Where life as we know it is impossible, the real adventure begins. Venus is a hostile planet, covered by active volcanoes, but NASA launches an expedition to search for life there anyway. Their specially developed airship cruises in the clouds of Venus to serve as a research platform for its four astronauts. When they discover dangerous activities on the glowing-hot surface, there can only be one explanation: A highly sophisticated life form must be at work.

Russian billionaire Nikolai Shostakovitch makes an offer to the former crew of the spaceship ILSE. He will finance a return voyage to the icy moon Enceladus. The offer is too good to refuse - the expedition would give them the unique opportunity to recover the body of their doctor, Dimitri Marchenko. Everyone on board knows that their benefactor acts out of purely personal motivations... but the true interests of the tycoon and the dangers that he conjures up are beyond anyone's imagination.

Harry Rogers and Jess Cook stumbled into the technological remnants of an alien presence on Earth. Now everyone wants to take it from them. With both the government and a ruthless criminal family hot on their trail, they can’t afford even one mistake. If they win, they get a ticket to the stars. If they fail, they get an unmarked grave.

Dib is an Earthlike planet, only slightly smaller, with shorter days and longer years, in orbit around twin suns. On the continent of Geo, in the city of Velon in the nation of Inimata, a man lies dead in his study. In life, Professor Orno Linus was a world-class scholar: an astrophysicist, a dead-language linguist, and an expert in (and apparent true believer of) the religious concept of the Cull, i.e., the end of the world. Widely respected, nothing about Linus’s expertise suggests somebody might want him dead.

Dr. Neil Anson Clemons was born at the very moment that men first landed on the moon and always strived to become an astronaut and reach the stars. Neil devoted his life to staying physically fit as any astronaut should be through martial arts and mentally fit by studying and becoming one of the world's foremost experts in quantum physics and gravitational theory. Now he and his team have achieved a breakthrough, both in building a warp drive, and finding a new energy source powerful enough to make the drive more than an interesting theoretical concept.  

Mark Thomas is a sailor on a freighter ferrying people and lithium ore between the utopian colony world, Elysium, and Earth. The starship is sabotaged, the crew presumed lost. But there's one survivor. Alone, Mark finds safe harbor in the barely charted star system, Trappist-1. Marooned, he thought that his biggest challenge was how to call for help. When he discovers that something ancient and dangerous is also marooned in the archipelago of a star system, his plight goes from bad to worse.

Set to embark on NASA's first expedition to the outer planets, the crew of the spacecraft Magellan learns someone else has beaten them by a few decades: a top-secret Soviet project codenamed Arkangel. Now during their long race to the Kuiper Belt, astronauts Jack Templeton and Traci Keene must unwind a decades-old mystery buried in the pages of a dead cosmonaut's journal. The solution will challenge their beliefs about the nature of humanity, and will force the astronauts to confront the question of existence itself. 

In celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing, the endlessly-mysterious moon is explored in this reprint short science fiction anthology from award-winning editor and anthologist Neil Clarke (Clarkesworld, The Best Science Fiction of the Year).

More than a century ago, Earth was suffering under the weight of overpopulation and ever-dwindling resources. Humanity’s best and brightest were commissioned to create a means to escape the overcrowding of Earth, and to branch out and live among the stars. Their efforts were hampered by the seeming impossibility of faster-than-light travel, until a team of researchers discovers an usual answer they call “the Lightrail”.  On the eve of Earth’s first successful jaunt to the stars, however, a powerful organization called Earth First commits a horrible act of terrorism.

Janae and Ken are part of the remnant of humanity which lives in Dome 17, surrounded by the radioactive, toxic wasteland of a dead Earth. The leadership of the dome has sent out adventurers to explore the other domes, but all they have found are failed domes, and deadly ruins. Some of those adventurers have self-terminated upon return from those grueling missions. Only Dome 17 survives, but now, Dome 17 is facing its own failure. Looking to history, they come up with a plan to try to find the seven lost generational colony ships which left Earth a century before.

NASA finally made it. The very first human has just set foot on the surface of our neighbor planet. This is the start of a long research expedition that sent four scientists into space. But the four astronauts of the NASA crew are not the only ones with this destination. The privately financed "Mars for Everyone" initiative has also targeted the Red Planet. Twenty men and women have been selected to live there and establish the first extraterrestrial settlement.  

We were fighting on the wrong side of a war we couldn't win. And that was the good news. The Ruhar hit us on Columbus Day. There we were, innocently drifting along the cosmos on our little blue marble, like the native Americans in 1492. Over the horizon come ships of a technologically advanced, aggressive culture, and BAM! There go the good old days, when humans only got killed by each other. So, Columbus Day. It fits. When the morning sky twinkled again, this time with Kristang starships jumping in to hammer the Ruhar, we thought we were saved.

This omnibus contains all four books of the Adrift on a Sea of Stars series. Together, they tell the epic saga of the crew of the Beagle, sent to explore our stellar neighborhood. 

The four books are:

• Adrift on a Sea of Stars
• Earth Not Forgotten
• The Tarden Agenda
• Republic and Empire

Exploring the boundaries of the genre, Bova not only writes of spaceships, aliens, and time travel in most of his titles, but also speculates on the beginnings of science fiction in “Scheherazade and the Storytellers,” as well as the morality of man in “The Angel’s Gift.” Stories such as “The Café Coup” and “We’ll Always Have Paris” dip into speculative historical fiction, asking questions about what would happen if someone could change history for the better. This expansive collection is a key addition for Bova fans and sci-fi lovers alike! 

All contact is lost with the first human colony on Mars during a long and destructive sandstorm. Satellite imagery of the aftermath shows extensive damage to the facility. The 54 colonists who called it home are presumed dead. Three years later, a new mission sets down on the surface to investigate what remains of the derelict site. But it's not long before they realize the colony is not as lifeless as everyone thought. Someone is still alive - hiding out somewhere. Yet, before they can find the elusive colonist, a strange illness starts to affect the crew.