Showing results by publisher "Orion Publishing Group Limited" in Science Fiction

The year is 2033. The world has been reduced to rubble. Humanity is nearly extinct and the half-destroyed cities have become uninhabitable through radiation. Beyond their boundaries, they say, lie endless burned-out deserts and the remains of splintered forests. Survivors still remember the past greatness of humankind, but the last remains of civilisation have already become a distant memory. Man has handed over stewardship of the earth to new life-forms.

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.

Calling Major Tom is a funny, uplifting tale of friendship and community about a man who has given up on the world...but discovers in the most unlikely way that it might not have given up on him. We all know someone like Thomas. The grumpy next-door neighbour who complains to the residents' committee about the state of your front lawn. The man who tuts when you don't have the correct change at the checkout. The colleague who sends an all-company email when you accidentally use the last drop of milk.

All her life, Spensa has dreamed of becoming a pilot. Of proving she's a hero like her father. She made it to the sky, but the truths she learned about her father were crushing. The rumours of his cowardice are true - he deserted his flight during battle against the Krell. Worse, though, he turned against his team and attacked them. Spensa is sure there's more to the story. And she's sure that whatever happened to her father in his starship could happen to her. When she made it outside the protective shell of her planet, she heard the stars - and it was terrifying.

Death-row prisoners with nightmare pasts and no future…. Until they were selected for a secret experiment….to create something more than human.

Now they are the future and humanity's worst nightmare has begun. The Twelve is the epic sequel to The Passage. Read by Scott Brick.

Stephen Donaldson devoted many years to his epic creation, The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. Now he is back with an all new novella - 40,000 words of richly imagined fantasy with beautiful world building and intense characterisation. The perfect listen for existing fans and new listeners alike. A man on a horse, confident in his powers but alone, rides a long and lonely road through rain-soaked woods. But he is on a path that he knows, and he is bringing much-needed justice with him.

It has been 14 years since the Martians invaded England. The world has moved on, always watching the skies but content that we know how to defeat the Martian menace. Machinery looted from the abandoned capsules and war machines has led to technological leaps forward. The Martians are vulnerable to earth germs. The army is prepared. 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.

Amy Harper Bellafonte is six years old, and her mother thinks she's the most important person in the whole world. She is.... Anthony Carter doesn't think he could ever be in a worse place than Death Row. He's wrong.... FBI agent Brad Wolgast thinks something beyond imagination is coming. It is.... The Passage.

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 10,000 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 30 billion Earths. But it is not at rest: it rotates at near light speed.

Bingo Sac Grabbins is asked by the coughing wizard Gandef and some (oddly Welsh) dwarves to help them relieve the great dragon Smug of his gold.SF author and Tolkien scholar Adam Roberts has written a parody that is both hilarious and intelligent. With knowing digs at the fantasy genre in general and the mystique that has built around middle earth in particular this will make Tolkien's 21st century readers laugh in a way that Bored of the Rings made his fans of 1969 laugh.

Labrys Town, home to a million humans cut off from the rest of the universe, has been invaded. Those who protected it have been deposed. The Relic Guild are scattered across the worlds of the Aelfir. Many of them are dead or dying. The Genii control everything. The war is almost over. Clara, a young woman barely able to control her werewolf side, has seen her friends and mentors killed in front of her. She is the last hope for Labrys Town.

Two 19th century stage illusionists, the aristocratic Rupert Angier and the working-class Alfred Borden, engage in a bitter and deadly feud; the effects are still being felt by their respective families a hundred years later.

From the critically acclaimed screenwriter of Doctor Strange and author of Sea of Rust and Queen of the Dark Things comes a hair-raising collection of short fiction that illuminates the strange, humorous, fantastical and downright diabolical that tantalise and terrorise us: demons, monsters, zombie dinosaurs and Death itself.

After months of travel, Anna Kubrick finally arrives on Mars for her new job as a geologist and de facto artist-in-residence. She'll be on Mars for over a year. Throwing herself into her work, she tries her best to fit in with the team. Anna finds a mysterious note, written in her own handwriting, she can't remember writing. Her wedding ring has been replaced by a fake. A footprint in a place the colony AI claims has never been visited by humans. Is she caught up in an elaborate corporate conspiracy, or is she actually losing her mind?

From the international best-selling author of The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant comes an extensive and all original new fantasy novella. Augur's Gambit is a tight and action-filled novella of more than 40,000 words. A novella with all the rich world building and acute characterisation that listeners have come to expect from the man who reinvigorated the whole genre in the 1980s and went on to write one of fantasy's landmark series.

Following his expulsion from school, 17-year-old dreamer Ellis Dau is sent to work with his father. His father is editor of The Chronicle, the last bastion of free speech in their strange, strange land. And it is under threat: from heavy-handed policemen, mysterious revolutionaries, and the resident Russian billionaire. As Ellis navigates his collapsing, blacked-out city - and his feelings for the oligarch's beautiful daughter - he realises that some things are worth fighting for.