Stephen Baxter

What would happen to the world if the sun went out?New epic sci-fi from Stephen Baxter, the award-winning author whose credits include co-authorship of the Long Earth series with Terry Pratchett.By the middle of the 21st century, humanity has managed to overcome a series of catastrophic events and maintain some sense of stability. Space exploration has begun again. Science has led the way.But then one day, the sun goes out. Solar panels are useless, and the world begins to freezeEarth begins to fall out of its orbit.The end is nigh.Someone has sent us a sign.

James Cameron's Avatar is the biggest movie of all time. Now the movie's legendary director has leant his support to an exploration of the world of Pandora with bestselling science-fiction author Stephen Baxter. From journeys into deep space to anti-gravity unobtanium, from Pandora's extraordinary flora and fauna to transferring consciousness, Baxter and Cameron reveal that we are often closer to the world of Avatar than we might imagine.Stephen Baxter is the master of `what-if?' science fiction. In THE SCIENCE OF AVATAR he's written a book that will appeal to fans of both science-fiction and popular science. THE SCIENCE OF AVATAR will offer fans the unique opportunity to explore the spectacular world of Pandora, from the creator himself.

An anthology featuring some of the biggest names in British genre fiction, including rare, previously uncollected stories by Iain M. Banks, Stephen Baxter, Peter F. Hamilton, Justina Robson, Paul McAuley, Juliet E McKenna, Anne Nicholls, and Geoff Ryman, alongside original stories by Eric Brown, Ian R. MacLeod, Martin Sketchley, Kari Sperring, and Adrian Tchaikovsky. The rare reprints all appeared originally in souvenir booklets given to attendees of the Novacon convention and featuring original work by that year's Guest of Honour.The very best of British Science Fiction.Table of Contents: Burning Brightly: Introduction by Rog PeytonChiron - Stephen BaxterThe Spheres - Iain M. BanksActs of Defiance - Eric BrownHeatwave - Anne NichollsAlien TV - Paul McAuleyCanary Girls - Kari SperringSoftlight Sins - Peter F. HamiltonErie Lackawana Song - Justina RobsonThrough the Veil - Juliet E. McKennaThe Coming of Enkidu - Geoff RymanRed Sky in the Morning - Adrian TchaikovskyThe God of Nothing - Ian R. MacLeodThe Ships of Aleph - Jaine FennBloodbirds - Martin SketchleyAbout the Authors

It started the night Geena and Henry broke up. What was that strange light in the sky? A new star? A comet? Neither. It was the death of Venus.As if to commemorate the end of NASA's golden couple, our neighbor planet exploded into a brilliant cloud of dust and debris, showering the Earth with radiation and bizarre particles as big as bacteria--a ten-dimensional superstring nanovirus that literally eats rock, transforming it into liquid, and then into molecule-size black holes that devour the very fabric of spacetime.Feasting on Edinburgh's primeval basalt, Moonseed is steadily eating its way toward Earth's core. The death toll rises by the hour as buildings collapse into streets that flow like water, as hundred-foot tsunamis obliterate Seattle and Vancouver, and as volcanoes sprout like weeds across the planet's quickly decaying mantle.NASA rock-jockey Henry Meacher and his Japanese colleague, Blue, race to cut off the virus and save what is left of the Earth. Meanwhile Henry's ex, Geena, straps in with a Russian cosmonaut for a daredevil Moon voyage, ultimately reuniting with Henry and searching for the lunar ice deposits that might make possible the greatest evacuation since Noah braved the Flood.And a mother and her young son clamber for the last solid ground in the liquefying Scottish Highlands, under the baleful stars of a dying universe ...Audacious beyond comparison, grand in conception, and gripping in execution, Moonseed is the first modern novel to do justice to the awesome terror and promise implicit in quantum physics. Like all of Baxter's work, it blazes new paths from which science fiction will surely follow in the years to come, and becomes required listening for anyone wishing to understand the awesome promise--and threat--revealed by modern science.

What would happen to the world if the sun went out? New epic sci-fi from Stephen Baxter, the award-winning author whose credits include co-authorship of the Long Earth series with Terry Pratchett. By the middle of the 21st century, humanity has managed to overcome a series of catastrophic events and maintain some sense of stability. Space exploration has begun again. Science has led the way. But then one day, the sun goes out. Solar panels are useless, and the world begins to freeze Earth begins to fall out of its orbit. The end is nigh. Someone has sent us a sign.

Trapped on an alternate Earth, the combined crews of a crashed Russian spaceship, a British expeditionary force and a group of strays from the future must work together to survive, escape, and discover what led them to this point. All are from parallel universes where small changes in history led to different realities, and the tensions between the groups are rising. But some changes were not small. The solar system has been altered, changed, shaped in the various realities, and the World Engineers - unspeakably powerful, completely unknown - are still active. Why have they populated this planet with humanity's ancestors and dinosaurs? What is on the moon of Saturn that gives off such an odd light? And even if they can be found, can they be stopped - and should they be? Malenfant, Deidra and the rest of their party must find a way off the planet, back into space, and into the many dimensions seeking the answer...

A hard-SF cli-fi saga set against the background of the birth of the solar system. Filled to the brim with big ideas and breathtaking worldbuildingIn the year 2570, a sleeper will wake . . .In the mid-21st century, the Kernel, a strange object on a five-hundred-year-orbit, is detected coming from high above the plane of the solar system. Could it be an alien artefact? In the middle of climate-change crises, there is no mood for space-exploration stunts - but Reid Malenfant, elderly, once a shuttle pilot and frustrated would-be asteroid miner, decides to go take a look anyway. Nothing more is heard of him. But his ex-wife, Emma Stoney, sets up a trust fund to search for him the next time the Kernel returns . . .By 2570 Earth is transformed. A mere billion people are supported by advanced technology on a world that is almost indistinguishable from the natural, with recovered forests, oceans, ice caps. It is not an age for expansion; there are only small science bases beyond the Earth. But this is a world you would want to live in: a Star Trek without the stars.After 500 years the Kernel returns, and a descendant of Stoney, who Malenfant will call Emma II, mounts a mission to see what became of Malenfant. She finds him still alive, cryo-preserved . . . His culture-shock encounter with a conservative future is entertaining . . . But the Kernel itself turns out to be attached to a kind of wormhole, through which Malenfant and Emma II, exploring further, plummet back in time, across five billion years . . .Readers are blown away by World Engines: Destroyer:'The book quickly becomes epic in a massive, yet thoroughly believable way, precisely because the story is grounded in all of these well-realised characters' Goodreads reviewer, ? ? ? ? ?'It is a really good Cli-Fi but not only ecological . . . It touches on very many different topics that are very much in our future' Goodreads reviewer, ? ? ? ? ?'It's a great sci-fi novel, well written and gripping. I loved the amazing world building, the fleshed out cast of characters and the plot' Goodreads reviewer, ? ? ? ? ?'This is a complex book with a lot going on . . . Suffice to say this was a fantastic read with a great story, good characters & a world that I would very much like to come back to' Goodreads reviewer, ? ? ? ? ?'The large scale is always where Baxter is so exciting and passionate and it pays off in spades in the final act. Worth your time to read and enjoy' Goodreads reviewer, ? ? ? ? ?'If you love your science fiction hard, look no further than Stephen Baxter to find your fix. He was literally a rocket scientist. His work is always grounded in science' Goodreads reviewer, ? ? ? ? ?

It is the dawn of the twentieth century.Following the Martians' failed invasion of Earth, the British Empire has seized their technology and unlocked its secrets for themselves. It is a Golden Age of discovery, adventure, culture, invention—and of domination, and rebellion.Scarlet Traces reveals a world of ant-headed nightmares; vacuum salesmen; war machines; deadly secrets; clockwork marvels; and Sherlock Holmes, T. S. Eliot and Thomas Edison as you've never seen them before...Including stories by Stephen Baxter, I. N. J. Culbard, Adam Roberts, Emma Beeby, James Lovegrove, Nathan Duck, Mark Morris, Dan Whitehead, Chris Roberson, Maura McHugh, Jonathan Green and Andrew Lane.

A hard-SF saga set on an almost-empty Earth, currently scheduled to be destroyed in a hundred years.

Michael Poole finds himself in a very strange landscape . . . This is the centre of the Galaxy. And in a history without war with the humans, the Xeelee have had time to built an immense structure here. The Xeelee Belt has a radius ten thousand times Earth's orbital distance. It is a light year in circumference. If it was set in the solar system it would be out in the Oort Cloud, among the comets - but circling the sun. If it was at rest it would have a surface area equivalent to about thirty billion Earths. But it is not at rest: it rotates at near lightspeed. And because of relativistic effects, distances are compressed for inhabitants of the Belt, and time drastically slowed.The purpose of the Belt is to preserve a community of Xeelee into the very far future, when they will be able to tap dark energy, a universe-spanning antigravity field, for their own purposes. But with time the Belt has attracted populations of lesser species, here for the immense surface area, the unending energy flows. Poole, Miriam and their party, having followed the Ghosts, must explore the artefact and survive encounters with its strange inhabitants - before Poole, at last, finds the Xeelee who led the destruction of Earth...

A sequel to the H.G. Wells classic THE WAR OF THE WORLDS, brilliantly realized by award-winning SF author and Wells expert Stephen Baxter It has been fourteen years since the Martian invasion. Humanity has moved on, always watching the skies but confident that we know how to defeat the alien menace. The Martians are vulnerable to Earth germs. The army is prepared. Our technology has taken great leaps forward, thanks to machinery looted from abandoned war-machines and capsules. So when the signs of launches on Mars are seen, there seems little reason to worry. Unless you listen to one man, Walter Jenkins, the narrator of Wells' book. He is sure that the first incursion was merely a scouting mission, a precursor to the true attack--and that the Martians have learned from their defeat, adapted their methods, and now pose a greater threat than ever before. He is right. Thrust into the chaos of a new worldwide invasion, journalist Julie Elphinstone--sister in law to Walter Jenkins--struggles to survive the war, report on it, and plan a desperate effort that will be humanity's last chance at survival. Because the massacre of mankind has begun. Echoing the style and form of the original while extrapolating from its events in ingenious, unexpected fashion again and again, The Massacre of Mankind is a labor of love from one of the genre's most praised talents--at once a truly fitting tribute to a classic and brainy, page-turning fun for any science-fiction fan.

The first novel from one of the world's leading SF authors, now a SF Masterwork for the first time!

Half a million years in the future, on a dead, war-ravaged world at the centre of the Galaxy, there is a mile-high statue of Michael Poole.Poole, born on Earth in the fourth millennium, was one of mankind's most influential heroes. He was not a warrior, not an emperor. He was an engineer, a builder of wormhole transit systems. But Poole's work would ultimately lead to a vast and destructive conflict, a million-year war between humanity and the enigmatic, powerful aliens known as the Xeelee. The Xeelee won, but at a huge cost. And, defeated in a greater war, the Xeelee eventually fled the universe. Most of them.A handful were left behind, equipped with time travel capabilities, their task to tidy up: to reorder history more to the Xeelee's liking. That million-year war with humankind was one blemish. It had to be erased. And in order to do that, a lone Xeelee was sent back in time to remove Michael Poole from history . . .