Time is running out. Chess and her brothers, Box and Splinter, are caught in a bitter struggle between two ruthless organizations. Now they face a terrifying choice - carry out a dangerous mission for the Committee, or try to outrun the evil Twisted Symmetry alone. Chess wants to take the mission. But it could prove fatal. And it will lead the Tuesdays into the heart of the very organization that is hunting them . . .

"Touches on a dizzying array of subjects, including UV rays, inert gases, fossils, meteorites, microwaves, rainbows . . . Like many a good teacher, Berman uses humor to entertain his audience and liven things up." —Los Angeles Times Bob Berman is motivated by a straightforward philosophy: everyone can understand science—and it's fun, too. In Strange Universe, he pokes into the bizarre and astonishingly true scientific facts that determine the world around us. Geared to the nonscientist, Berman's original essays are filled with the trademark wit and cleverness that has earned him acclaim over many years for his columns in Astronomy and Discover magazines. He emphasizes curiosities of the natural world to which everyone can relate, and dishes on the little-known secrets about space and some of science's biggest blunders (including a very embarrassing moment from Buzz Aldrin's trip to the moon). Fascinating to anyone interested in the wonders of our world and the cosmos beyond, Strange Universe will make you smile and think.

HOME ON THE STRANGE An Offbeat Mystery Jeff and Terry Winslow are tired of life in the big city. So it seems like fate when they run into Jeff’s old Veterinary school chum at a convention. Stewart Varney is doing service for the state of Nevada in a small town, paying back an obligation for a college grant, and is equally tired of the country life. They happily agree to swap lives for one year, and Jeff hands his practice to Stewart, while Terry takes a sabbatical from her job as an anthropology professor. Jeff and Terry arrive in the quirky town of Silver Peak to find a very different world from the one they left. The Mayor is a nudist, acid reject who lives in a copper-clad tower on the town’s highest hill, a brothel serves as the town’s gathering spot, prostitutes and prospectors are numerous, and the town’s most revered citizen is a burro that loves good coffee and watches Star Trek religiously. Jeff also discovers that he is not only the town Veterinarian, but also the town Doctor, one of many things Varney neglected to mention. From their very strange home that also serves as his office, they become acquainted with the townsfolk and their various maladies. Jeff biopsies a growth from Jenny the burro, when her owner, Jack Derry, asks the couple to accompany him to a strange find out in the desert. After a long hike, they come upon a flexible, metallic, cylindrical object half-buried in the sand that was exposed by the latest monsoon. They need help to get it out, and enlist the town’s leaders, including the hefty, female cafe owner, Biggie, and brothel owner, Darrel Barlowe. They store what they come to call “whateverthehellitis” in the Winslow’s stable. Meanwhile, Terry notices that Marilyn, one of the local prostitutes, has been spending a lot of time at the Copper Castle, home of the secretive mayor known as Zeus. She confronts the girl, pays her for information about the strange man, and learns that he insists on nudity, has no penis, and is paying her to work on a large item of unknown origin in the big tower, which is surrounded by a mammoth junkyard. Soon after in San Francisco, Stewart Varney gets a mysterious call saying that “they found it”. Jenny’s biopsy is cancerous, and the whole town pitches in to help pay for her treatment. The “whateverthehellitis” group decides to try to get inside their find. They use every possible method, including explosives and a chainsaw, but are unable to enter. During the process, Marilyn calls to tell them that State Troopers are on their way to the Winslow’s on a tip that they are growing Marijuana, but stopped for some action at the brothel. She keeps them busy, while in a last ditch effort, Jack, Biggie, Terry, Jenny the mule, and Jeff disrobe and visit the mayor to see what he knows. They walk up the high peak to find him waiting. He explains that he is from the Vega star cluster, and was sent to recover a probe that vanished here, unable to withstand Earth’s atmosphere. His people have transcended matter, and live as pure light and energy. The probe is the second of two, as the first was the craft in Roswell. He disguised himself as an acid-freak to explain his strange behavior when he first landed in the sixties, and built the Winslow residence and then the Copper Castle as devices to try to find the probe, but the local uranium deposits made it very difficult. His companion, Jenny, was traded with money to Jack for the town, in the hope that the prospector might come upon the probe in his travels. Zeus regards clothing as a light barrier and, therefore, pollution. Sensing trouble at the stable, he spirits them all back to the probe as light. At the stable, the cops have arrived, but are delayed by the naked forms of Terry and Biggie outside, while the men try to figure out how to hide or remove the probe. But, it’s too late, and Zeus and the others hide in the craft-- one must be naked to ent

This is a reissue of the novel inspired by Hunter S. Thompson's ether-fuelled, savage journey to the heart of the American Dream: We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold... And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas.

Are aliens visiting Earth, right now, even as you’re reading this? For a long-time, best-selling science fiction author Stephen Hunt believed - as you might do - that UFOs and the chance extraterrestrials are presently calling on Earth was a load of... (let’s keep this family-friendly), complete old nonsense! What was it that changed his mind? Interestingly, not his encounter with an alien probe in 2001. He wrote that off as a council pollution-monitoring drone - even though the first commercial drone wasn’t used until 2006. No, it was the New York Times’s article revealing that the Pentagon had been running, and denying the existence of, a top-secret alien-hunting program so covert it had to change the word ‘UFO’ to ‘UAP’ just to escape the stigma created by the CIA around the term. This feature came with confirmed videos of the latest U.S. navy fighter jets being made to look like paper planes by anti-gravity effect vehicles. Craft racing at mind-boggling speeds that would turn human pilots into meat-paste. Since then, Stephen has been exploring deep down this rabbit hole. Now, in his very first non-fiction book, he brings you the results of his strange voyage of exploration, seeking the answers to such eye-opening questions as... - Has the U.S. government (a) lost its mind, or (b) are they really trying to back-engineer crashed alien craft wreckage? - What is the connection between UFOs/UAPs and high strangeness (portals, ghosts, Bigfoot)? - Given there are between 100 and 400 billion star systems in our Milky Way Galaxy, where the heck is everyone else? Is humanity truly that unique? The only machine-using species? - What does the U.S. government know that we don’t? - Are UFO witnesses and whistle-blowers influenced by popular science fiction entertainment, or are our media companies dropping approved UFO/alien bread-crumbs? - Is this new wave of official U.S.-sanctioned UFO openness a prelude to something shocking coming our planet’s way? Revelations so improbable, they’ll change humanity forever? Stephen Hunt examines this fascinating and astonishing universe through the eyes of a science fiction author, drawing the parallels between our sci-fictions, and what just might be a bizarre classified reality of actual alien-derived sci-facts.