Loose Cannon (chap book #7), Shadows and Shades (chap book #8), Quiet Knives (chap book #9), With Stars Underfoot (chap book #10), Necessary Evils (chap book #11), and Allies (chap book #12).

    The Jedi Council has sent them to the remote planet Ontotho to oversee the peaceful excavation of a mysterious temple that has been uncovered. But they will come to find that what surrounds the temple may be even more dangerous than the mysteries within it. Clandestine local resistance forces and ruthless corporate security troops in a war for the fate of Ontotho – and the Jedi are caught in the middle!

    Burroughs is bound to be a trial. After all, the man who frequented lesbian dives and had a fascination with firearms couldn't possibly make that great of a father. Perhaps inevitably, William Jr. (called Billy) referred to himself as "cursed from birth" and in the book of the same name editor David Ohle collects parts of Billy's third and unfinished novel Prakriti Junction, his last journals and poems, and correspondence and conversations to recreate this tortured life. Endowed with the sufferings — but not the patience — of Job, Billy's life was often characterized by tragedy and frustration, although there were also pockets of success and levity. More than just the memoir of a casualty of the Beat Generation, Cursed From Birth provides rare insight in Billy's father, as well as his scene, friends, and times. It also provides an all-too-familiar story of familial difficulties that anyone with difficult parents can understand and appreciate.

    But her ex-husbands linger in the background while her four children spin away to their own separate futures, each carrying the baggage of a complex family history. Matt serves as caretaker to the ailing father who abandoned him as a child, while his wild teenage sister, Karen, hides herself in marriage to a born-again salesman. Joe, a perpetual outsider, struggles with a private sibling rivalry that nearly derails him. And then there’s the youngest, Frankie, an endearing, eccentric sci-fi freak who’s been searching since childhood for intelligent life in the universe–and finds it.Written with wry affection, and with compassion for every character in its pages, Send Me is a wholly original, haunting evocation of family love, loss, and, ultimately, forgiveness.From the Hardcover edition.

    . . ?Nicholas Martin looked up at the robot across the desk."I'm not going to ask what you want," he said, in a low, restrained voice. "I already know. Just go away and tell St. Cyr I approve. Tell him I think it's wonderful, putting a robot in the picture. We've had everything else by now, except the Rockettes. But clearly a quiet little play about Christmas among the Portuguese fishermen on the Florida coast "must" have a robot. Only, why not six robots? Tell him I suggest a baker's dozen. Go away."

     It’s Commander Joe Pikeman’s job to protect what’s left: not just the computer servers, but the flesh-and-blood people huddled in fortified settlements, praying to be overlooked by pirates and other predators. When raiders start abducting children from those settlements, Joe uncovers a galaxy-wide conspiracy bent on enslaving everyone. They hit Joe where it hurts the most – where he keeps his heart buried. Now, he’s going to use all his training and skill to make them pay.

    Ali Smith's Supersonic 70s collects together some of Ali Smith's best writing of the last ten years and also includes a brand new story.

     As far as everyone in the squad room knows, Ben Halloran is completely fresh to the streets of the 77th Division, a soft kid from the West Side who's decided to become a cop and just happened to draw the hardest neighborhood in L.A. But demons from Ben's complicated past catch up with him-and his tough, oddly principled Daryl Gates-era partner, Miguel Marquez-all too quickly. From the moment Ben and Marquez hit the streets together, they're pulled into a web of ultraviolent corruption and retribution involving hardcore Crip gangbangers and tagalong gangsta-rap gloryhounds, L.A.'s Mexican Mafia, sleazy celebrity defense attorneys, and dirty cops with distinctly self-serving definitions of law enforcement. Ben is forced to choose among father figures and apparent destinies-trying to obey (and discover) his own moral principles as well as his desperate animal instinct simply to stay alive. Author Will Beall is a Los Angeles police officer who has spent almost all of his career on the streets of South Central, much of it in antigang units. The book bristles with the energy and authenticity of his experience. But the true revelation of L.A. Rex is that Will Beall can write - his raw and brilliant, fearless prose simultaneously evokes Richard Price and James Ellroy. The result is an explosive thriller that takes us deep into a city that's further from Hollywood than we can imagine-a city that no other writer has managed to capture with this kind of hard-earned insight and intensity. L.A. Rex is already on its way to the silver screen, and Beall is now at work on his next novel. Articulate cop and hard-nosed writer, Will Beall is perfectly poised to become the next great noir laureate of Los Angeles.

    The lands are now controlled by despots, crooked cattle barons, energy hoarders, and anyone with enough might to keep the local folks under control.For Clay MacAulay, none of that matters as he roams the land in a war machine from a time gone by. He wants nothing to do with small desert towns or brutal dictators. He only has his sights set on a new life. Unfortunately for Clay, too many ruthless people want what he has. They want the war machine he pilots. They want the battle mech that shouldn’t exist anymore.They want his Fighting Iron. But they will have to pry Clay’s cold, dead body out of that pilot’s seat before they can take it from him. And he plans on fighting them every massive mech step of the way!A far-future mech western, Fighting Iron is a rip-roaring scifi adventure filled with six-shooters, plasma canons, rough and rowdy saloon brawls, showdowns, corrupt landowners, and fifty foot battle machines ready to crush everything in their path!

    Gerry Cardle reluctantly runs the Death Lottery. It's a job he despises, yet one which keeps his name off the list. Until one day, despite his agreement with The Family, his name is inexplicably drawn next.With his world crashing down around him and with just seven days left to live, Gerry realises that the system has been breached by a malicious artificial intelligence. In order to save his life and preserve the safety of those within the city, he must do the unthinkable: flee to the abandoned wastelands outside the dome. Bitter, resolute, and with nothing left to lose, Gerry will have to do whatever it takes to survive--even if it means sacrificing his freedom, and possibly worse--his life.

     Young and old, married and single, punk and evangelical, black, white, and Korean, each witness to these bewildering events interprets them differently, yet all of their lives are changed -- by the phenomenon itself, and by what it provokes in them. And whether they in turn stagger toward love, or heartbreakingly dissolve it, Emmons's portrayal of their stories is strikingly real and emotionally affecting.

    s/t: Plato's original story of the lost city, continent, empire

    But one uncertainty remains: Where do we go? Astrophysicist Reggie Straifer has an idea. He’s discovered an anomalous star that appears to defy the laws of physics, and proposes the creation of a deep-space mission to find out whether the star is a weird natural phenomenon, or something manufactured.The journey will take eons. In order to maintain the genetic talent of the original crew, humankind’s greatest ambition—to explore the furthest reaches of the galaxy—is undertaken by clones. But a clone is not a perfect copy, and each new generation has its own quirks, desires, and neuroses. As the centuries fly by, the society living aboard the nine ships (designated “Convoy Seven”) changes and evolves, but their mission remains the same: to reach Reggie’s mysterious star and explore its origins—and implications.A mosaic novel of discovery, Noumenon—in a series of vignettes—examines the dedication, adventure, growth, and fear of having your entire world consist of nine ships in the vacuum of space. The men and women, and even the AI, must learn to work and live together in harmony, as their original DNA is continuously replicated and they are born again and again into a thousand new lives. With the stars their home and the unknown their destination, they are on a voyage of many lifetimes—an odyssey to understand what lies beyond the limits of human knowledge and imagination.

    

    Discover the core skills of effective thinking; then analyze your own thought processes, identify weaknesses, and overcome them.