Isaac Asimov's renowned Foundation Trilogy pioneered many of the familiar themes of modern science fiction and shaped many of its best writers. With the permission and blessing of the Asimov estate, the epic saga left unfinished by the Grand Master himself now continues with this second masterful volume.

With Hari Seldon on trial for treason, the Galactic Empire's long-anticipated migration to Star's End is about to begin. But the mission's brilliant robot leader, R. Daneel Olivaw, has discovered a potential enemy far deadlier--and closer--than he ever imagined. One of his own kind.

A freak accident erases the basic commandments in humaniform robot Lodovik Trema's positronic brain. Now Lodovic's service to humankind is no longer bound by destiny, but by will. To ensure his loyalty, Daneel has Lodovic secretly reprogrammed. But can he be trusted? Now, other robots are beginning to question their mission--and Daneel's strategy. And stirrings of rebellion, too, are infecting their human counterparts. Among them is a young woman with awesome psychic abilities, a reluctant leader with the power to join man and robot in a quest for common freedom.or mutual destruction.

Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy is one of the high-water marks of science fiction. It is the monumental story of a Galactic Empire in decline, and the secret society of scientists who seek to shorten the inevitable Dark Age with the science of psychohistory. Now, with the permission -- and blessing -- of the Asimov estate, the epic saga continues.

Fate -- and a cruel Emperor's arbitrary power -- have thrust Hari Seldon into the First Ministership of the Empire against his will. As the story opens, Hari is about to leave his quiet professorship and take on the all but impossible task of administering 25 million inhabited worlds from the all-steel planet of Trantor. With the help of his beautiful bio-engineered "wife" Dors and his alien companion Yugo, Seldon is still developing the science that will transform history, never dreaming that it will ultimately pit him against future history's most awesome threat.

The bizarre events that have been occuring across the United States -- unexplained "oddities" tracked by Air Defense, mysterious disappearances, shocking deaths -- seem to have no bearing on Benita Alvarez-Shipton's life. That is, until the soft-spoken thirty-six-year-old bookstore manager is approached by a pair of aliens asking her to transmit their message of peace to the powers in Washington. An abused Albuquerque wife with low self-esteem, Benita has been chosen to act as the sole liaison between the human race and the Pistach, who have offered their human hosts a spectacular opportunity for knowledge and enrichment.

But ultimately Benita will be called upon to do much more than deliver messages -- and may, in fact, be responsible for saving the Earth. Because the Pistach are not the only space-faring species currently making their presence known on her unsuspecting planet. And the others are not so benevolent.

The Year is 2040.

The Marines have landed on Mars to guard the unearthed secrets of an ancient and dangerous alien race: Ourselves.

Scientists have discovered something astonishing in the subterranean ruins of a sprawling Martian city: startling evidence of an alternative history that threatens to split humanity into opposing factions and plunge the Earth into chaos and war. The USMC -- a branch of a military considered, until just recently, to be obsolete -- has dispatched the Marine Mars Expeditionary Force, a thirty-man weapons platoon, to the Red Planet to protect American civilians and interest with lethal force if necessary.

Because great powers are willing to devastate a world in order to keep an ancient secret buried. Because something that was hidden in the Martian dust for half a million years has just been unearthed . . . something that calls into question every belief that forms the delicate foundation of civilization . . .

Something inexplicably human.

3000 A.D. Years ago, humans colonized Mars, bringing with them specimens of long-extinct Earth life for regeneration on this new frontier. But humankind has disappeared, and the animals have been left behind to fend for themselves. Icebones, daughter of Silverhair, had been the only adult mammoth taken to Mars. As such, she is now the only one of her kind who carries the accumulated knowledge of mammoth history, and it is up to her to teach her fellow mammoths how to survive -- and thrive -- without their human keepers.

In the grand tradition of "Watership Down," Stephen Baxter has created a complex society complete with elaborate myths and legends. With "Icebones," he brilliantly and dramatically brings the acclaimed Mammoth trilogy to its resounding conclusion.

288p

The Jovian Astronautical-Biological Orbital Laboratory circles Jupiter and its moons—a metal shell bathed in lethal radiation, held in tenuous place by the gravity of the massive gas giant like a fragile glass ornament in a monstrous fist.

For seventeen-year-old Matt Bohles and his friends, "the Can" is home.

Life onboard the aging space station is cramped, spartan, and dangerous. Its mission—to monitor incoming signals and transmissions in search of alien life—has so far proven fruitless.

It is the only world Matt has ever known.

But now, as the threshold of adulthood—with its onset of new questions, confusions and feelings —Matt Bohles faces an impending crisis that threatens everything he knows and is. For unless he can prove himself an invaluable member of the scientific team—and quickly—he will be exiled to a filthy, perilous and unfamiliar hell called Earth.

208p

Hero or Killer?
In a startling future that’s coming closer every year, Chet Kinsman is an astronaut ace who has done everything in space---including committing the first murder.It’s a secret he can never escape, not even on the Moon, where he’s head of the first U.S. lunar colony.

But suddenly, a series of shocking yet strangely inevitable circumstances forces Kinsman to confront his hidden past and decide Earth’s destiny.In a desperate countdown to nuclear annihilation, Kinsman struggles against a deadly paradox: if he rescues the world, he may end up destroying himself.

In the future, earth's warriors have conquered the heavens.
But on a distant world, Humanity is in chains ...

Many millennia ago, the human race was enslaved by the An -- a fearsome alien people whose cruel empire once spanned the galaxies, until they were defeated and consigned to oblivion. But a research mission to the planet Ishtar has made a terrifying -- and fatal -- discovery: the Ahanu, ancestors of the former masters, live on, far from the reach of Earth -- born weapons and technology ... and tens of thousands of captive human souls still bow to their iron will. Now Earth's Interstellar Marine Expeditionary Unit must undertake a rescue operation as improbable as it is essential to humankind's future, embarking on a ten-year voyage to a hostile world to face an entrenched enemy driven by dreams of past glory and intent once more on domination. For those who, for countless generations, have known nothing but toil and subjugation must be granted, at all costs, the precious gift entitled to all of their star-traveling kind: freedom!

"Once the world worked differently - before "the Silence" from space quieted the airwaves and rendered electronics useless." "Once there was a haven called Crescent City, built through the wonders of nanotechnology to transport its enlightened inhabitants into the cosmos, far away from the chaos and terrors of a world gone mad. But humanity has failed the city. And carelessness has left it vulnerable to attack from those who covet the health and prosperity it offers." "One of the original "pioneers" - a recipient of the DNA-altering virus affecting a remarkable few who were born at the Silence's onset - Jason Peabody must now flee in the wake of an unanticipated assault on Crescent City by pirates. In the city-imposed persona of musical six-gun-toting Radio Cowboy, entrusted with the recovery of lost technology needed to heal the sentient metropolis and rocket it upward, he embarks on a bizarre odyssey across a perilous, unrecognizable outside - through a landscape of Western round-ups and tragically "youngening" children; of plague-ravaged humans in foreboding "flower cities"; of conscious machines, talking animals, and toys that long to be real. With him is Dania, a brilliant scientist and resilient survivor whose hidden, troubled past is now painfully remembered beyond the walls of her urban sanctuary." But even as Dania and her Cowboy journey westward, others are being relentlessly drawn to Crescent City from all parts of the globe - and two from the moon, the last humans remaining from the inexplicably vanished Unity colony.

416p

London is hunting
The great Traction City lumbers after a small town, eager to strip its prey of all assets and move on. Resources on the Great Hunting Ground that once was Europe are so limited that mobile cities must consume one another to survive, a practice known as Municipal Darwinism.

Tom, an apprentice in the Guild of Historians, saves his hero, Head Historian Thaddeus Valentine, from a murder attempt by the mysterious Hester Shaw -- only to find himself thrown from the city and stranded with Hester in the Out Country. As they struggle to follow the tracks of the city, the sinister plans of London's leaders begin to unfold ...

The nightmare metropolis called the Well-Built City exists because the satanic genius and Master, Drachton Below, wished it so. And few within its confines hold the power of Physiognomist First Class Cley. With scalpels, calipers, and the other instruments of his science, Cley can divine good and evil, determine character and intelligence, uncover dark secrets and foretell a person’s destiny, through the careful study of facial and bodily features. But now the Master has ordered the great physiognomist out of the City on a seemingly trivial assignment into the rural hinterlands. but there, removed from Below’s omnipresent scrutiny, even the most loyal servant of logic and order can fall prey to seductions of the flesh and spirit. And in this strange and unfamiliar place possessing terrors uniquely its own, there are stark truths awaiting the eminent Cley--and inescapable revelations that could shatter his perceptions of himself, his profession, and his world.

256 p

A loyal soldier and a wealthy merchant have served bravely in the flames of an enduring war that is ravaging their land. But swords, bows, wits and courage will no longer be enough to defeat the scourge that is descending upon their home. For a foul and terrible thing has escaped from a world already devoured to feed on one consumed by chaos -- an insatiable nightmare creature of dark and murderous nature which seeks to own and corrupt the very source of life itself

The final conflict is joined, pitting serpent against man and magician against demon. For those who battle in the cause of good, there will be victory...or there will be doom for all.

There can be no other outcome.

For eighteen years, Captain Jani Kilian has been hiding from her bloody past. Now she faces trial for what she once did, what she knows now, and what she has become.

Eighteen years ago, she was saved by a radical -- and illegal -- medical procedure that added alien genetic material to her own. But her hybrid body is breaking down. And so is everything else.

Relations between the human and alien idomeni races are deteriorating as rapidly as Jani Kilian's augmentation. And Jani's reemergence has caused old wounds to reopen and new wounds to form. Perhaps it's time for a damaged soldier to stop fighting; to let the desperate architects of a vast and devouring conspiracy keep the truth well hidden; to let the universe and everyone in it go straight to Hell.

Perhaps not...

A dread darkness is descending upon a great land called Midkemia -- a powerful and malevolent race of monsters that has slipped through a hole in the dimensions. And two unlikely young heroes -- a bastard heir denied his birthright and an irrepressible scoundrel with a penchant for thievery -- must take up arms in the struggle to protect their besieged world...two friends chosen by Destiny to stand at the fore of the battle that is to come against the gargantuan reptile army of the terrible Emerald Queen.

For fifty thousand springs, Silverhair and her kind, the last of the woolly mammoths, have lived in a remote tundra, rimmed by ice and sea and mountain. Soon to be a mother, Silverhair looks to the future with hope. But even as her life begins, the world she loves is ending. A new menace, more vicious than any enemy, is descending upon the snowlands -- a two-legged creature that kills for joy. Desperate to save their kind, Silverhair and the matriarch, Owlheart, must travel across the glacial torrents, beyond the saw-toothed mountains. There they will seek help from the distant cousins who found their destiny in the sea, and from an enemy -- an ice-faced menace known as...the Lost.

304p

Published here for the first time in illustrated trade paperback, this is Rudy Rucker's brilliant novel that helped define the cyberpunk movement in science fiction and won the first Phillip K. Dick Award.

There is a secret passage through time
...and it leads all the way to the end of Eternity. But the journey has a terrible cost. It alters not only the future but he "present" in which we live.

A century after the publication of H. G. Wells' immortal The Time Machine, Stephen Baxter, today's most acclaimed new "hard SF" author, and the acknowledged Clarke, returns to the distant conflict between the Eloi and the Morlocks in a story that is at once an exciting expansion, and a radical departure based on the astonishing new understandings of quantum physics.