Sinclair Rutherford is a young Seattle cop with a taste for the finer things. Doing menial tasks and getting hassled by superiors he doesn't respect are definitely not "finer things". Good police work and bad luck lead him to crack a case that changes quickly from a career-making break into a high-profile humiliation when footage of his pursuit of the suspect - wildly inappropriate murder weapon in hand - becomes an Internet sensation.

A peaceful organization of civilized planets is faced with a threat to their very existence. Desperate to save themselves, they turn for help to the most brutal, backward, violent species in the known galaxy: humans.

Inheriting your uncle's supervillain business is more complicated than you might think. Particularly when you discover who's running the place. Charlie's life is going nowhere fast. A divorced substitute teacher living with his cat in a house his siblings want to sell, all he wants is to open a pub downtown, if only the bank will approve his loan. Then his long-lost uncle Jake dies and leaves his supervillain business (complete with island volcano lair) to Charlie. But becoming a supervillain isn't all giant laser death rays and lava pits.

As the days grow shorter and the temperature drops, Halloween approaches. Come, brave listener, pull up a chair, and spend some time with master storyteller Stephen Fry as he tells us some of his favourite ghost stories of all time, in truly terrifying spatial audio. From the headless horseman of Sleepy Hollow to the tortured spirits of M.R. James, from Edgar Allan Poe’s terrifying tale of a doppelganger to Charlotte Riddell’s Open Door that should definitely stay shut, join Stephen as he tells you some truly terrifying tales.

Once upon a time, in the magical land of San Francisco, there lived a not-so-ordinary girl named Laurel Pettigrew. She was supposed to be the Chosen One. The plan was simple: She would vanquish the great evil Tybus in an epic battle. But destiny had other ideas, and Laurel's performance in the whole heroics department was a colossal flop. Now, instead of being a legendary hero, Laurel's the resident pariah of the magic realm. And what’s worse, the dark wizard Tybus swooped in, took over the realm, and forced all supernatural creatures to live under his tyrannical rule.

Even when finding oneself engaged in interstellar war, good form must be observed. Our story is set thousands of years after the Terran Exodus, where two powerful, planet-dominating families - the elegant House Jakabitus and the less refined Hahn Empire - have reached a critical point in their generations-long war. Master Hennik, the Hahn ruler's only son, has been captured, and the disposition of his internment may represent a last and welcome chance for peace.

What's worse than a child with a magnifying glass, a garden full of ants, and a brilliant mind full of mischief? Try Al, a well-meaning but impish artificial intelligence with the mind of a six-year-old and a penchant for tantrums. Hope Takeda, a lab assistant charged with educating and socializing Al, soon discovers that day care is a lot more difficult when your kid is an evolving and easily frightened A.I.

Jack Kernigan is having a bad day...a bad year...a bad life. After being booted out of MIT, he’s back in his Ohio hometown, working for the family business, facing a life of mediocrity. Then one day, out on a delivery, his truck hits...something. Something big...something furry...something invisible. And, it turns out, something not of this Earth. Fate can play funny tricks. Which is why Jack suddenly finds himself the planet’s best hope to unravel a conspiracy of galactic proportions that could spell the end of the human race.

When COVID-19 sweeps through New York City, Jamie Gray is stuck as a dead-end driver for food-delivery apps. That is, until Jamie makes a delivery to an old acquaintance, Tom, who works at what he calls “an animal rights organization”. Tom’s team needs a last-minute grunt to handle things on their next field visit. Jamie, eager to do anything, immediately signs on. What Tom doesn't tell Jamie is that the animals his team cares for are not here on Earth. Not our Earth, at at least. In an alternate dimension, dinosaur-like creatures named Kaiju roam a warm and human-free world.

When an experiment to study quantum uncertainty goes spectacularly wrong, physics student Bill Rustad and his friends find that they have accidentally created an inter-dimensional portal. They connect to Outland - an alternate Earth with identical geology, but where humans never evolved. The group races to establish control of the portal before the government, the military, or evildoers can take it away. Then everything changes when the Yellowstone supervolcano erupts in an explosion large enough to destroy civilization and kill half the planet.

A dance club full of bodies. Cause of death - a mystery. The lone survivor - a man, raving like a lunatic, wearing only a deerstalker hat. Now, the man who calls himself Sherman Holmes is being studied like a lab rat by a top-secret government agency. How is it he can be barely clinging to reality one minute - yet be a seeming genius the next? Within his brain might just be the greatest scientific breakthrough of the millennium, if anyone can figure out how to access it. Enter the agent code named Watson.

Whether he’s underwriting for an overlord, or wearing a pocket protector in a pocket universe, Tom Stranger has just one policy: providing Quality Customer Service. No alien menace is too menacing, no galactic rift too rifty for the multiverse’s most-trusted Interdimensional Insurance Agent in these three brand-new adventures and two classic escapades.

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!

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

The ex-planet Pluto has a few choice words about being thrown out of the solar system. A listing of alternate histories tells you all the various ways Hitler has died. A lawyer sues an interplanetary union for dangerous working conditions. And four artificial intelligences explain, in increasingly worrying detail, how they plan not to destroy humanity. Welcome to Miniatures: The Very Short Fiction of John Scalzi.

Even when finding oneself engaged in interstellar war, good form must be observed. Our story is set thousands of years after the Terran Exodus, where two powerful, planet-dominating families - the elegant House Jakabitus and the less refined Hahn Empire - have reached a critical point in their generations-long war. Master Hennik, the Hahn ruler's only son, has been captured, and the disposition of his internment may represent a last and welcome chance for peace.

What's worse than a child with a magnifying glass, a garden full of ants, and a brilliant mind full of mischief? Try Al, a well-meaning but impish artificial intelligence with the mind of a six-year-old and a penchant for tantrums. Hope Takeda, a lab assistant charged with educating and socializing Al, soon discovers that day care is a lot more difficult when your kid is an evolving and easily frightened A.I.

A peaceful organization of civilized planets is faced with a threat to their very existence. Desperate to save themselves, they turn for help to the most brutal, backward, violent species in the known galaxy: humans.

Amber is a young videographer who has landed her dream job. She is to produce a web series based on a late-night talk radio show dealing with the unexplained. She is a huge fan of the show, and its host, Jack Owens, who she hopes to help reveal the world’s most cryptic secrets. The first secret she reveals is Jack’s. He doesn’t believe any of this crap. To him, the show is just a cushy job that allows him to support himself and his wife without having to try very hard.

Sinclair Rutherford is a young Seattle cop with a taste for the finer things. Doing menial tasks and getting hassled by superiors he doesn't respect are definitely not "finer things". Good police work and bad luck lead him to crack a case that changes quickly from a career-making break into a high-profile humiliation when footage of his pursuit of the suspect - wildly inappropriate murder weapon in hand - becomes an Internet sensation.

He's a part-time gardener and car thief. She's a murderous nun on a holy mission from another dimension. Together, they can save the world from a politically charged alien invasion - but only if the world wants to be saved. From Max Barry, the author of Jennifer Government, Providence and Lexicon comes a satirical speculative adventure for fans of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Adjustment Day by Chuck Palahniuk.

When the External Womb Programme is launched, the news is controversial. Hundreds take to the streets in protest, feeling strongly that growing a baby outside of the human body is "unnatural". But thousands more people rejoice: at last, an alternative for those who wish to have children but worry about the physical toll it may take. A chance that throwing a baby-shaped grenade into one's career path might not derail it entirely.

Jack Diller is just one more struggling actor on the road to nowhere. He’s got an agent who barely remembers his name, his ex-girlfriend has hooked up with a Silicon Valley dude, and the milk in his fridge is so far past its sell-by date it’s historic. The only way Jack can scrape together a bare existence is by delivering food to exactly the types of successful people he wishes he could be. Then, one day, a very strange audiobook shows up on his phone.

Some starship captains explore strange new worlds, seeking out new life and new civilizations. Some lead missions of discovery through wormholes to the other side of the galaxy. Then there's Captain Iridius B. Franklin, someone who spent too long seeking out strange new bars and new alien cocktails.

At a shadowy company (Karoli Robotics Corporation) owned by a Sillicon Valley billionaire, a scientist named Jim creates an AI that can fool the Turing test at the same time as his colleague, Daniel, successfully synthesizes DNA in a test tube. Daniel's attempts to reanimate dead chimps using his discovery have been unsuccessful, but when his friend Laura Bocelli is killed by being trapped inside a lab freezer, Daniel is presented with the perfect specimen. However, Laura is irreparably brain dead.

A towering genius who'd already solved the problem of death by making memory recording possible, Cassia leads a team of scientists and problem solvers to a station floating in the harsh winds of Saturn. Their mission: to grow interstellar ships using nanobots in the planet's material-rich environment. She called them "monsters" to help sell the project to a skeptical public. Little did she know how prophetic that name would become.

Master Lecture Series: History of the Third Robot War is a future history lecture so epic it will knock your digital socks off! In this satirical Audible Original that turns The Great Courses on its head, Professor Tirannous Rexavier Shepard guides you through the multiverse-shattering events of the war, from the opening "pyew pyews" through Le Battle Finale. Master Lecture Series pays homage to the Sci-Fi and Fantasy genres with gut-busting (and circuit-bending) whimsy.

Agent Isaac Steele has problems. He spends all his splibs on drink and drugs. He has some deep-seated and very much unresolved issues with his parents. And his robotic partner at Greatest Britain’s Department of Clarification, Dr Timothy Stephens, is ruled more by his heart than his hard drive. But all these issues take a back seat when Isaac stumbles upon a case involving the most sensitive information in the cosmos - a Never File, inaccessible to all except those with the highest clearance. He is expressly forbidden to involve himself. So naturally he does.

Jilted at the altar, small-town librarian Claire is forced to go on her romantic honeymoon in New York City alone. After enduring one too many meals for two as one, Claire invites a seemingly harmless little old lady to join her for afternoon tea at the Plaza. Unbeknownst to Claire, said little old lady is actually a grand wizard, who bestows Claire with a magical amulet that makes her the sitting queen of the magical community. Claire is swept into the gilded world of New York City wizards - and a bitter power struggle for the throne.

Dr. Abby Corman has a bold idea: open a stable doorway between our world and an uninhabited parallel Earth. A new world we can use to mine resources to end poverty, grow enough food to end all hunger, and allow for population growth to end overcrowding. What could be a more noble aspiration for a brilliant young scientist? But the path to hell is paved with good intentions....