Mecha – presented by Cannon Publishing
Feedback from the slight pressure of a hand closing sends a powerful mechanical arm smashing into an opponent. A neural link hurls blustering plasma fire from your suit’s shoulder mounted cannon. Your reactor levels scream with overload as return fire smashes into your armor, and damage alarms wail while you hurl your twenty ton body sideways for cover.
You’re a Mecha, a mechanical fighting machine with a human pilot. The guy that the infantry curse at in training and pray for in combat. The machine that the last hopes of your people ride on. The construct that strikes fear deep into alien hearts as they hear your turbines power up. The one able to pass through hell and come out the other side victorious, or die trying.
Cannon Publishing brings you ten stories from current masters of military science fiction that will take you from the magic of a Medieval village to the edges of the galaxy to fight inhuman foes.
Nanotime – Bart Kosko
In the year 2030—when the world has doubled in population and no one can escape the prying eyes of the State—John Grant wants to save the Earth from its oil addiction, and get rich in the process.
But the revolutionary new molecule he has patented—an astonishing advance that can split water and produce a virtually limitless supply of cheap fuel hydrogen—has marked him as a traitor to his country and as a target.
Sufi mystic, genius mathematician and master terrorist Hamid Tabriz wants Grant’s patent and his mind. Now both goals are within Tabriz’s reach, thanks to a chip he has perfected which enables him to place his own mind in another’s head.
An increasingly chaotic world is racing toward annihilation. And John Grant will have to defend it—and himself—from a disembodied place far beyond the confines of space and time: in Nanotime.
No Way Back (Forgotten Fallout #3) – M. R. Forbes
When the going gets tough, Sheriff Duke gets tougher.
He’ll have to if he’s going to survive long enough to see justice done. The monsters infecting the forgotten Earth don’t sleep, and neither can he. There’s no time to rest. There’s no time to recover. The clock is ticking, the stakes are rising, and if he fails it’ll be more than his wife and child that are caught in the fallout.
It’ll be the whole world.
Don’t miss the thrilling conclusion to Forgotten Fallout, the series readers have called “addictive and exciting sci-fi filled with action, suspense, loss, and hope.”
Octavia Gone (Alex Benedict #8) – Jack McDevitt
After being lost in space for eleven years, Gabe finally makes his triumphant return to reunite with Alex and Chase and retrieve a possibly alien artifact—which may lead them to solve the greatest archaeological mystery of their careers, in the eighth installment of the Alex Benedict series.
After his return from space, Gabe is trying to find a new life for himself after being presumed dead—just as Alex and Chase are trying to relearn how to live and work without him. But when a seemingly alien artifact goes missing from Gabe’s old collection, it grants the group a chance to dive into solving the mystery of its origins as a team, once again.
When a lead on the artifact is tied to a dead pilot’s sole unrecorded trip, another clue seems to lead to one of the greatest lingering mysteries of the age: the infamous disappearance of a team of scientists aboard a space station orbiting a black hole—the Amelia Earhart of their time. With any luck, Alex, Chase, and Gabe may be on the trail of the greatest archaeological discovery of their careers…
Shockwave (Star Kingdom #1) – Lindsay Buroker
What if being a hero was encoded in your genes? And nobody told you?
Casmir Dabrowski would laugh if someone asked him that. After all, he had to build a robot to protect himself from bullies when he was in school.
Fortunately, life is a little better these days. He’s an accomplished robotics engineer, a respected professor, and he almost never gets picked on in the lunchroom. But he’s positive heroics are for other people.
Until robot assassins stride onto campus and try to kill him.
Forced to flee the work he loves and the only home he’s ever known, Casmir catches the first ship into space, where he hopes to buy time to figure out who wants him dead and why. If he can’t, he’ll never be able to return home.
What in his genes is worth killing for?
Titan’s Rise (Children of Titan #3) – Rhett C. Bruno
Titan has declared its freedom from Earth.
Keeping it is another story.
After inciting rebellion against Earth throughout Titan’s off-world colonies, Kale Trass learns that leadership isn’t only about fighting. Keeping control of his people–even his own family–requires a different set of skills. Following a pivotal battle over Saturn, Kale travels deep into enemy territory under the guise of seeking peace, though peace is the last thing on his mind.
Malcolm Graves used to be an infamous Collector for a powerful Earther corporation, until he nearly lost his life on Titan. Now he’s retired. But when Kale’s wake of destruction follows Malcolm to Mars and claims the life of a friend, it’s time for the ex-Collector to dust off his pulse-pistol and leap back into a fight he thought he’d left behind.
With the solar system divided, heroes are few and short-lived … but someone has to put the self-proclaimed King Trass of Titan in his place.
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