Glorious continues the hard science fiction Bowl of Heaven series from multi-award-winning authors Gregory Benford and Larry Niven...Audacious astronauts encounter bizarre, sometimes deadly life forms, and strange, exotic, cosmic phenomena, including miniature black holes, dense fields of interstellar plasma, powerful gravity-emitters, and spectacularly massive space-based, alien-built labyrinths. Tasked with exploring this brave, new, highly dangerous world, they must also deal with their own personal triumphs and conflicts.At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Once upon a moment, the One spoke to He and She, and learned that infinity and eternity are slippery concepts. At best.

Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy is one of the high-water marks of science fiction. It is the monumental story of a Galactic Empire in decline, and the secret society of scientists who seek to shorten the inevitable Dark Age with the science of psychohistory. Now, with the permission -- and blessing -- of the Asimov estate, the epic saga continues.Fate -- and a cruel Emperor's arbitrary power -- have thrust Hari Seldon into the First Ministership of the Empire against his will. As the story opens, Hari is about to leave his quiet professorship and take on the all but impossible task of administering 25 million inhabited worlds from the all-steel planet of Trantor. With the help of his beautiful bio-engineered "wife" Dors and his alien companion Yugo, Seldon is still developing the science that will transform history, never dreaming that it will ultimately pit him against future history's most awesome threat.

"A fascinating plunge into a new world. I loved the idea of the SETI Library on the moon. Chasing wormholes is also a wild ride!" —Jack McDevitt, bestselling author of Octavia Gone Shadows of Eternity is legendary author Gregory Benford's return to interstellar science fiction as a discovery within the SETI library on the moon turns out to be deadly.Shadows of Eternity is a novel set two centuries from now. Humanity has established a SETI library on the moon to decipher and interpret the many messages from alien societies we have discovered. The most intriguing messages are from complete artificial intelligences. Ruth, a beginner Librarian, must talk to alien minds—who have aggressive agendas of their own. She opens doors into strangeness beyond imagination—and in her quest for understanding nearly gets killed doing it. Gregory Benford is one of science fiction's iconic writers, having been...

Death came in on sixteen legs.So begins a novella set in the Galactic Center series, "A Hunger for the Infinite." Now this novella and much other writing about the science and fiction in the series, appears in one volume. Unique in literature, the series comes from the author's own scientific research. The series took a quarter century to complete, and Benford traces his own research into the strange structures there, first discovered in the 1980s. Critics have described the six novels as "magnificent" by "the most rigorous of hard SF writers." The series has been called "one of the greatest sf series ever written," "a major achievement in realizing the potential of hard SF not only as speculation, but as literature," with "a bardic heft worthy of Poul Anderson." "No one has surpassed this ground-breaking achievement in mapping the unmappable depths of space, time, and consciousness."For the first time, all the depth surrounding the series is collected in one volume.

writing as Sterling Blake

In this thematic sequel to Gregory Benford's award-winning bestseller Timescape, a history professor finds that he is able travel back to 1968, the year he was sixteen—here, he finds a slew of mentors with the same ability, including Robert Heinlein, Albert Einstein, and Philip K. Dick.

Science Fiction. 9419 words long. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, September 1978

Now in a new, revised edition, the fourth book of the Nebula Award-winning author's Galactic Center series is a classic tale of man's future and fate--and the greatest mystery from outer space that humanity has ever encountered.

COMING OF AGE AMONG THE STARS Matt Bohles was content with the pleasures of low-g life in the Jovian Orbital Lab. Even if a young man did get to feel a bit squeezed, growing up in a tin can 600 million klicks from Mother Earth… But the International Space Administration was losing its patience with the slow advance of science. There was talk of closing down the lab. The Earthside pols wanted publicity, adventure and profits—and not necessarily in that order. So Matt had a bright idea. He figured he’d steal a spacesuit. Grab a spare shuttlecraft. And discover life on Jupiter…

In this first collaboration by science fiction masters Larry Niven ( Ringworld ) and Gregory Benford ( Timescape ), the limits of wonder are redrawn once again as a human expedition to another star system is jeopardized by an encounter with an astonishingly immense artifact in interstellar space: a bowl-shaped structure half-englobing a star, with a habitable area equivalent to many millions of Earths…and it’s on a direct path heading for the same system as the human ship. A landing party is sent to investigate the Bowl, but when the explorers are separated — one group captured by the gigantic structure’s alien inhabitants, the other pursued across its strange and dangerous landscape — the mystery of the Bowl’s origins and purpose propel the human voyagers toward discoveries that will transform their understanding of their place in the universe.

From the Nebula Award-winning author comes a newly revised edition of this story in his classic Galactic Center series.