The October Round-up of Scifi Books

Hello out there. This month's round-up is being recorded in advance as by the time you read this I'll be back in Cornwall. If the weather is OK, I'll be coasteering and kayaking near Falmouth. I also hope to return to Kynance Cove and explore some more.

Well, I'm sure you don't really bother reading the bits about my life and want to dive striaght into the book suggestions. So here they are...

We’re all Orphans in the Black...
Strap yourself in for nineteen thrilling short stories of space pirates, time travelers, aliens, AI, and more! Meet determined heroes forging their own path through the universe, men and women who won’t go down without a fight.

From gruesome alien invasions to epic space battles, the second volume of The Expanding Universe will expand your imagination. Explore the possibilities that our infinite universe holds with psychic hunters, brave soldiers who battle vicious invaders, and brilliant engineers who must act quickly to save their crewmembers. And only in The Expanding Universe will you find mercenary nuns.
Chivalry in space, pirates versus drones, a starship teetering on the edge of a gravity well, and space marines doing what they do best - kicking ass - will have you on the edge of your seat, turning pages long into the night to find out what happens next. And only in The Expanding Universe will you find mercenary nuns.

Being an officer means balancing many conflicting demands. Making the wrong decision can have serious consequences. It takes a special kind of person to cope with the responsibility.
The Officer is an anthology of eleven science fiction short stories by writers from across the globe. It is part of the Newcomer series of scifi anthologies.

Cosette Sinclair, pregnant with an illegal second child, makes a discovery that will change the course of humanity. While on assignment to find a habitable planet for mankind’s first colony, she witnesses a tear in space—a gateway for a devastating alien invasion. Now she’s faced with the heart-wrenching choice between saving her unborn child and saving the world.
Moshie lives in a culture that prizes competition about all else. His mother raises him to dominate every creature he encounters. As Moshie trains for the day when he will rule an ancient alien civilization, a whisper in the young man’s mind calls him to something greater. Can he put aside a lifetime of striving for power and heed the cry to save those he despises the most?
She has one chance to save the human race. He has one chance to save himself. Both learn that trusting their long-hated enemies might be their only chance of survival.

In a few hundred years, the Algol system becomes humanity's new home. The question is: is it a better one? When a crew of arms smugglers botches their latest job, Corps-deserter and crewmember, Aly Erikson, is separated from her brother, the only person she can trust, and left behind to fight for her life. In the aftermath, as she tries to piece together what happened, a crew of roughneck settlers pressgang her into a dangerous mission in the heart of Corps territory. Time is running out to get back everything she's lost: her crew, her brother, and her options. But no one is taking her gun.

Walt Marshall is no stranger to loss after the global infertility epidemic claimed his wife and unborn son. Now he’ll honor them by doing whatever it takes to restore life to a decimated valley.
War consumes the planet, Earth spirals into chaos, and the human race teeters on the edge of extinction. As Walt works towards a brighter future, he uncovers a secret rivaling military claims. Destined to unveil the truth, he embarks down a dangerous path of espionage and treason as he desperately vies for answers.

Earth has been destroyed, the entire solar system turned to dust by a cataclysmic event known as the Fracture. Now, the last survivors of humanity live on vast arkships drifting through the Cluster, doing what they can to survive in a hostile ever-changing environment.
When the arkship Obsidian is attacked, Wynn awakes in an escape pod fleeing from a huge space battle, unable to remember who he is. Hunted by a killer robot, the forces of a rival arkship, and the Church of the Infinite, Wynn must survive long enough to unlock his lost memories, discover who is behind the attack and take his revenge.

Professor Rachel Jordan dared to defy 3000 years of angelic doctrine, teaching that the ancient angels were never the saviors they claimed to be. The Redeemers, self-appointed guardians of angelic law, branded her a heretic. Hunted by zealots who would brainwash her back into the angels’ good graces, she flees to the edge of civilized space.
But not to hide.
Rachel’s only hope is a fabled lost book of the Codex, written by a rogue angel: the Sefer Raziel. Tracking the book to a desolate former prison world, she delves into the criminal underworld to ferret out its location. But her search draws the ire of greedy megacorporations, shadowy puppet governments, and the zealots who chased her there in the first place.
As conflicting forces close in, Rachel must rely on dangerous allies and question the limits of her moral code to be the first to claim the Sefer Raziel. Even if it kills her. Because the only fate worse than death is knowing that her failure doomed humanity to eternal servitude.

Centuries after three quarters of the human population on earth fell victim to a savage plague, a new enemy rises to threaten the existence of humanity. A population divided by those still fully human, those part machine and those who are both dead and alive at the same time, what it means to be truly human has already been long forgotten.
Enter one man who knows. Encased in cryo-stasis for three hundred years, his connection to the past could potentially save the human race from extinction once again, if he can stay alive long enough. Pursued by enemies on all sides, Nathan Ironside has one mission: to survive. Because if he doesn't nobody will...

For Karin Makos, the chance to pilot a small-time scrounging vessel to remote corners of space is the dream. After years on the run with her sister and enduring the constant paranoia of living planet-side, going off-radar gives her exactly what she wants: freedom.
After what seems like a routine mission, that dream is shattered.
A system-wide attack decimates humanity and leaves the survivors scraping for clues. And Karin might know where to look.
But digging into her past comes with a whole new set of secrets and consequences, none of which she wants to face. Plagued by strange dreams of her sister and a sense of growing danger, Karin and the crew of the Nemina must race desperately across space to find their loved ones—and answers.

Nine brilliant scientists travel light years on a one-way trip to an Earth-like planet. Their mission is to study from orbit the two species of intelligent lifeforms on the surface. The first: an isolated people embarking on civilization and building their world’s first city. The second: a brutal race of massive predators, spread thick and still growing across the dominant landmass—destined to breed and eat their way to extinction within a few centuries.
After eight years of observation, disaster strikes the orbiting station and only two crewmembers eject successfully. Drifting down through a dark alien sky, the pair realizes their escape pod launched not toward the safety of the city, but to the other side of the planet, touching down deep inside a land no human could possibly survive.

Far from Earth and shipwrecked on a desolate alien planet, a band of brave settlers strive to carve out a life for themselves on a range of hills while battling to hold back the carpet of deadly microorganisms that creeps across the lowlands below, devouring all in its path. The settlers survive from day to day, but their lives are thrown into chaos on one fateful night when five of their young men and women go missing. And that’s when they see the lights. Out there in the deadly wasteland, there are headlights carving through the darkness. Someone is coming. And perhaps, they mean to stay.

When Rosalen Maldonado tinkers with the derelict freighter, she's just hoping to prove she deserves a scholarship to University. She certainly doesn't count on waking the ship's damaged AI or having three stowaways, Micah Rotherwood and brothers Jem and Barre Durbin, along for the ride. They all have their private reasons for hiding aboard and lives they are seeking to escape, but if the accidental crew can't work together and learn to trust each other, they'll die together, victims of a computer that doesn't realize the war ended decades before any of them were even born.

In the year 2432, humans think they are alone in the universe. They’re wrong.
Commander Noa Sato plans a peaceful leave on her home planet Luddeccea ... but winds up interrogated and imprisoned for her involvement in the Archangel Project. A project she knows nothing about.
Professor James Sinclair wakes in the snow, not remembering the past twenty four hours, or knowing why he is being pursued. The only thing he knows is that he has to find Commander Sato, a woman he’s never met.
A military officer from the colonies and a civilian from Old Earth, they couldn’t have less in common. But they have to work together to save the lives of millions—and their own.
Every step of the way they are haunted by the final words of a secret transmission: The archangel is down.

Genetically engineered from birth, Karin Makos’s powers have made her the Alliance’s most wanted person. With her sister still missing, and only a cryptic notebook left behind for clues, the mystery of her past is going to take a lot more time and resources than they have to unravel it.
And there’s a bigger problem looming. Keeping their promise to heal Ethan’s stepfather and the rest of the people on the Ozark puts them right past Caishen station and its Alliance allies—and there might be another force on their tail.
After the crew split apart on a wild chase that puts Karin in the hot seat, it’ll take all of their strength and ingenuity to bring them back together. With enemies gathering in the wings, a desperate, heavy-handed station commander hard on their tail, and the Shadows an ever-present threat, they must race against the odds and scramble to fight their way out.

Lucas Odin can’t catch a break. What began as a shuttling mission under flag of truce escalated to a fight to keep the Fairfax in one piece. Now he and his crew are plunging back in-system in search of the missing Martian Ambassador Taurius, whom they are supposed to convey to a peace summit on Pluto. But Odin has reasons to suspect Taurius isn’t all he seems. He’d better be worth sneaking into enemy space, taking on hostile pirates at every turn, and courting an all-out war with the mafia bosses of Ceres. The walls are closing in around Odin and the Fairfax. Can they find the ambassador and get back to Kuiper space before they become the very enemy they are fighting to destroy?

Io Suta was a mother and a relic of the Last War. A hard-wire robot pilot using a coupling system to control her giant bipedal war machine. A mech or "mobile suit". After the Final Crisis, she found a lost population of migrants and fell in with them doing the only thing she had ever been any good at. Fighting.
Io and her suit, the Areol ended up the migrant's first and last line of defense against the dangers of a universe in chaos.
Her story starts when a dangerous new kind of Jack, an uncontrollable enemy, drives the migrant fleet to crash on an abandoned terraforming experiment. A new life? New hope? There was no way to know, and no turning back.

NASA discovered the alien ship lurking in the asteroid belt in the 1960s. They kept the Target under intense surveillance for decades, letting the public believe they were exploring the solar system, while they worked feverishly to refine the technology needed to reach it.
The ship itself remained silent, drifting.
Dr. Jane Holloway is content documenting nearly-extinct languages and had never contemplated becoming an astronaut. But when NASA recruits her to join a team of military scientists for an expedition to the Target, it’s an adventure she can’t refuse.
The ship isn’t vacant, as they presumed.
A disembodied voice rumbles inside Jane’s head, "You are home."
Jane fights the growing doubts of her colleagues as she attempts to decipher what the alien wants from her. As the derelict ship devolves into chaos and the crew gets cut off from their escape route, Jane must decide if she can trust the alien’s help to survive.

Join Captain Bartholomew Quasar and the crew of the Effervescent Magnitude in this hilarious collection of short stories as they confront bands of nefarious space pirates, cantankerous bandits, exotic aliens, devious powers of persuasion, mysterious ghosts from the past, deep space identity crises, a runaway hyperspeed train, an insidious computer virus, and a villain with the fastest thumbs in the quadrant.

Did you see the guy in the video wearing the purple tights and mask robbing that bank?
That’s Brendan’s dad. He’s a supervillain. The law is after him. The internet loves him. Brendan wishes they weren’t related. Fortunately a scholarship fell into his lap to an exclusive private high school across the country in California. The chance of a lifetime. The teachers are attentive and Brendan is making new friends, but Dutchman Springs Academy has its own mysteries.
A girl keeps showing up in his electronics lab who can vanish at will, the phone and internet keep going out, and Brendan believes the Headmaster of the school is conducting secret experiments on the students.

As the only woman on the first contact team, xenolinguist Toni Donato expected her assignment on Christmas would be to analyze the secret women's language -- but then the chief linguist begins to sabotage her work. What is behind it? Why do the men and women have separate languages in the first place? What Toni learns turns everything she thought they knew on its head.

A murderous computer program has seized her cyborg partner's body and mind, turning him into a super assassin bent on destroying everything she's vowed to protect. In a high-stakes game of cat and mouse, Kimber FitzWarren faces her deadliest challenge yet, a man with all the skills and knowledge of her lover Wolf Youngblood, but controlled by the mind of a killer. Fitz has to find a way to protect her Emperor while keeping her adversary alive until she can free her partner.
A prisoner in the dark labyrinth of his own mind, Wolf struggles to regain control of his body, concocting a plan to use the killer as a Trojan Horse to lead him to his attacker. In the meantime, he can only watch as a helpless passenger as the assassin plots to kill all the people he loves.

They barely escaped with their lives, and pursuit is hot on their tail. While Higgins and Mimic begin the journey to find the shapeshifter’s home, the fugitive crew must stay ahead of ship that would gladly sell them all for profit. In the process, Higgins and Mimic will learn more about their vastly different races and explore unknown worlds. Whether she finds home or not, Mimic has found a friend for life.

A fourth volume in the prestigious series of space opera collections emerges, featuring ten authors, some best-selling and some freshly emerging, telling bold new tales. Join these award-winning writers as they take you on a journey... beyond the stars.

Underwater cities, lost civilizations, crops, climate change, and dead zones.
In this collection of ocean-themed stories, twelve of today’s top speculative fiction writers explore our morality, our built-in societal restraints, and reflect upon our state of grace.
The waves roll in, the waves roll out.

Dictators. Devices. Destruction.
With worlds fallen and tyrants rising in their wake, can these heroes and heroines survive the End of Days?
Uncover secrets and flirt with death when you immerse yourself in these 16 all-new, exclusive stories of economic collapse, war, disease, and disaster from today’s New York Times, USA Today, and award-winning authors.

Fear ripples through human galactic society.
Another ship travels from humanity's bleak future, targets a populated planet ... and lays it waste in a fiery apocalypse. Nothing survives, and the ship disappears. In the midst of the recovery, Admiral Jack Mattis finds more questions than answers as he tracks down the dreadfully powerful enemy ship.
But the most pressing question: why are these mutated humans from the future relentlessly attacking us? What do they want? And at what cost?
And are these the same creatures created by the genetic research corporation exposed by Mattis on the planet Chrysalis?
The answers lie at the root of a deep conspiracy that goes beyond governments, beyond corporations. A conspiracy that will stop at nothing to succeed, and achieve ultimate power over humanity.
And as the deadly ship prepares for its final catastrophic strike, Admiral Jack Mattis and the crew of the Midway are the last defense between us, and our last dawn.

Yara Ortuso always knew she'd follow in her father's footsteps as a Spell Slinger--until her mother sold her off as a concubine to a lord, after a forbidden romance.
Yara would have served her time as a wife to keep her family safe, but when King Loric sets a decree to abolish magic, she has no choice but to make plans for her escape.Her best friend--a crow shifter named Hero is just what she needs. Yara vows to end the reign of murder and tyranny. But when the skeleton key transports Yara to a distant future, she must adapt to this new world. A mysterious prince with his own secret motives might stand between Yara and her quest for vengeance.

In a world where mythical creatures are either controlled, or on the brink of extinction—a prophecy reveals there's one who can restore balance. The only problem is, she has no idea how to do it.
Separated from the only people who've had her back—as well as the love of her life, Traeton—Runa must go on a quest alone to uncover what it means to be human, as well as the Daughter of Five. Dropped in an unknown location, presumably still on the planet, she only has a monolithic book—the Caudex—as her guide, but it's not giving up its answers easily. Will she be able to uncover the mysteries? The fate of the entire word rests on her shoulders and her ability to push through all of the challenges set her way.

A woman with the power to raise the dead. A man stranded on another world, fighting all alone for a lost cause. Zombies invading New York. Alien artifacts. Sci-Fi battle angels. Samurais fighting demons. Interplanetary detectives and lost unicorns.

Everyone knows that there's no such thing as ghosts, but when a client claims that her house is being haunted, Ivy tries to keep her mind open and her weapons handy. If her psychic gifts and recent cases have taught her anything, it's that you're better off arming yourself for the unexpected.
Anything is possible in Harborsmouth.