Central Skagit Library District

The saucer aliens are here. They're healing the planet. They've got to be stopped.

"Yellow and the Perception of Reality" by Maureen McHugh is a science fiction story about a woman who delves into the mystery of why and how her twin sister, a physicist, has been brain damaged in a lab accident in which two of her colleagues died. I wear yellow when I go to see my sister. There's not a lot of yellow at the rehab facility; it's all calm blues and neutrals. I like yellow-it looks good on me-but I wear it because Wanda is smart and...

Excerpt: "One day you were young, and you too wanted to write forecasts; and you too found that to envisage the future was arduous, that old ways of thinking and status quo ante judgments of value imposed themselves upon your mind, and made you despair of the true estimate and the adequate phrase. And you found that, however unclouded your own faculty of prognostication, you searched in vain for the magic touch which would interpret the future for...

This book presents 37 stories. These pieces may be short, but these stories will excite you, challenge you, and even threaten your current way of thinking as they look into the future of humanity, their lives and future problems. Enter this space and let your imagination run wild. For this edition, the author attempts to answer the fundamental questions of cosmology. Technical words have been kept to a minimum, but essential terms are explained in...

The story is set in an Utopia set on a Mars whose long-lived inhabitants, benefiting from a healthy socialist regime much in contrast with the terrible state of post-World War Two Earth, kidnap the crew of a B-29 bomber and teach them things it is good to know.

Our young narrator has many skins. Shedding and taking on new ones help, them to find their way back home after leaving to avoid more tragedies and assaults. But, what price do they have to pay to acquire the one true skin that fits the best?

Dive back into the world of The Institute in this gripping sequel to The Orphan Chronicles: Genesis… Ananya Patel is a young woman with extraordinary abilities. Her keen instincts for sensing danger have been enhanced and honed during her upbringing at The Institute, a clandestine underwater research facility established and funded by billionaire philanthropist, Gregory Cornelius. In The Orphan Chronicles: Evolution, the time has come for Ananya...

The stunning conclusion to the saga of a doomed civilization and the heroes who fight to save it. In an empire on the brink of implosion, the Society of the Phoenix is the only alternative to catastrophe, yet it is regarded by the rulers of the Concord as treasonable and a greater threat than the ominous rumblings of a Bond uprising. The Phoenix is led by Alex Ransom, once the first born of the House of DeKoven Woolf, but Commander Ransom now lies...

"You are hereby banished from the North American continent. Should you reenter it, you will be executed upon recognition. Within this facility, you have the right to life and to defend that life, unto your death." These are the last words spoken to the exiles banished to the Square, a massive penal colony encompassing the western triangle of what was once the state of Texas. Paxton Stephens, a disgraced and exiled scientist, gave the authoritarian...

We were created by the Bestower, and placed on the world to rid it of its native life, unpleasing to Him. He gave us the living Bestowed to sustain us and replace what was there before. Thus say the priests, but now that myth is questioned: Native life has evolved; why not ourselves and the Bestowed that came with us? Are not all native, and necessary for survival? The evidence is contentious: Exterminate, or conserve? There is increasing dissension...