National Network for Equitable Library Service

Wren MacAvoy works as a coal miner for a domed city once constructed to protect Earth's collision with a comet. But centuries later, society has become complacent even while the coal runs out. And some wonder, "Is there life outside the dome?"

After Ship settled humans on planet Home, it promised to return. Over time, and with conflict, the colony divided. When a light appears in the sky, one side believes it's Ship, but the others are silent. Whatever it is, life is about to change radically for all.

More than twenty years have passed since Ship left the seed of mankind on an uninhabited planet. They started settlements and had children of their own, but as conflict arises once more, it threatens to engulf the children on either side.

Ship hurtles through space, carrying the seed of humankind. Launched by the people of a dying Earth, its mission is to find a habitable world for the children it created from its genetic banks. But can they overcome the biggest obstacle to the survival of mankind: themselves?

As Daniel X continues to hunt for intergalactic aliens, he and his friends go to England searching for Beta, an outlaw who takes the form of fire and who killed Daniel's parents when he was two years old.

Fundamentalist minister Alexander Hergensheimer knew that Armageddon was near. Somehow, he had to bring his beloved heathen, Margrethe, to a state of grace--and, while he was at it, save the rest of the world.

One moment Joseph Schwartz is a happily retired tailor in Chicago, 1949. The next he's a helpless stranger on Earth during the heyday of the first Galactic Empire. Earth, as he soon learns, is a backwater, just a pebble in the sky, despised by all the other two hundred million planets of the Empire because its people dare to claim it's the original home of man. And Earth is poor, with great areas of radioactivity ruining much of its soil--so poor that everyone is sentenced to death at the age of sixty. Joseph Schwartz is sixty-two.

The Sharers of Shora are a pacifist nation of women on a distant moon in the far future. Highly advanced in the sciences, they reproduce by parthenogenesis. Conflict erupts when a neighboring civilization sends an army to develop their world.

The mysterious Firstborn have long sought to stop the advance of human civilization. This time, they have sent a "Q-bomb" speeding toward Earth--a device that human scientists can barely comprehend, let alone stop.

The Firstborn have returned Bisesa Dutt to the Earth of 2037, where scientists have discovered an anomaly in the sun's core that reveals a chilling alien plan to destroy Earth's life through radiation.