Stars are dying. John Bandicut and his companions are summoned to a star-cloud called Starmaker, known to humans as the Orion Nebula, to discover what force threatens newborn stars-and possibly every world within a thousand light-years. Their journey takes them not just into the perils of a stellar nursery, but into confrontation with the Mindaru, a billion-year-old AI and adversary of life as they know it. The task is daunting. But with the aid...

Continues the adventure of a human expedition to another star system that is jeopardized by an encounter with an astonishingly immense artifact in interstellar space: a bowl-shaped structure cupping a star, with a habitable area equivalent to many millions of Earths. And which, tantalizingly, is on a direct path heading toward the same system the human ship is to colonize. Investigating the Bowl, or Shipstar, the human explorers are separated--one...

"There are lots of strange things going on at Starling Academy these days: Leona is devastated about her Wish Pendant failure. Ophelia, the newest Star Darling, is completely clueless. Vega's roommate, Piper, is getting on her last nerve. And Scarlet? Who knows? She's nowhere to be found! So when by-the-book Vega gets sent to Wishworld on the next mission, she finds herself very distracted. Why is her Wisher so secretive? Vega needs to solve this...

A race of microscopic beings, who were genetically engineered to survive on the turbulent mantle of a neutron star and who vividly remember their superbeing creators, prepare for the biggest family reunion in history.