Akron Public Library

Slavery is back. America, 1962. Having lost a war, America finds itself under Nazi Germany and Japan occupation. A few Jews still live under assumed names. The 'I Ching' is prevalent in San Francisco. Science fiction meets serious ideas in this take on a possible alternate history.

Two frightened navigators , three frozen hibernauts, and a talkative computer named Hal ride on the spacecraft Discovery, hoping to unravel the mystery of a crystal monolith left on the moon by alien intelligence.

"The old world is buried. A new one has been forged atop the shifting dunes. Here in this land of howling wind and infernal sand, four siblings find themselves scattered and lost. Their father was a sand diver, one of the elite few who could travel deep beneath the desert floor and bring up the relics and scraps that keep their people alive. But their father is gone. And the world he left behind might be next. Welcome to the world of Sand, a novel...

On December 21, 2012, the date prophesied as the end of the world, a mysterious alien presence bursts from sacred sites across the globe, ripping human souls from their bodies and plunging the world into a time of chaos and darkness.

The earth has been invaded by a species that take over the minds of their human hosts while leaving their bodies intact, and most of humanity has succumbed. But Melanie Stryder refuses to fade away. Wanderer, the invading "soul" who has been given Melanie's body, knew about the challenges of living inside a human: the overwhelming emotions, the too vivid memories. But there was one difficulty Wanderer didn't expect: the former tenant of her body refusing...

Friday is a secret courier and ardent lover. Employed by a man she only knows of as "Boss," she is given the most awkward and dangerous cases, which take her from New Zealand to Canada, and through the new States of America's disunion, all the way out into the stars and the new colony of Botany Bay. Thrust into one calamity after another, she uses her enhanced wits and very many skills to evade, seduce or even kill her way out of any sticky situation...

"In the major-league draft of 1971, the first player chosen from the State of Oklahoma was Ron Williamson. When he signed with the Oakland A's, he said goodbye to his hometown of Ada and left to pursue his dreams of big league glory." "Six years later he was back, his dreams broken by a bad arm and bad habits - drinking, drugs, and women. He began to show signs of mental illness. Unable to keep a job, he moved in with his mother and slept twenty hours...

For any task you might want to do, there's a right way, a wrong way, and a way so monumentally complex, excessive, and inadvisable that no one would ever try it. Munroe has created a guide to the third kind of approach. He provides highly impractical advice for everything from landing a plane to digging a hole. Cartoonist Randall Munroe (xkcd) explains how to predict the weather by analyzing the pixels of your Facebook photos. He teaches you how to...

The Time Machine tells the story of the Time Traveler, an inventor living in Victorian England. Traveling into the distant future using his time machine he encounters the descendants of humans and witnesses the end of life on earth.

Fifteen thousand years after Leto II's death, the remnants of the Bene Gesserit contend with the ruthless leaders of an alien culture to forge a new civilization and preserve the best of the Old Empire.