Central Kansas Library System

Search the Sky is a satirical science fiction novel by American writers Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth, first published in 1954 by Ballantine Books. Halsey's Planet is in decline, and when a generation ship arrives, having failed to contact six other planets, Ross is sent to discover the state of the interstellar colonies. He is given a ship, which can make the trip from colony to colony almost instantaneously. The technology used in the ship...

Generation after generation, engineers have maintained the barricade, a shield that protects civilization against Turbulence, this strange force that destroys both minds and machines. As Turbulence grows ever more intense and the barricade begins to fail, can Ritter live up to the demands of his father, an engineer the equal of any hero in the Five Great Classical Novels, as they struggle to prevent this civilization from falling like every civilization...

Ruins are all that's left. The name doesn't matter. A long time ago, alien creatures were brought here but somehow escaped and infested the city, but just because it was left in ruins does not mean that everything is lost. The Ruins trilogy are three stories that follow the trials and tribulations of three men, set in different points in the city's fall--a scavenger who has to help a tourist find what she lost a long time ago, a father who wants...

In the early 2000s in a top-secret facility located deep beneath Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania, years of research on time travel technology by the United States military finally comes together. But the initial excitement soon wanes when a startling reality surfaces and captures a moral dilemma. Suddenly, everyone is speculating what will happen if they start changing history. As the team, led by United States Army Colonel Barton Stauffer, begins...

"Edward M. Lerner has produced the best-ever guide to putting the science in science fiction, and he's done it with clarity, wit, and panache." --Robert J. Sawyer, Hugo Award-winning author of Quantum Night The essential resource for anyone who reads, writes, watches, or studies science fiction. Men have walked on the Moon. Siri and Alexa manage -- at least often enough to be helpful -- to make sense of the things we say. Biologists have decoded...

There is no such thing as well-explained life forms, and then there are facets of evolution, which no one can truly define. George, the genius dabbler, feels implicated in religious troubles in the Middle East. George talks with someone, he meddled within the past, who hands him an interesting present. The desert citadel rallies to Mehmed's call for battlefield supremacy. However, even as Mehmed issues his commands he has to admit there are contradictions...

Rachel Swirsky's short fiction has appeared in Weird Tales, Fantasy Magazine, and Subterranean Magazine, among others, and has been collected in Year's Best anthologies edited by Rich Horton, Jonathan Strahan, and the VanderMeers. She is also the submissions editor of Podcastle, an audio fantasy magazine.

Casey works hard on developing the resources to protect rapidly-eroding coastlines.As the dunes degrade, she knows the urgency of figuring out solutions.But not everyone agrees with her approach.When strangers show up at her grandfather's house, they bring more than just questions.Casey finds herself confronting her very values.A climate story with a heart from the author of Goldie.

The world's first lunar spacecraft is about to launch. The ship, Prometheus, is built from two separate components-one designed to travel from Earth's atmosphere to the Moon and back, and the other to carry the first component through Earth's atmosphere and into orbit. Sound familiar? That's because it's the basic description of the first space shuttle-well before its launch in 1971. Prelude to Space was published in 1951-well before the first Sputnik...

In the ashes of World War IV, planet earth is unrecognizable. Book 2 of the Time Altar Series, The Fall, finds Twenty-Fifth Century United America, a juggernaut, in the pockets of an iron fist fascist regime. The only counterweight, Mutare Science and Technology Global (MST), is much more than it appears. Dr. Benjamin Murray escapes to MST with the time-traveler Lt. Col. Jake Gillean and a proxy war erupts between the two global heavyweights. As...