Past Kindle Book Deals but Still Must Read Books!
Looking for must read books you missed the first time around? You’re in the right place. This is where all of our past Kindle book deals live—the ones good enough to click, even if the discount’s gone. Every book here was hand-picked by our team, featured in a daily deal, and still earns a spot on your TBR.
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128 past books matching First Contact
When alien ships appear and abduct thousands, psychologist Elspeth McGann must track down a patient who foretold the event.
Ripe
Sci-Fi · First Contact
Our take
When alien ships appear and abduct thousands, psychologist Elspeth McGann must track down a patient who foretold the event. With global conspiracy and extraterrestrial threats looming, she teams up with a former NSA analyst to uncover a terrifying truth: the harvest is just beginning.
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The day the ships arrived, everything changed. Scottish psychologist Elspeth McGann never believed her patient, Lester Rains, who claimed to be part of a 2,000-year-old team of extraterrestrial "farmers" awaiting an alien harvest. But when 50,000 people vanish over Moscow, she realizes he may not be delusional after all.
Now, Elspeth must join forces with Cassius C. Trenton, a former NSA analyst, to track down Rains and uncover the truth. The clock is ticking, and with some world leaders in on the aliens' plans, survival seems impossible.
As the harvest approaches, the danger grows. Can they stop the impending apocalypse, or will they discover that the harvest is only the beginning?
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Cachalot was meant to be a sanctuary—a water world where Earth's whales thrived in peace.
Cachalot
Sci-Fi · First Contact · Space Exploration
Our take
Cachalot was meant to be a sanctuary—a water world where Earth's whales thrived in peace. But when floating human settlements spark unrest and mysterious deaths, a team of marine biologists races to uncover the truth. As tensions mount, the whales grow larger, smarter—and possibly vengeful. Beneath the waves, something deadly stirs. Is it too late to stop paradise from becoming a graveyard?
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Cachalot—a water-covered planet where Earth’s marine mammals were saved from extinction—was meant to be a safe haven, a perfect refuge.
Marine biologists are sent to investigate when humans establish floating towns, disrupting the peace, and people start mysteriously dying. The team, led by determined scientists, must uncover the truth behind the attacks before it's too late.
With each passing day, tensions rise between humans and whales as the once-peaceful creatures grow in both size and intelligence. As the biologists dig deeper, they realize they may have underestimated the true threat lurking beneath the surface.
Can they solve the mystery and save themselves, or has Cachalot’s paradise turned into a deadly trap?
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Discovery demands a price measured in centuries.
Starfarers
Sci-Fi · First Contact · Space Exploration
Our take
Discovery demands a price measured in centuries. In Starfarers, a crew of explorers leaves Earth to pursue first contact with distant alien civilizations, knowing their home will age thousands of years in their absence. As the Envoy travels into deep space, scientific wonder collides with sacrifice in a far-reaching science fiction epic shaped by time, change, and human ambition.
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Courageous space explorers embark on a mission to make contact with alien races light years away, while the Earth they leave behind ages twelve hundred centuries
It's the most exciting discovery since humankind first began watching the skies: SETI scientists detect starship "trails" in a galaxy many light years from Earth, and at long last the dream of human-to-alien contact is attainable. But the courageous crew of starfarers assembled to take on the monumental endeavor must sacrifice the only lives they've ever known and the people they love; the Earth will have aged many thousands of years when—and if—they are finally able to return. Still, their hunger for knowledge of the universe and the extraterrestrial races that inhabit it is too great to deny, and the Envoy rockets off into the vast unknown. It's a perilous mission that will profoundly change everyone it touches—even as the passing millennia transform the Earth in ways no one could ever have imagined.
Of all the science fiction extrapolators to emerge in the twentieth century, none were more visionary and few as prolific as the great Poul Anderson. Starfarers, his ingeniously imagined space exploration adventure, still stands tall among the most intelligent, enthralling, and unforgettable science fiction novels ever written.
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They’ve been watching us for hundreds of years.
Star Shroud
Sci-Fi · First Contact · Space Opera
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About the book
They’ve been watching us for hundreds of years.
Now they need our help.
Earth is not safe.
Zack is good at finding things, but when he discovers a global conspiracy, life as he knows it is over. Sometimes the truth doesn’t set you free. It traps you instead.
Kept secret for 60 years, the discovery of an alien signal forces an unlikely team to investigate a mysterious structure discovered in the furthest reaches of the solar system. Join the crew of the Athena, Earth’s most advanced spaceship on the ultimate journey beyond our wildest imagining.
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A good pick for fans of science fiction built around problem-solving, space survival, and humor.
Project Hail Mary
Sci-Fi · First Contact · Space Exploration
Our take
A #1 New York Times bestseller called “propulsive” by Entertainment Weekly, this novel follows Ryland Grace, who wakes aboard a spacecraft with no memory of his mission. As his memories return, he must solve a scientific mystery to save humanity. A good pick for fans of science fiction built around problem-solving, space survival, and humor.
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About the book
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Now a major motion picture starring Ryan Gosling, directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, with a screenplay by Drew Goddard
A lone astronaut must save the earth from disaster in this “propulsive” (Entertainment Weekly), cinematic thriller full of suspense, humor, and fascinating science—from the author of The Martian.
HUGO AWARD FINALIST • NEW YORK TIMES READER PICK: 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21ST CENTURY • ONE OF THE YEAR’S BEST BOOKS: Parade, Newsweek, New York Public Library, Polygon, Shelf Awareness, She Reads, Kirkus Reviews, Library Journal
Ryland Grace is the sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission—and if he fails, humanity and the earth itself will perish.
Except that right now, he doesn’t know that. He can’t even remember his own name, let alone the nature of his assignment or how to complete it.
All he knows is that he’s been asleep for a very, very long time. And he’s just been awakened to find himself millions of miles from home, with nothing but two corpses for company.
His crewmates dead, his memories fuzzily returning, Ryland realizes that an impossible task now confronts him. Hurtling through space on this tiny ship, it’s up to him to puzzle out an impossible scientific mystery—and conquer an extinction-level threat to our species.
And with the clock ticking down and the nearest human being light-years away, he’s got to do it all alone.
Or does he?
Hailed by USA Today as “an epic story of redemption, discovery, and cool speculative sci-fi,” Project Hail Mary is an irresistible interstellar adventure as only Andy Weir could deliver.
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Humanity survives, but not on its own terms, when Lilith wakes aboard an alien ship after nuclear war.
Dawn
Sci-Fi · First Contact · Genetic Engineering · People of Color · Speculative Fiction
Our take
Humanity survives, but not on its own terms, when Lilith wakes aboard an alien ship after nuclear war. In Dawn, Octavia E. Butler builds a post-apocalyptic story around coercion, survival, and the cost of starting over. It fits readers drawn to cerebral science fiction that uses first contact, genetic change, and social tension to probe power, identity, and what remains of the human future.
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Isaac Asimov’s The Gods Themselves—winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards—delivers a bold, mind-bending vision of humanity’s future.
The Gods Themselves: A Novel
Sci-Fi · First Contact · Space Opera
Our take
Isaac Asimov’s The Gods Themselves—winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards—delivers a bold, mind-bending vision of humanity’s future. Blending hard science with alien intrigue, this classic examines the peril of unchecked progress. With 4.4 out of 5 stars on Amazon, it’s a masterwork of speculative fiction you won’t want to miss.
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In the twenty-second century, humanity thinks it’s struck gold: limitless energy from a mysterious exchange with a parallel universe. No fuel costs. No shortages. Just endless power. Too bad it’s a ticking time bomb.
Dr. Frederick Hallam basks in fame as the face of the discovery, while obscure scientist Peter Lamont realizes the truth—Earth’s Sun is being slowly poisoned. Across the divide, alien beings also see doom looming, but their pleas for change go unheard.
Meanwhile, on the Moon, Selene Lindstrom, a lunar-born intuitionist, senses what no equations can prove: annihilation is closer than anyone admits. If no one listens, the cost of “free” energy is planetary extinction.
Three worlds. One failing star. Will truth break through before everything burns out?
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The Border turns an alien invasion into full-scale apocalypse, then makes it even worse.
The Border
Sci-Fi · Alien Invasion · First Contact
Our take
The Border turns an alien invasion into full-scale apocalypse, then makes it even worse. Earth is caught in the middle of a brutal war between two hostile alien races, while the few human survivors left behind are forced to battle hunger, fear, and creatures twisted into something monstrous. When a mysterious injured boy appears with strange power and a message from his dreams, this sci-fi horror epic leans into destruction, survival, and the fragile possibility of hope in a world already broken.
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About the book
The New York Times–bestselling author "pulls out all the stops for this exhilarating alien-invasion epic . . . One of his finest" (Publishers Weekly, starred review).
It happened one day in April. Huge explosions in skies across the world heralded the coming of the Gorgon ships, sparking a worldwide panic. Indestructible, they blasted Earth’s greatest cities into rubble. Then, through portals opening in the air, came the skeletal Cyphers. And Earth became a battlefield in a war between two alien races bent on mutual destruction.
In Colorado, just over a hundred survivors have found sanctuary in the ruins of an apartment complex—and it’s not just the Gorgons and Cyphers who threaten them. They are regularly besieged by the Gray Men, humans mutated by something in the atmosphere into monstrosities straight out of nightmares.
With their ammunition and supplies dwindling, the remaining humans face a bleak future. Then one day, a teenage boy appears, seemingly human, seemingly the victim of catastrophic injuries. He can’t remember where he came from, but he senses a power within himself—one that causes an earthquake to repel a horde of Gray Men. A voice speaks to the boy in his sleep, telling him to find “the white mansion.” Now, the one thing the survivors need most of all is blossoming within them: hope. But only if they choose to trust in a boy who has no memory and only three words from a dream to guide him . . .
"A prime example of a master storyteller/writer returning to the type of novel that made him a master and an excellent addition to the alien invasion flavor of the Apocalyptic Novel canon." —SF Signal
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