Gerald M Kilby Books in Order
Explore Gerald M Kilby books in order, with series lists, short summaries, background on his science fiction worlds, and guidance on where to start reading.
Last updated: December 25, 2025
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Publication Order
20 books
Brain Gain
by Gerald M Kilby
2024
Dawn Harrison wakes in a research lab with no memories and an experimental AI fused to her brain. On the run from rival agencies that want to weaponise her, she has to uncover her missing past before the thing in her head gets them both killed.
Resource Control
by Gerald M Kilby
2023
The team reactivating long-abandoned Moon Base Delta is already starving when waves of refugees and rebels arrive from conflicts across the lunar colonies. As hunger and fear build, Renton Hicks and his crew must decide whether to stay neutral or fight for control of their own future.
Power Vacuum
by Gerald M Kilby
2023
Under a tightening corporate blockade, Moon Base Delta is running out of food, fuel, and options. When a Martian evacuation ship carrying advanced genetic tech appears, Renton Hicks gambles on a dangerous alliance with former enemies that could either save the colony or finish it.
Solar Storm
by Gerald M Kilby
2022
As agencies and corporations race to finalise a New Lunar Accord, a massive solar storm shreds Earth's satellite constellations and strands thousands on the Moon. Trapped at a vulnerable outpost, engineer Renton Hicks must navigate failing systems and rising panic just to keep people alive.
Emergence
by Gerald M Kilby
2022
With unrest spreading across the asteroid belt, Luca allies with the quantum intelligence Athena to tear down the VanHeilding empire. While Scott, Miranda, and Cyrus join rebels in the Elektra system, Luca prepares for a final, lethal showdown with an army of node-runners on New World One.
Winds of Mars
by Gerald M Kilby
2021
This short story returns to Kilby's Mars, focusing on ordinary colonists living under constant dust storms and political tension. It offers a ground level glimpse of how fragile, and how stubborn, life on the Red Planet can be.
Exodus
by Gerald M Kilby
2021
After the battle for New World One, Luca Lee-McNabb is locked in a catatonic state, haunted by what she has become. As Scott and Miranda plan a desperate evacuation to Mars, Luca must confront both a dangerous double and her own power before the VanHeildings strike again.
Plains of Utopia Mars Colony 6
by Gerald M Kilby
2020
When an Earth-bound shuttle explodes on the Jezero City launchpad, DNA from two victims comes back as an exact match. Dr Jann Malbec and envoy Mia Sorelli trace the mystery to Xenon Hybrid's remote commune and uncover a cult-like movement whose cloning program could plunge Mars into chaos.
Gizmo Origin
by Gerald M Kilby
2020
A stranded engineer on Mars refuses to surrender to isolation. By rewiring a battered maintenance droid and tying it into the colony AI, he creates Gizmo, a sharp-tongued robotic companion whose constant commentary may save his sanity or push him over the edge.
Enigma
by Gerald M Kilby
2020
On the eve of her twenty-third birthday, Luca Lee-McNabb learns the quantum intelligence that has shielded her can no longer keep her safe. To reach the New World One habitat, she must outwit ruthless corporate hunters and face lethal node-runner hackers in the data-grid.
Surface Tension: Colony Five Mars
by Gerald M Kilby
2019
During the worst dust storm in Martian history, Major Mia Sorelli struggles to keep a restless colony from tearing itself apart. When a fellow officer dies in the lawless city of Syrtis, she and her droid Gizmo uncover a plot so brutal it may demand outright revolution.
Evolution
by Gerald M Kilby
2018
The battered Hermes crew crash lands on a ruined Earth and must cross an irradiated wasteland to plug the quantum intelligence Athena into the global network. Hunted by autonomous security drones, Scott McNabb risks everything to complete the mission and learn what became of Miranda and their child.
Entropy
by Gerald M Kilby
2018
Recalled from the moons of Saturn just as First Officer Miranda Lee leaves to see her dying mother, the Hermes is pushed into a secretive new mission for the Council of Europa. Scott McNabb soon realises their ship's AI is hiding dangerous truths that could ignite an interplanetary war.
Entanglement
by Gerald M Kilby
2018
Commander Scott McNabb takes a dull survey job in the asteroid belt to stay ahead of his creditors. When his crew discovers a lost quantum device aboard a derelict ship, the find draws every major power in the system to their trail and turns a simple salvage into a fight for survival.
Jezero City: Colony Four Mars
by Gerald M Kilby
2017
When a colonist dies under suspicious circumstances just before a high stakes terraforming experiment, Dr Jann Malbec suspects sabotage. She secretly recruits troubled ex-cop Mia Sorelli and the sardonic droid Gizmo to investigate, uncovering a plot that threatens Jezero City and Mars's fragile future.
Colony Three Mars
by Gerald M Kilby
2017
With the truth about Mars's illegal genetic experiments exposed, rival Earth factions arrive armed to seize the research and turn the colonists into test subjects. Dr Jann Malbec holds a terrifying secret that could save the colony, but using it may doom Earth to a global plague.
Extraction
by Gerald M Kilby
2016
In this companion to the Reaction technothriller, fixer Marcel reels from the murder of his lover and the loss of his patron's trust. On the run in the criminal underworld, he must decide whether to disappear or turn the tables with one last, very risky move.
Colony Two Mars
by Gerald M Kilby
2016
Stranded on Mars and officially branded a biohazard, Dr Jann Malbec expects to die alone. When a stranger collapses in the colony airlock carrying DNA that should be impossible, she is forced to cross the deadly Jezero crater toward Colony Two in a desperate search for answers.
Colony One Mars
by Gerald M Kilby
2016
After a deadly sandstorm cuts off contact with Mars's first private colony, a follow up mission led by biologist Dr Jann Malbec finds the base shattered yet not entirely abandoned. As a strange illness spreads, she uncovers a lethal secret that could endanger all of Earth.
Reaction / Chain Reaction
by Gerald M Kilby
2015
Surveillance expert Charles Gardner visits Monaco to see his journalist daughter and watch the launch of a groundbreaking fusion reactor. After witnessing a yacht murder that no one will investigate, he uncovers a plot to destroy the reactor and must race the clock to stop a catastrophe.
Where should I start?
If you want a frontier Mars saga: Colony One Mars → Colony Two Mars → Colony Three Mars → Jezero City: Colony Four Mars.
If you want to see the Mars story widen out: Surface Tension: Colony Five Mars → Plains of Utopia Mars Colony 6 → Gizmo Origin → Winds of Mars.
If you prefer big-idea space opera in the asteroid belt: Entanglement → Entropy → Evolution → Enigma.
If you like near-future survival on the Moon: Solar Storm → Resource Control → Power Vacuum.
If you want grounded technothrillers on Earth: Reaction / Chain Reaction → Extraction → Brain Gain.
Author bio
Gerald M Kilby grew up in Dublin, Ireland, reading classic science fiction by Isaac Asimov, Arthur C Clarke, and Frank Herbert, then graduating to Iain M Banks, Neal Stephenson, and Michael Crichton.
Those books did more than entertain him. They gave him a taste for big ideas, plausible technology, and stories where ordinary people are caught up in events far larger than themselves.
He came to writing later in life, at what he jokingly calls the midpoint, after years of working in more conventional jobs. Looking for the kind of technothriller he wanted to read and not finding it, he decided to try writing one instead.
The result was Reaction (now published in updated form as Reaction / Chain Reaction), a near future thriller about a surveillance expert who stumbles on a plot to destroy a new fusion reactor on the French coast. It set the tone for much of Kilby's work, blending real world engineering, tight pacing, and a very human reason to care about the outcome.
His breakout came with Colony One Mars and the rest of the Colony Mars sequence, which follows biologist Dr Jann Malbec as she uncovers illegal genetic experiments, corporate power plays, and the brutal realities of keeping people alive on the Red Planet. The series has reached large new audiences in audio and ebook, and has even been optioned for potential television.
Kilby then expanded that future history with The Belt books, a six volume arc that moves the action into the asteroid belt and brings quantum intelligences, data grid warfare, and corporate dynasties into the mix. Readers who enjoy following a single timeline can see how the consequences of the Mars experiments ripple out through the wider solar system.
More recently, with Solar Storm and the Moon Base Delta trilogy, he has turned his attention to life on the Moon, imagining what happens when a massive solar event cuts off travel back to Earth and leaves thousands of colonists fighting to hold fragile habitats together. In parallel, standalones like Brain Gain return to the technothriller side of his imagination, this time with an AI implant in a woman's head and a very personal battle over who controls her mind.
Across all of these books, certain themes keep coming back. Kilby is interested in how communities cope under pressure, how far people will go to protect family and friends, and what happens when powerful technologies such as AI, cloning, or fusion energy escape the control of the people who built them. His stories are full of engineers, cops, scientists, and working crew, usually trying to do the right thing with incomplete information.
There is also a streak of dry humour that surfaces in side characters like the semi sentient droid Gizmo, who steals scenes throughout the Colony Mars books.
Kilby still lives in Dublin, close to the neighbourhood once home to Bram Stoker, and he is often found writing in local cafés with his dog Loki at his feet. From there he continues to build out his interconnected universe of Mars, the Belt, and the Moon, along with the earthbound thrillers that first got him started.
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