It was just a boring drive through the Nevada desert...until the Sonderberg family picked up a beautiful young hitchhiker named Mouse and found themselves on a wild, careening ride down the exit ramp to Hell. It seems the entire universe is doomed unless Mouse, a transdimensional alien, can find and heal the dying cosmic Spinner who controls the very fabric of reality. They're driving into a fantastic nightmare to save all creation at the Vanishing Point on the Cosmic Road...which happens to be US Interstate 40!

Jonathan Thomas Meriweather is a typical college student, interested in girls, music, and an occasional taste of reefer. But when a journey through an interdimensional portal lands him in a world of talking animals and ominous sorcery, he finds he is on a very different trip indeed. Here, when he plays a strange instrument called a duar, peculiar things happen: powerful magic that may be the only way to stop a dark force that threatens his new world — and his old one.

The Human Blend is a science-fiction adventure centered around a group of thieves living in a future where physical alterations and enhancements are a common occurrence. If you could take on a body with any features you wanted, what would it look like? And what would you do with them - human or otherwise?

Moth was a beautiful planet, the only one with wings - two great golden clouds suspended in space around it. Here was a wide-open world for any venture a man might scheme. The planet attracted unwary travelers, hardened space-sailors, and merchant buccaneers - a teeming, constantly shifting horde that provided a comfortable income for certain quick-witted fellows like Flinx and his pet flying snake Pip.

For millennia, the Weave, an alliance of species, have fought to resist the telepathic Amplitur, who strive to unite all self-aware life-forms in their great "Purpose." The Weave is slowly losing ground, but for both sides, warfare focuses more on outthinking and outmaneuvering your foe than destruction. In fact, most regard violence as hideously barbaric, and even the thought of harming another sentient being is beyond imagining.

From the rich imagination of science-fiction great Alan Dean Foster comes the story of Midworld, a Humanx Commonwealth planet that's equally fragile and hostile. Covered by a lush rainforest, Midworld is home to a primitive society that lives in harmony with the natural world. But the arrival of an exploitative human company, whose workers know nothing of Midworld's delicate ecosystem, sparks a conflict. Should Midworld's villagers aid the humans or stand against them?

The Covenant mission is the most ambitious endeavor in the history of Weyland-Yutani. A ship bound for Origae-6, carrying 2,000 colonists beyond the limits of known space, this is a make-or-break investment for the corporation - and for the future of all mankind. Yet there are those who would die to stop the mission. As the colony ship hovers in Earth orbit, several violent events reveal a deadly conspiracy to sabotage the launch.

Earth is being invaded by the shetani - spirit creatures so small and stealthy that only one man knows about the increasing peril. The potential savior is an African elder named Olkeloki who is capable of fighting evil both in this world and the spirit one. But to be successful he must recruit the help of two others: government agent Joshua Oak, and a feisty young woman named Merry Sharrow. Only the three of them can keep the shetani from destroying reality as we know it.

Once Homo sapiens reigned supreme, spreading from star system to star system in an empire that encountered no alien life and thus knew no enemy.... save itself. As had happened many times before, the most primal human instincts rose up, only this time armed with the advanced scientific knowledge to create a genetically engineered smart virus that quickly wiped out humanity to the last man. That man is Ruslan, the sole known surviving human being in the universe.

Inheriting your uncle's supervillain business is more complicated than you might think. Particularly when you discover who's running the place. Charlie's life is going nowhere fast. A divorced substitute teacher living with his cat in a house his siblings want to sell, all he wants is to open a pub downtown, if only the bank will approve his loan. Then his long-lost uncle Jake dies and leaves his supervillain business (complete with island volcano lair) to Charlie. But becoming a supervillain isn't all giant laser death rays and lava pits.

Skeeve is a magician’s apprentice (and a wanna-be thief) until an assassin’s bolt kills his master, Garkin. Along with Aahz, the green-scaled, purple-tongued demon and master magician summoned by Garkin, he sets out on a quest to get even. The road to vengeance is bound to prove rocky, however, because Skeeve can barely light a candle with his beginning magic, and Aahz has lost his own considerable magical abilities as a consequence of Garkin’s summoning spell.

Knocking at death’s door. Bargaining for a second chance. Seems like a heck of a way to find out about an alien invasion.... Vietnam vet Albert Jenkins is battling a bulging waistline and a passion for drink. So when a towering pile of scrap rocket parts falls and crushes the stubborn curmudgeon, he thinks it’s finally the end. But just as he’s about to take one final breath, a snarky alien parasite offers him a deal: His life in return for sharing his body.

Imagine life in an ironically magical world where 144,000 doors separate fiction from reality. A place that can hypnotize even the most grounded philosophy major and deliver a fantastical rhyme to his reason. A place where a best buddy resembles a shaggy carpet, and adventures surpass a boy's dreams . . . welcome to Castle Perilous.

Get ready to experience two more origin stories in the Backyard Starship universe.

After being court-martialed by the Space Legion for ordering the strafing of a treaty-signing ceremony, multimillionaire Willard Phule receives his punishment: He must command the misfit Omega Company on Haskin's Planet, a mining settlement on the edge of settled space. At his duty station, he leverages his personal money and a knack for managing people to get the company to come together as a unit.

You think you’re struggling to find your place in the universe? Consider poor old Colin Douglass, a terminally ill insurance agent who awakens from centuries in cryogenic freeze to find Earth is a devastated wasteland. Now, he’s being pursued by a homicidal interstellar tourist board, and calculating insurance dividends is as outdated as making stone axes. Sci-fi-hating technophobe Colin seeks a cure for his illness in this strange new galaxy where toilets talk back, and door handles are a long-forgotten relic.

It's hard enough for Alastair Stone to keep his two lives - powerful mage and mundane Occult Studies professor - separate without an old friend asking him to take on a new apprentice. Especially after a university colleague wants him to investigate a massive old house for things that go bump in the night. Still, Stone figures it's an easy job: just turn up, put on a little show, and announce that the house is clean. Only it isn't. A malevolent spirit is reawakening in the basement.

Nick Morgan knows there’s no magic in the world, no matter how much he wants to believe. Magic is for suckers, but fortunately, for his job as a sham fortune teller to Hollywood’s fading stars, there are plenty of those around. When somebody starts peddling a new miracle beauty potion to the town’s never-ending supply of wannabe actors, Nick’s suspicious. But his suspicion becomes terror when it turns the niece of his best client horrifically ugly and kills her right in front of his eyes.

Davie is a normal girl trying to live a normal life. Except that she can see the future and has visions that make her seem crazy. When she meets a man who immediately seems too perfect to be real, her quest for a normal life quickly ends. She soon learns the world is full of mythical creatures including shape-shifting dragons, dwarves, and mystical oracles. Can Davie adapt to the new world that has dropped her into the middle of a mythical war that could tear the world apart?

Ramon “Ray” Cosa’s life is not what he expected it to be. Living in a small Texas town ravaged by Hurricane Harvey, Ray has suffered many losses in his young life, and he has little hope left that anything will ever change or get better. That is, until the vintage Ford Galaxie and its strange, dying owner enters Ray’s life. Given a jeweled ring he cannot remove and a desperate mission, Ray is plunged into a universe of secrets, wonders, and terrors he never dreamed exists. Now, he travels the Queen's Road - a hyper-space highway that connects all the planets in creation.

When prospector Bob Broadhead went out to Gateway on the Heechee spacecraft, he decided he would know which was the right mission to make him his fortune. Three missions later, now famous and permanently rich, Robinette Broadhead has to face what happened to him and what he is...in a journey into himself as perilous and even more horrifying than the nightmare trip through the interstellar void that he drove himself to take!

When the Guardians attempt to evacuate a Kree prison planet and end up in a fight for their lives - what else is new? - they discover their old pal Groot is stretched a little thin. Someone is planting stolen branches of the monosyllabic hero and selling the saplings across the galaxy! The search to find Groot's missing pieces forces the Guardians into an alliance with the unscrupulous Collector, but the real problem is more complicated than he wants them to believe.

Tina never worries about being 'ordinary' - she doesn't have to, since she's known practically forever that she's not just Tina Mains, average teenager and beloved daughter. She's also the keeper of an interplanetary rescue beacon, and one day soon, it's going to activate, and then her dreams of saving all the worlds and adventuring among the stars will finally be possible.

In the southwestern desert, a mysterious cult prays for the return of the Visitors. Only one creature can derail that grand and glorious event: An evil entity, known as the Duad, can keep the Visitors from arriving and prevent the transfiguration to come. Daley, who lives nearby, has a far more serious problem: an alien consciousness that has taken up residence in her head.

Higgens has the best job in the galaxy. Except for the fact that he’s technically a janitor on a galactic mining vessel. When he discovers an unknown alien species, his world gets turned upside down. He will have to find unlikely allies if he is going to save his new friend and help her build a new home. The Mimic and the Space Engineer boxed set contains the first three books in the Space Shifter Chronicles. If you like fast-paced space adventures with engaging, and quirky, characters, you will love Higgens, Mimic, and their adventures in space.

Any kind of death annuls everything except his present knowledge and returns him to the past. This is a good way to test all sorts of things. That is, it would be, if not for one little thing.... This loop has real lords and it's unlikely that they'll be happy to hear about an uninvited guest. And that isn't his only problem - all of his memories of the last year have simply disappeared, but the world around him has changed in the meantime.

Chuck never thought too deeply about whether aliens existed - not until Jopp, an intergalactic transport pilot, drunkenly crashed on Earth and tried to steal his truck. Now Chuck finds himself unwittingly roped into helping Jopp work off a debt to the universe's most powerful corporation, the Prime Partners Intergalactic Consortium. Through a series of mishaps and misfortune, the duo find themselves in possession of a mysterious black case. In order to survive, they must fend off murderous marauders, an interplanetary police force, and a peculiar crime boss.

During the day, he’s a South Chicago high school janitor, slopping a mop around from nine o’clock to three o’clock, five days a week. At night, hiding out in a boarded-up factory, he attends to his damaged interstellar spacecraft, making repairs and counting the days until he can return to his homeworld of Calunoth. All he needs to do is mind his own business and avoid any messy human dramas for just a few more weeks. But it is on one of those quiet nights when he hears them outside: the MP140s. Named for a police radio code for murder, they're among the most ruthless killers.

Pilot X is Ambassador of the Alendans, a race with the ability to move through space and time as guardians of the timeline. Locked in ongoing conflict with the Sensaurians, an organic hive mind that can send messages in thought throughout its own history, and the Progons, a machine race who can communicate backwards in time, Pilot X finally manages to create peace among the three races.

Earth’s first colony ship finally reaches the target world. The excitement of planetfall is indescribable, but quickly transforms into sick disappointment when they find the atmosphere is a roiling mass of hydrochloric acid, carbon dioxide, and other deadly poisons. They fly onward, seeking better planets. They find them, but none are ideal. The search goes on for a century, then longer still. As they move farther from Earth, aliens discover the intruding ship, and they begin to investigate humanity. They find our species unacceptable.

From the rich imagination of science-fiction great Alan Dean Foster comes the story of Midworld, a Humanx Commonwealth planet that's equally fragile and hostile. Covered by a lush rainforest, Midworld is home to a primitive society that lives in harmony with the natural world. But the arrival of an exploitative human company, whose workers know nothing of Midworld's delicate ecosystem, sparks a conflict. Should Midworld's villagers aid the humans or stand against them?

Contains books one and two of the humorous sci-fi Jane Bond series: Some Assembly Required and Dark Side of the Moon.

Arcana has never encountered another intelligent species while exploring scores of other worlds. No cities, no vast empires, no civilizations, and no equivalent of their own dragons, gryphons, spells, and wizards. But all of that is about to change. It seems there is intelligent life elsewhere in the multiverse. Other human intelligent life, with terrifying new weapons and powers of the mind...and wizards who go by the strange title of ''scientist''.

With an introduction by J. J. Pierce, this volume features the 12 most important stories by Cordwainer Smith, a unique writer who has fused wonder and poetry into imaginative tales that transcend both science and fiction.

Most days, Sarya doesn't feel like the most terrifying creature in the galaxy. Most days, she's got other things on her mind. Like hiding her identity among the hundreds of alien species roaming the corridors of Watertower Station. Or making sure her adoptive mother doesn't casually eviscerate one of their neighbors. Again. And most days, she can almost accept that she'll never know the truth - that she'll never know why humanity was deemed too dangerous to exist.

Herself a biologist, Julie E. Czerneda has earned a reputation in science fiction circles for her ability to create beautifully crafted, imaginative, yet believably realized alien races. In Survival, the first novel in her new series, Species Imperative, she draws upon this talent to build races, characters, and a universe which will draw listeners into a magnificent tale of interstellar intrigue, as an Earth scientist is caught up in a terrifying interspecies conflict.

The Lords of Creation rule the Nine Worlds through its control of the ultra-advanced technology that has permitted the colonization of the entire solar System. More gods than men, the Lords of Creation have cheated Death itself. But although they rule the solar system with their god-like scientific knowledge, there are even more powerful forces to be feared lurking out in the dark depths of space. And when an unthinkably terrible enemy that rules a vast network of dead stars and planets comes to the Nine Worlds, it falls to them to stop it, though entire worlds may perish.

First came the news that a flying saucer had landed in Iowa. Then came the announcement that the whole thing was a hoax. End of story. Case closed. Except that two agents of the most secret intelligence agency in the US government were on the scene and disappeared without reporting in. And four more agents who were sent in also disappeared. So the head of the agency and his two top agents went in and managed to get out with their discovery

Fresh out of college with his Ship Engineer 3rd-Class certificate, Dave Walker’s only thought is to try to find a berth on a corporate ship plying the trade routes between the many habs, orbitals, and moons in the Solar System. The problem for Dave, however, isn't his straight C average; it's that his stepfather, a powerful Earth senator he’s never met, now wants him dead. Forced to take the first berth he can find, Dave ends up on the Iowa Hill, an old tramp freighter running with a minimal crew and nearing the end of its useful life.

In a society where everyone's DNA determines their destiny, being a Natural means automatic relegation to the gritty and dangerous Outskirts. Born a Natural, Lee Urban was adopted into the Enhanced high society of the Asian Federation and forced to conceal her genetic roots. When her dream of attending Peking University becomes a reality, she is determined to go despite a warning from a mysterious source. Targeted by a hacker bent on exposing her true DNA, Urban faces off with an Artificial Intelligence Game that puts her—and her lies—to the test.