Search Worlds Without End

After they are pulled 70,000 light-years away from Alpha Quadrant, the captain and crew of Star Trek: Voyager must travel homeward while exploring new challenges to their relationships, views of others, and themselves. As the first extended, critical study dedicated to Star Trek: Voyager, this book examines how the series uses the physical distance from the crew's home quadrant and the effect this has on the dynamics among community formation, self-creation and a sense of place.

Chapters cover topics such as time travel, leadership models, interspecies relationships, the impact of trauma, models of self-creation and individuality, environmental influences on groups and individuals, memory, nostalgia, and how spiritual experiences affect people. The holographic Doctor and the former Borg, Seven of Nine, stand out as complex and boundary-stretching figures.

The devastating Food and Fuel Wars have turned once-powerful nations into isolated farming communities. Barter has replaced currency, and scientists-considered responsible for the world's misery-are burned at the stake. Hidden in the Idaho hills, astronomer Allen Chandliss secretly monitors his radiotelescope, listening for signs of intelligent life, hoping that aliens will come and improve things on Earth. For seventeen years he has waited patiently. His patience is about to pay off....

Merritt Thackery knew from boyhood that his only dream was to be part of the Unified Space Survey. He prepared himself with five years of training on an exquisitely boring space tug, and with a speciality in alien linguistics. When his chance finally came, he was more than ready.

But even Thackery's boyhood dreams could not have prepared him for his final mission, beyond the borders of known space: To seek out an unknown enemy and win Earth's freedom at last!

In Empery, a newgalactic empire has coalesced some 60,000 years after the destruction by the alien Mizari. The Unified Worlds, despite eleborate defenses, are devided over the development of a world-wrecking new weapon while the Mizari threat intensifies.

Niccolucio, a young Florentine Carthusian monk, leads a devout life until the Black Death kills all of his brothers, leaving him alone and filled with doubt. Habidah, an anthropologist from another universe racked by plague, is overwhelmed by the suffering. Unable to maintain her observer neutrality, she saves Niccolucio from the brink of death.

Habidah discovers that neither her home's plague nor her assignment on Niccolucio's world are as she's been led to believe. Suddenly the pair are drawn into a worlds-spanning conspiracy to topple an empire larger than the human imagination can contain.

The transdimensional empire, the Unity, has dissolved, its ruling powers forced into exile -- but empires don't die easily. The living planarship Ways and Means has come to medieval Earth and ended the Black Death, but it keeps its intentions to itself. Someone is trying to kill its agent Osia, who is suffering through her own exile. Spy-turned-anthropologist Meloku becomes a target, too, when she catches Ways and Means concealing the extent of its meddling. While they fight to survive, Fiametta -- an Italian soldier, mercenary, and heretical preacher -- raises an army and a religious revolt, aiming to split Europe in half.