Питер Уоттс: Firefall

This is the Omnibus edition of Blindsight and Echopraxia.

February 13, 2082, First Contact. Sixty-two thousand objects of unknown origin plunge into Earth’s atmosphere—a perfect grid of falling stars screaming across the radio spectrum as they burn. Not even ashes reach the ground. Three hundred and sixty degrees of global surveillance: something just took a snapshot.

And then… nothing.

The world holds its breath and waits for the Second Coming—and while it waits, it fractures. Hive-minds coalesce, speaking in tongues, paleogeneticists resurrect nightmares from the dawn of humanity, soldiers are fitted with zombie switches to turn off consciousness in combat, half the population has retreated into the ersatz security of a virtual environment called Heaven.

Extinction beckons for Homo Sapiens.

But from deep space: whispers. Something out there talks—but not to us. Two ships, Theseus and the Crown of Thorns, are launched to discover the origin of Earth’s visitation, one bound for the outer dark of the Kuiper Belt, the other for the heart of the Solar System.

Their crews can barely be called human, what they will face certainly can’t.