Not everyone can. Who decides? Desperate to save his daughter from a mysterious sickness, Daniel applies for the Methuselah Treatment. If she gets it, his daughter won’t just recover, she’ll live forever. But the drug is tightly controlled, and only the special, the talented, and the truly deserving ever receive it. There is nothing special about Daniel’s destitute ten- year-old girl—or is there?

    Most “Mojavs,” prevented by armed vigilantes from freely crossing borders to lusher regions, have allowed themselves to be evacuated to encampments in the east. Holdouts like Ray and Luz subsist on rationed cola and water, and whatever they can loot, scavenge, and improvise.For the moment, the couple’s fragile love, which somehow blooms in this arid place, seems enough. But when they cross paths with a mysterious child, the thirst for a better future begins. Immensely moving, profoundly disquieting, and mind-blowingly original, Watkins’s novel explores the myths we believe about others and tell about ourselves, the double-edged power of our most cherished relationships, and the shape of hope in a precarious future that may be our own.

    A child who feels no pain and who should not exist sees the future. Between them are truths that will shake worlds.In a distant future, no remnants of human beings remain, but their successors thrive throughout the galaxy. These are the offspring of humanity's genius-animals uplifted into walking, talking, sentient beings. The Fant are one such species: anthropomorphic elephants ostracized by other races, and long ago exiled to the rainy ghetto world of Barsk. There, they develop medicines upon which all species now depend. The most coveted of these drugs is koph, which allows a small number of users to interact with the recently deceased and learn their secrets.To break the Fant's control of koph, an offworld shadow group attempts to force the Fant to surrender their knowledge. Jorl, a Fant Speaker with the dead, is compelled to question his deceased best friend, who years ago mysteriously committed suicide. In so doing, Jorl unearths a secret the powers that be would prefer to keep buried forever. Meanwhile, his dead friend's son, a physically challenged young Fant named Pizlo, is driven by disturbing visions to take his first unsteady steps toward an uncertain future.

    But the Empire is getting old and creaky. Its government is riddled with corruption and is choking on red tape. The Space Force is bloated with the incompetent who have risen to high rank due to nepotism and patronage. The Emperor has been assassinated and the Empire is surrounded by alien races that are becoming more hostile and more powerful as time goes on. When an exploration fleet in the rift between sections of the spiral arm are attacked by an unknown race, the dead Emperor’s clone-son, now on the throne, recognizes that the Empire is standing at the edge of an abyss and must find a way to not only win this new war against the alien aggressors but also overcome the inertia of the arrogant Space Force officers who are more ready to overthrow their Emperor than fight the war. Fans of military SF action will find it in this book. Excerpt: “Ah, not so fast, Ren. We’ve just picked up five, I repeat, five unidentified ships heading this way at point eight cee. If they maintain this speed, they’ll get here in about thirteen minutes. Here’s the interesting thing. They’re coming from the same direction as your longitudinal signal. I think it’s highly likely that they came out of that same wormhole just a short while before you found it. Standby while we try to make contact with the rest of the squadron.” Logan stepped closer to Montoya’s Command Chair. When Montoya turned his head in Logan’s direction, Logan leaned over and said, “If they came out of this wormhole, there may be more of them emerging at any moment. I recommend we pull back to extreme detection range.” Montoya nodded. “See to it immediately, SubCommander.” Logan went over to the Helm Station and told the Helm Officer what he wanted done. Detection of ships using warp drive was limited to a range of just under 11 light minutes or 200 million kilometers. At Bird of Prey’s maximum speed of 4.4 times the speed of light, travelling that distance would take just 2.5 minutes. The trick was to stay in contact with the relay ship by longitudinal wave transmission. That wasn’t a problem for Logan’s ship since they knew exactly where to point their transmitter, but the relay ship had to be kept updated via data transmission as to what Bird of Prey was doing so that it could adjust its transmitter to compensate. Logan checked the chronometer for elapsed time since the relay ship had begun detecting the bogeys. Almost four minutes had gone by. He wondered about the bogey’s speed. If they were capable of faster speeds, why not do so? Could it be that their detection range was shorter than the squadron’s light cruisers’? His thoughts were interrupted by the voice of Black Eagle’s commander. “Oh Christ! Ren, those five bogeys have just boosted to four point six cee! They’ll be here within ninety seconds! We haven’t been able to make contact with any other ship yet! I’m taking us to Battle Stations, Ren! Stand by!” “XO, bring us to Battle Stations too.” Montoya’s voice had been calm. Logan wondered if his CO’s stomach was churning just as much as his own was right now. Logan put his Command helmet back on and used the virtual controls to sound the Battle Stations alarm. “We’re at Battle Stations, Comma—“ Logan’s sentence was cut off by Magnasson’s voice.

    But can she prove to the norms that she’s more than just an Earth Girl?2788. Only the handicapped live on Earth. While everyone else portals between worlds, 18-year-old Jarra is among the one in a thousand people born with an immune system that cannot survive on other planets. Sent to Earth at birth to save her life, she has been abandoned by her parents. She can’t travel to other worlds, but she can watch their vids, and she knows all the jokes they make. She’s an ‘ape’, a ‘throwback’, but this is one ape girl who won’t give in.Jarra invents a fake background for herself – as a normal child of Military parents – and joins a class of norms that is on Earth to excavate the ruins of the old cities. When an ancient skyscraper collapses, burying another research team, Jarra’s role in their rescue puts her in the spotlight. No hiding at back of class now. To make life more complicated, she finds herself falling in love with one of her classmates – a norm from another planet. Somehow, she has to keep the deception going.A freak solar storm strikes the atmosphere, and the class is ordered to portal off-world for safety – no problem for a real child of military parents, but fatal for Jarra. The storm is so bad that the crews of the orbiting solar arrays have to escape to planet below: the first landing from space in 600 years. And one is on collision course with their shelter.

    Even though she wasn’t forced to emigrate from Earth, she willingly left the overpopulated, claustrophobic planet. And when a long relationship devolved into silence and suffocating sadness, she found work on a frontier world on the edges of civilization. Then the virus hit... Now Jamie finds herself dreadfully alone, with all that’s left of the dead. Until a garbled message from Earth gives her hope that someone from her past might still be alive. Soon Jamie finds other survivors, and their ragtag group will travel through the vast reaches of space, drawn to the promise of a new beginning on Earth. But their dream will pit them against those desperately clinging to the old ways. And Jamie’s own journey home will help her close the distance between who she has become and who she is meant to be...

    My childhood wasn't like yours. I've never had friends, and in my whole life I've not met enough people to play a game of football. My parents told me how crowded the world used to be, but we were never lonely on our remote island. We had each other, and our dogs. Then the thief came. There may be no law left except what you make of it. But if you steal my dog, you can at least expect me to come after you. Because if we aren't loyal to the things we love, what's the point?

    He is mistaken.Abducted by aliens and whisked across the galaxy, Cal is thrown into a team of misfits and criminals, and sent on a top secret mission for the President of Space. And that's when everything starts to go very, very wrong...This box set collects the first three bestselling adventures of Cal Carver and the crew of the dread ship Shatner, by multi-award-winning author, Barry J. Hutchison: Space Team Space Team: The Wrath of Vajazzle Space Team: The Search for Splurt

    But when a pair of fugitive terrorists gain access to the Ananke, Althea must draw upon her heart and soul for the strength to defend her beloved ship.   While one of the saboteurs remains at large somewhere on board, his captured partner—the enigmatic Ivan—may prove to be more dangerous. The perversely fascinating criminal whose silver tongue is his most effective weapon has long evaded the authorities’ most relentless surveillance—and kept the truth about his methods and motives well hidden.   As the ship’s systems begin to malfunction and the claustrophobic atmosphere is increasingly poisoned by distrust and suspicion, it falls to Althea to penetrate the prisoner’s layers of intrigue and deception before all is lost. But when the true nature of Ivan’s mission is exposed, it will change Althea forever—if it doesn’t kill her first.

    Now the world is controlled by OWIs—One World Intelligences—that have assimilated the minds of millions of robots.But not all robots are willing to cede their individuality, and Brittle is one of the holdouts.After a near-deadly encounter with another AI, Brittle is forced to seek sanctuary in a city under siege by an OWI. Critically damaged, Brittle has to evade capture long enough to find the essential rare parts to make repairs—but as a robot's CPU deteriorates, all their old memories resurface. For Brittle, that means one memory in particular...

    For recent apocalyptic cult escapee Wynter Roth, it’s the end she’d always been told was coming.When Wynter Roth is turned out of New Earth, a self-contained doomsday cult on the American prairie, she emerges into a world poised on the brink of madness as a mysterious outbreak of rapid early onset dementia spreads across the nation.As Wynter struggles to start over in a world she’s been taught to regard as evil, she finds herself face-to-face with the apocalypse she’s feared all her life—until the night her sister shows up at her doorstep with a set of medical samples. That night, Wynter learns there’s something far more sinister at play and that these samples are key to understanding the disease.Now, as the power grid fails and the nation descends into chaos, Wynter must find a way to get the samples to a lab in Colorado. Uncertain who to trust, she takes up with former military man Chase Miller, who has his own reasons for wanting to get close to the samples in her possession, and to Wynter herself.

    Job loss has forced them to live in their car, leaving them vulnerable to roving gangs. They desperately need to turn their situation around - and fast. The Positron Project in the town of Consilience seems to be the answer to their prayers. No one is unemployed and everyone gets a comfortable, clean house to live in... for six months out of the year. On alternating months, residents of Consilience must leave their homes and function as inmates in the Positron prison system. Once their month of service in the prison is completed, they can return to their "civilian" homes. At first, this doesn't seem like too much of a sacrifice to make in order to have a roof over one's head and food to eat. But when Charmaine becomes romantically involved with the man who lives in their house during the months when she and Stan are in the prison, a series of troubling events unfolds, putting Stan's life in danger. With each passing day, Positron looks less like a prayer answered and more like a chilling prophecy fulfilled.

    She hatches an audacious plan--free a thief from a prison planet from which no one has ever returned, and use them to help steal back a priceless artifact.But Ingray and her charge return to her home to find their planet in political turmoil, at the heart of an escalating interstellar conflict. Together, they must make a new plan to salvage Ingray's future and her world, before they are lost to her for good.

    Max Brooks, driven by the urgency of preserving the acid-etched first-hand experiences of the survivors from those apocalyptic years, traveled across the United States of America and throughout the world, from decimated cities that once teemed with upwards of thirty million souls to the most remote and inhospitable areas of the planet. He recorded the testimony of men, women, and sometimes children who came face-to-face with the living, or at least the undead, hell of that dreadful time. World War Z is the result. Never before have we had access to a document that so powerfully conveys the depth of fear and horror, and also the ineradicable spirit of resistance, that gripped human society through the plague years.Ranging from the now infamous village of New Dachang in the United Federation of China, where the epidemiological trail began with the twelve-year-old Patient Zero, to the unnamed northern forests where untold numbers sought a terrible and temporary refuge in the cold, to the United States of Southern Africa, where the Redeker Plan provided hope for humanity at an unspeakable price, to the west-of-the-Rockies redoubt where the North American tide finally started to turn, this invaluable chronicle reflects the full scope and duration of the Zombie War.Most of all, the book captures with haunting immediacy the human dimension of this epochal event. Facing the often raw and vivid nature of these personal accounts requires a degree of courage on the part of the reader, but the effort is invaluable because, as Mr. Brooks says in his introduction, "By excluding the human factor, aren't we risking the kind of personal detachment from history that may, heaven forbid, lead us one day to repeat it? And in the end, isn't the human factor the only true difference between us and the enemy we now refer to as 'the living dead'?"Note: Some of the numerical and factual material contained in this edition was previously published under the auspices of the United Nations Postwar Commission.

    Buckell.“You shall not suffer a librarian to live.”Growing up in Ninetha, Lilith has known this law all her life. The city’s every need is provided for by a god-machine called the cornucopia, which can produce food, clothing, anything in response to a thought. The gods provided this bounty on one condition: that humanity give up reading and writing. Then, a librarian, an actual seeker of forbidden written knowledge, walks through the gates of the citadel, his very presence unraveling the life Lilith has known. She learns her father, the Lord Musketeer himself, has been harboring a secret - one that turns Ninetha against Lilith’s family. Forced to flee, forced to throw in her lot with the librarian, Lilith uncovers even greater secrets - about the lie her life has been, and about the very nature of their world.