Tangled Planet

It's taken 400 years of travel, but the starship Venture has finally arrived at its destination. Beta Earth is an uninhabited, untouched planet that seventeen-year-old engineer Ursa has to colonise with her crewmates. The first night Ursa is on Beta Earth her world goes out of control when she encounters a dead body. She's positive she saw a large creature with sharp teeth, something that shouldn't even be on the planet, but nobody believes her. As injuries and bodies start piling up, Ursa must figure out who to trust when her fellow crewmates start taking sides between Venture's safety and the hope of creating a home on Beta Earth. If Ursa and her people can't find out what's really going on in the forest, their already fragile society won't survive.

A lost island wreathed in whispering mists, two mysterious incidents, and a quest for the truth. Ajay is desperately searching for his friend and crush, Oleander, who has gone missing. All his suspicions and all his investigations come up empty, and he’s left with the fear that Oleander is dead. But he has one clue: she once told him of an island that no one can remember. Could this island in the mist have the answers to what happened to Oleander? And what about the girl Ajay meets who seems to know all there is to know about the island, but has lost most of her memories? Unlocking those memories could help both teens to find the truth.

Make the teaching of Maths a more exciting and creative cross-curricular experience! This new series provides original and fun stories, sketches and poems to use as the basis for teaching objectives from the Mathematics Programme of Study. The stories are supported by differentiated lesson plans and original resources such as card games and suggestions for kinaesthetic activities. Ages 9-11 stories include: Sneaky Circles, Hank Bullman rides into Certain City, Space Chase, Mediaevel Mode, Metric Measures Poem, Ratio Poem. The stories have been road-tested in schools and the children thoroughly enjoyed them!

Operating on the premise that our failure to recognize our interconnected relationship to the rest of the cosmos is the origin of planetary peril, this volume presents academic, activist, and artistic perspectives on how to inspire reflection and motivate action in order to construct alternative frameworks and establish novel solidarities for the sake of our planetary home. The selections in this volume explore ecologies of interdependence as a frame for religious, theological, and philosophical analysis and practice. Contributors examine questions of justice, climate change, race, class, gender, and coloniality and discuss alternative ways of engaging the world in all its biodiversity. Each essay, poem, reflection, and piece of art contributes to and reflects upon how to live out entangled differences toward positive global change. Constructive and practical, global and local, communal and personal, Ecological Solidarities is an innovative contribution to the discourses on relational and liberative thought and practice in religion, philosophy, and theology. It will be welcomed by scholars of World Christianity and theology as well as seminary students, activists, and laity interested in issues of justice and ecology.

Visions of utopia – some hopeful, others fearful – have become increasingly prevalent in recent times. This groundbreaking, timely book examines expressions of the utopian imagination with a focus on the pressing challenge of how to inhabit a climate-changed world. Forms of social dreaming are tracked across two domains: political theory and speculative fiction. The analysis aims to both uncover the key utopian and dystopian tendencies in contemporary debates around the Anthropocene; as well as to develop a political theory of radical transformation that avoids not only debilitating fatalism but also wishful thinking. This book juxtaposes theoretical interventions, from Bruno Latour to the members of the Dark Mountain collective, with fantasy and science fiction texts by N. K. Jemisin, Kim Stanley Robinson and Margaret Atwood, debating viable futures for a world that will look and feel very different from the one we live in right now.

What if Earth had several moons or massive rings like Saturn? What if the Sun were but one star in a double-star or triple-star system? What if Earth were the only planet circling the Sun? These and other imaginative scenarios are the subject of Arthur Upgren's inventive book Many Skies: Alternative Histories of the Sun, Moon, Planets, and Stars. Although the night sky as we know it seems eternal and inevitable, Upgren reminds us that, just as easily, it could have been very different. Had the solar sytem happened to be in the midst of a star cluster, we might have many more bright stars in the sky. Yet had it been located beyond the edge of the Milky Way galaxy, we might have no stars at all. If Venus or Mars had a moon as large as ours, we would be able to view it easily with the unaided eye. Given these or other alternative skies, what might Ptolemy or Copernicus have concluded about the center of the solar sytem and the Sun? This book not only examines the changes in science that these alternative solar, stellar, and galactic arrangements would have brought, it also explores the different theologies, astrologies, and methods of tracking time that would have developed to reflect them. Our perception of our surroundings, the number of gods we worship, the symbols we use in art and literature, even the way we form nations and empires are all closely tied to our particular (and accidental) placement in the universe. Many Skies, however, is not merely a fanciful play on what might have been. Upgren also explores the actual ways that human interferences such as light pollution are changing the night sky. Our atmosphere, he warns, will appear very different if we have belt of debris circling the globe and blotting out the stars, as will happen if advertisers one day pollute space with brilliant satellites displaying their products. From fanciful to foreboding, the scenarios in Many Skies will both delight and inspire reflection, reminding us that ours is but one of many worldviews based on our experience of a universe that is as much a product of accident as it is of intention.

Silva and her family visit her grandfather, only to find his health has taken a bad turn. As they struggle with this news, Silva seeks escape in books – at the local library. But she gets more than she bargained for when a magpie guides her to a secret, magical room containing books that she can not only read, but that she can live. Silva finds herself in the worlds of the characters … who all turn out to be real people. People she knows. There’s a catch, though: she soon discovers that the magpie has lured her to these books for selfish and dark reasons. Going back to the books could mean losing her soul …

London, England, present day. This is the world as we know it, but with one key difference: medical science has found a way to remove diseases from the sick. The catch? They can only transfer the diseases into other living humans. The government now uses the technology to cure the innocent by infecting criminals. It is into this world that Talia Hale is born. Now sixteen and the daughter of a prime ministerial candidate, she discovers that the effort to ensure that bad things happen only to bad people has turned a once-thriving community into a slum, and has made life perilous for two new friends. When Talia’s father makes an election promise to send in the police to crack down on this community, Talia can only think of how much worse things will be for her friends. Will she defy her father to protect them, even if it means costing him the election? Tranferral, the debut from Kate Blair, is a chilling look at a world gone wrong because of its efforts to do right.