Central Skagit Library District

"With the scope of Dune and the commercial action of Independence Day, this near-future trilogy is the first chance for English-speaking readers to experience this multiple-award-winning phenomenon from China's most beloved science fiction author. Set against the backdrop of China's Cultural Revolution, a secret military project sends signals into space to establish contact with aliens. An alien civilization on the brink of destruction captures the...

Raz, a mathematician, is among a cohort of secluded scientists and philosophers who are called upon to save the world from impending catastrophe.

Pern was a beautiful planet, Earth-like enough to feel like home, yet unspoiled by the industrial development and interstellar wars that had ravaged the other planets of humankind. And the few thousand colonists who came to Pern intended to keep it that way. They staked their claims on the land and settled down to build a low-tech, agricultural paradise on the world they had loved at first sight. Then disaster struck. Deadly spores fell like silver...

The human colony on the planet Argo has long explored and exploited the technology left behind by an alien race, a race gone for hundreds of thousands of years. But then an archeology team accidentally activates a terrible weapon: a weapon that will destroy the entire colony, and its star, if they cannot deactivate it. Evidence at the site suggests that the weapon was created for the ancient Argonauts by another race, a race of traders. And within...

For millennia, we have looked up at the stars and wondered whether we are alone in the universe, but in the last few years-as our probes begin to escape the solar system, and our telescopes reveal thousands of Earthlike planets-scientists have taken huge leaps toward an answer. "Forget science fiction," author Ben Miller writes. "We are living through one of the most extraordinary revolutions in the history of science: the emergent belief of a generation...

"For this ragtag band of space gays, liberation means beating the patriarchy at its own game. Pan's life used to be very small. Work in her dad's body shop, sneak out with her friend Tara to go dancing, and watch the skies for freighter ships. It didn't even matter that Tara was a princess... until one day it very much did matter, and Pan had to say goodbye forever. Years later, when a charismatic pair of off-world gladiators show up on her doorstep,...

Fans have long wondered what happened to Ahsoka after she left the Jedi Order near the end of the Clones Wars, and before she re-appeared as the mysterious Rebel operative Fulcrum in Rebels. Finally, her story will begin to be told. Following her experiences with the Jedi and the devastation of Order 66, Ahsoka is unsure she can be part of a larger whole ever again. But her desire to fight the evils of the Empire and protect those who need it will...

"Hadrian Marlowe, a man revered as a hero and despised as a murderer, chronicles his tale in the galaxy-spanning debut of the Sun Eater series, merging the best of space opera and epic fantasy. It was not his war. The galaxy remembers him as a hero: the man who burned every last alien Cielcin from the sky. They remember him as a monster: the devil who destroyed a sun, casually annihilating four billion human lives--even the Emperor himself--against...

In this introduction to the emerging field of astrobiology, a distinguished paleontologist and a noted astronomer team up to provide a synthesis of what's known about the rise of life on Earth and how it sheds light on possibilities for organic life forms elsewhere in the universe.