First Contact: Essentials (English Edition) epub

Five novels. Five encounters. Five very different visions of First Contact: a war-zone, a classroom-to-cosmos love letter, a slow-burn mystery ship, a dimension-bending epic, and a hard-SF alien world thriller. Each one provides a completely different answer to the same question: what happens when we realize we're not alone anymore?

• Xenophobia
• Anomaly
• Ghosts
• Maelstrom
• Cold Eyes

XENOPHOBIA
Elizabeth Bower is a doctor working with Doctors Without Borders. She's caught in the middle of a civil war in Malawi when the world is turned upside down. An alien spacecraft enters orbit, and peacekeeping forces are recalled home. Abandoned to a country descending into chaos, Bower and the handful of US Rangers have to get her patients out alive—only to discover the war they're fleeing and the visitors overhead aren't as separate as they seem.

ANOMALY
Teller is an underachieving high school science teacher on a field trip to New York—until an alien spacecraft lands outside the United Nations and the world's leading scientists find themselves needing someone who can explain things simply. With a technological gap measured in millions of years, humanity's best chance at First Contact turns out to be the last person anyone expected. ANOMALY is a love letter to the teachers who make impossible ideas make sense—and a reminder that sometimes the smartest person in the room is the one asking the simplest questions.

GHOSTS
When an alien spacecraft four times the size of an aircraft carrier enters the solar system, it doesn't approach Earth. Instead, it parks, motionless, over a hundred million miles away from Earth, and waits. Chris "Crash" Williams leads the international crew sent to find out why, only to discover the ship isn't nearly as dead as it looks. Written as a tribute to Arthur C. Clarke's Hugo and Nebula Award-winning classic RENDEZVOUS WITH RAMA, Peter Cawdron's GHOSTS is a slow-burn mystery about what happens when the silence itself is the warning.

MAELSTROM
Tunguska, Roswell, the Bermuda Triangle, the Mary Celeste—for centuries, history's strangest unsolved mysteries have been dismissed as coincidence until Dr. Elizabeth Callie, a surgeon in rural China, finds a patient who shouldn't exist: a living, breathing Neanderthal. Told across three interlocking novellas, MAELSTROM builds from an impossible discovery into a globe-spanning collision of worlds—dinosaurs, alien technology, and visitors from realities that were never supposed to touch ours, making this a unique form of First Contact.

COLD EYES
COLD EYES is an original First Contact novel, written as a tribute to the 1974 science fiction classic THE MOTE IN GOD'S EYE, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. The UN warship Magellan is twelve light-years from Earth, in orbit around a cold eye—a tidally-locked super-Earth called Bee, home to not one but two advanced, intelligent species. But no one is waiting for the Magellan in orbit, and the crew's attempts at radio contact come back garbled and wrong. Xenobiologist Dali Patel has to figure out why before a misunderstanding no one can take back drags them into a war nobody wants. Warning: the most absurd part of this story is true and accurately portrayed.

THE FIRST CONTACT SERIES
FIRST CONTACT is a series containing dozens of stand-alone novels that explore the concept of humanity's first interaction with extraterrestrial life. Like BLACK MIRROR or THE TWILIGHT ZONE, the series is based on a common theme rather than common characters, allowing these books to be read in any order. Technically, they're all first as they all deal with how we might initially respond to contact with aliens, exploring the social, political, religious and scientific aspects of First Contact.