Twelve-year-old Simon is obsessed with aliens. The ones who take people and do experiments. When he's too worried about them to sleep, he listens to the owls hoot outside. Owls that have the same eyes as aliens-dark and foreboding. Then something strange happens on a camping trip, and Simon begins to suspect he's been abducted. But is it real, or just the overactive imagination of a kid who loves fantasy and role-playing games and is the target of...

The Earth is dying, and our hopes are pinned on Ubastis, an untamed paradise at the edge of colonized space. But such an influx of people threatens the planet's unstudied ecosystem - a tenuous research colony must complete its analysis, lest humanity abandon one planet only to die on another. The Ubasti colonists barely get by on their own. To acquire the tools they need, they are relegated to selling whatever they can to outside investors. For xenobiologist...