Space Science Exploration

Equipped with the entirety of human knowledge, a sentient ship is launched on a last-ditch journey to find a new home for civilization. Trillions of miles. Tens of thousands of years. In the space between, the AI has plenty of time to think about life, the vastness of the universe, everything it was meant to do, and—with a perspective created but not limited by humans—what it should do.

Earth has been nothing but bad luck for Mia Ambrose. So when the opportunity arises for her to be a nanny on a different planet, she jumps on it. But she should’ve researched her new employer a bit more. When he turns out to be a strict, super hot and stuffy military commander, she wonders if her bad luck followed her. Tharon is the highest-ranking commander in the Tor’vian military. And he has no idea how to take care of his children, a set of eight-year-old twins. Help comes in the form of hiring a nanny from the planet Earth. Mia isn’t exactly what he expected in a nanny. She’s ...

Jimmy Martin has a sore head. He's used to smuggling illegal data in his headspace. But this is the first time it has started talking to him. The data claims to be a distinguished academic, author and civil rights activist. It also claims to be a bear. A bear named Honey. Jimmy has nothing against bioforms–he's one himself, albeit one engineered out of human stock–and works with them everyday in Hell City, building the future, staking mankind's claim to a new world: Mars.

Captain Shirakaya commands the Celestial, an intergalactic starship that glides through the inky blackness of deep space. As a powerful sorceress, she and her crew investigate paranormal events while exploring the void.

Hired as a tutor and nanny to Prince Maxon’s son, Fiona packs her bags and goes to a planet where the people are every color of the rainbow. But life in the palace is anything but vibrant. The prince is a jerk. A jerk her hormones crave. His sexy body and deep gaze twist her emotions in knots, but she’s not falling for him. Prince Maxon has been training for the day to take the place of his father as king since birth. Long days of weapons training, war strategizing, and politics have kept him too busy to be a good father or loving partner. He doesn’t have time for the emotions that ...

Held captive by Dark Horse Company, Captain Axel Finn is faced with a mission to humanity’s ancestral home after all contact with the planet is lost. Learning his mother might be hiding there, Axel agrees to help his adversaries, and deploy on Vengeance, the last Steward ship. But his decision might lead to his downfall if the Wrath have already arrived on Earth. On the treacherous Wooly planet of Dari, bounty hunter Rangnar Soki becomes the prey, finding himself the target in a deadly game of survival. His path to rejoin Axel’s crew hinges on passing a test of Dari’s most revered guardian.

Though she knows her brother holds her mother's favor, Ingrid is determined to at least be considered as heir to the family name. She hatches an audacious plan—free a thief from a prison planet from which no one has ever returned, and use them to help steal back a priceless artifact. But Ingray and her charge return to her home to find their planet in political turmoil, at the heart of an escalating interstellar conflict. Together, they must make a new plan to salvage Ingray's future and her world, before they are lost to her for good.

The Galactic Empire has prospered for 12,000 years. Nobody suspects that the heart of the thriving Empire is rotten, until psychohistorian Hari Seldon uses his new science to foresee its terrible fate. Exiled to the desolate planet Terminus, Seldon establishes a colony of the greatest minds in the Empire, a Foundation which holds the key to changing the fate of the galaxy.

Leigh grew up in Rotterdam, drawn to the waterfront as an escape from her unhappy home life and volatile father. Enchanted by the undersea world of her childhood, she excels in marine biology, travelling the globe to study ancient organisms. When a trench is discovered in the Atlantic ocean, Leigh joins the exploration team, hoping to find evidence of the earth's first life forms—what she instead finds calls into question everything we know about our own beginnings.

Van and his crew have killed an empire. The problem is the empire doesn’t know it’s dead. Moving among the stars, the Peacemakers are faced with their greatest challenge—removing an evil so vast, it has a presence in every known star system. To that end, they’ll need to move quickly. To do so, they must be mobile, and that means big changes in their tactics. . . and their crew. With the help of a shadowy figure known as the Body Thief, Van will continue his policy of justice and freedom for all citizens, even if they began life on a computer chip.

After eighty years of fragile peace, the Architects are back, wreaking havoc as they consume entire planets. In the past, Originator artifacts—vestiges of a long-vanished civilization—could save a world from annihilation. This time, the Architects have discovered a way to circumvent these protective relics. Suddenly, no planet is safe. Facing impending extinction, the Human Colonies are in turmoil. While some believe a unified front is the only way to stop the Architects, others insist humanity should fight alone.

Jacques McKeown is the most celebrated author of star-pilot fiction in the galaxy. He's rich, famous, and living in luxury, and his universe-wide fanbase eagerly awaits any news of his next book. There's just one small hitch. He's not Jacques McKeown. He's Dashford Pierce, star pilot and con artist, and if only the impatient calls from his publisher were the worst of his problems. There's also the last vestige of the Henderson crime gang, trouble brewing in the retired star-pilot community, and a small matter of somebody trying to kill him.

Ralph could be described as a rogue on a good day. A bad day involved a lot of cursing, calling him a pirate, or sometimes even having a shoot-out. It wasn't really his fault of course, or so he would have you believe. It was the fault of those who wanted to get in his way of making as much money as possible as a smuggler. His family had been gifted with a letter of marque for the Terran Confed, one that is inherited and has been passed down to him. Essentially, it gives him a lot of loopholes and ways through regulations to be a fantastic smuggler. Or as a legal pirate, a Privateer.

Raised fatherless in a galactic Brinktown, Joe Pikeman only ever wanted to escape. The Galactic Guard offered that escape, with the promise of regular meals to boot. Now Joe is a full Guardsman, with his own ship and a snide partner bot who hates humans almost as much as he hates other bots. To the pirates he hunts, Joe is known as the Butcher. His bloody reputation has landed him in the center of a sweeping conspiracy that threatens to stamp out the galaxy’s last surviving human settlements.

Hackett, in his trusty ship the Perseus, is not just a space traveller—beginning his travels with an expedition to Neptune and back—but, thanks to the time-dilation effect, a time traveller as well. His new mission will take him to Andromeda, to get a close-up look at the constellation which will eventually crash into the Milky Way, and give humanity a heads-up about the challenges which are coming. A mission which will take him five million years to complete. Not only is Hackett exploring unknown space, but he will return to a vastly different time.

No one has ever ventured deeper into space than the four astronauts of Shepherd-1. The aim of their mission is to witness the creation of the cosmos. Using the sun as a lens, they are to align a flock of probes in such a way that the moment of the Big Bang becomes visible. For astronomer Christine, this is a dream come true. So she is bitterly disappointed when the first images are obscured by a kind of veil that prevents any insight. She works obsessively to find a solution, but when she finally succeeds in lifting the veil, she sees something that would have been better kept hidden...

Stephanie Harrington didn’t discover treecats—they were indigenous to the planet Sphinx, a colony of the tiny Star Kingdom of Manticore. But at age ten she was the first human to bond with one. Now, almost 17, she is the species greatest champion. To the rest of the human galaxy, if they are known at all, they are recognized as tool using, socially organized, fuzzy little creatures, with no known method of communication—who also happen to be fierce hunters. But are they sapient?

Hannah is a fusion scientist working alone at a remote cottage off the coast of Scotland when she sees a figure making his way from the sea. It is a young man from a human settlement on Mars, traveling backwards through time to try to make a crucial intervention in the fate of our dying planet, and he needs Hannah's help. Hannah and the stranger are on the path towards a breakthrough—and then things go terribly wrong.

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

Life in the wasteland is a constant struggle. No one knows it better than Taimin. Crippled, and with only his indomitable aunt to protect him, Taimin must learn to survive in a world scorched by two suns and frequented by raiders. But when Taimin discovers his homestead ransacked and his aunt killed, he sets off with one mission: to seek revenge against those who stole everything. With nowhere to call home, his hunt soon takes a turn when he meets a mystic, Selena, who convinces him to join her search for the fabled white city.