Plot
Earth sends out a spaceship to investigate starfaring in far distant space of which traces have been found. The ship Envoy, bearing a crew of six men and four women, travels at a speed close to the speed of light. At the end of the journey the crew meets a Centaur-like species on a planet they call Tahir that has left spacefaring behind. Sentient life is also detected in connection with a nearby black hole, a reading confirmed by the Tahirans. Their interest aroused, the Earthlings can send a combined crew to investigate.
Communications with this "Holont" is established and much knowledge is acquired. Differences aboard the ship, however, lead to the death of three men (Brent, Russek, and Cleland), and female pilot Kilbirnie crashes into the black hole. The six Earthlings left drop the Tahirans off at their homeworld and head towards Earth.
In between the story jumps regularly back to the development of human society over the gaps of many thousand years and to that of the Kith, the closed group doing the starfaring, who are often shunned by the rest of Earth. The Kith have their own settlements on different planets, where some retire from time to time.
Earth has changed over the long period taken up by the voyage of the Envoy, and no one is much interested in spacefaring anymore. On Harbor, a colony of Earth, the Envoy crew finds remains of the Kith society, which still are connected to spacefaring. But the last ship to plot trade-routes in space, the Fleetwing, disappears from tracking. The cause is a Zero-Zero-failure ripping off the rear part of the ship. The Envoy sets out on a rescue mission as soon as possible but twenty years of outside time have passed by the time they reach the Fleetwing. They save the remaining crew, thus building a foundation of experienced spacefarers to start spacefaring anew with the knowledge acquired from the Holont.
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Nightflyers is a science fiction horror novella by American writer George R. R. Martin, released as a short novella in 1980 and as an expanded novella in 1981. A short story collection of the same name was released in 1985 that includes the expanded novella. In 1987, the short novella was adapted into a film by the same name. A 2018 television adaptation of the extended novella was developed; television presentation began on December 2, 2018, on the SyFy Channel.
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Humans as Gods is a 1966–1977 science fiction trilogy by Soviet author Sergey Snegov. Despite being initially intended as a parody on space opera, mythological and religious cliché, the novels embody a complex set of ideas on the fundamental principles of the world's structure and development, and the directions of the civilizations' possible future. While a number of plot elements seem to be taken from general science fiction concepts, the resulting story may be considered unique in many ways. The central conflicts are based on the assumption that the face of super-civilization must be defined by its comprehension of the Universe as a whole: the understanding of its elementary, most basic laws.
The Enemy Stars, is a science fiction novel by American writer Poul Anderson, published in 1959 by J.B Lippincott in the US and by Longmans in Canada. Originally published in Astounding Science Fiction under the title We Have Fed Our Sea__, it was a nominee for the 1959 Hugo Award for Best Novel. The original title refers to a line in a poem by Rudyard Kipling.
Aurora is a 2015 novel by American science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson. The novel concerns a generation ship built in the style of a Stanford torus traveling to Tau Ceti in order to begin a human colony. The novel's primary narrating voice is the starship's artificial intelligence. The novel was well-received by critics.
Death's End is a science fiction novel by the Chinese writer Liu Cixin. It is the third novel in the trilogy titled Remembrance of Earth's Past, following the Hugo Award-winning novel The Three-Body Problem and its sequel, The Dark Forest. The original Chinese version was published in 2010. Ken Liu translated the English edition in 2016. It was a finalist for the 2017 Hugo Award for Best Novel and winner of the 2017 Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel.
Sisters of the Vast Black is a 2019 LGBT science fiction novella, the debut novella by Lina Rather. It features a group of spacefaring Roman Catholic nuns performing charity work across the galaxy; eventually, they discover a conspiracy that will test their faith.
The Uplift Storm trilogy, also called The Uplift Trilogy is a series of novels set in David Brin's Uplift Universe. The entire trilogy is one long tale, with no gaps in the timeline between volumes. The three novels are:
