In 1977, as twelve-year-old Theo struggles with a science class project on space exploration, questions emerge about why his father never returned from Vietnam and why Theo's mother has been keeping secrets for many years.

The hilarious new science fiction comedy When a misfit trash collector is chosen by aliens to represent Earth, one wrong move can lead to Galactic War. Or, even worse...the end of chocolate! Jack Gripper loves playing pranks and eating pizza. But when he's tasked with selecting an alien species to mentor Earth for the next one-hundred years, he'd better make the right call or the Earth is doomed. Can he overcome obstacles and diabolical plots to pick the right alien? And, just as important...can chocolate and pizza survive the alien encounter?

Bob Eggleton has won the Hugo Award for Best Artist several times, as well as the Chesley Award—and this collection of over 100 illustrations proves exactly why he is considered one of today’s most original fantasy and science fiction illustrators. All the paintings are imagined as part of a time capsule sent to aliens, and these fanciful, otherworldly visions include the covers for Daniel Hood’s The Scales of Justice and Larry Niven’s Rainbow Mars. Dynamic commentary by best-selling author Nigel Suckling.

In 1977, two extraodinary spacecraft called Voyager were launched to the stars. Affixed to each Voyager craft was a gold-coated copped phonograph record as a message to possible extra-terrestrial civilizations that might encounter the spacecraft in some distant space and time. Each record contained 118 photographs of our planet; almost 90 minutes of the world's greatest music; an evolutionary audio essay on "The Sounds of Earth"; and greetings in almost sixty human languages (and one whale language). This book is an account, written by those chiefly responsible for the contents of the Voyager Record, of why they did it, how they selected the repertoire, and precisely what the record contains.

Learn about the impact that humans have on the Earth, its environment, and how to reduce damage.

In this engrossing, provocative, and intimate memoir, a young journalist reflects on her childhood in the heartland, growing up in an increasingly isolated meditation community in the 1980s and ’90s—a fascinating, disturbing look at a fringe culture and its true believers. When Claire Hoffman’s alcoholic father abandons his family, his desperate wife, Liz, tells five-year-old Claire and her seven-year-old brother, Stacey, that they are going to heaven—Iowa—to live in Maharishi’s national headquarters for Heaven on Earth. For Claire’s mother, Transcendental Meditation—the Maharishi’s method of meditation and his approach to living the fullest possible life—was a salvo that promised world peace and enlightenment just as their family fell apart. At first this secluded utopia offers warmth and support, and makes these outsiders feel calm, secure, and connected to the world. At the Maharishi School, Claire learns Maharishi’s philosophy for living and meditates with her class. With the promise of peace and enlightenment constantly on the horizon, every day is infused with magic and meaning. But as Claire and Stacey mature, their adolescent skepticism kicks in, drawing them away from the community and into delinquency and drugs. To save herself, Claire moves to California with her father and breaks from Maharishi completely. After a decade of working in journalism and academia, the challenges of adulthood propel her back to Iowa, where she reexamines her spiritual upbringing and tries to reconnect with the magic of her childhood. Greetings from Utopia Park takes us deep into this complex, unusual world, illuminating its joys and comforts, and its disturbing problems. While there is no utopia on earth, Hoffman reveals, there are noble goals worth striving for: believing in belief, inner peace, and a firm understanding that there is a larger fabric of the universe to which we all belong.