These seventeen stories explore the relationships between children and the adults - parents, guardians, or others - who might have an interest in them. They range from the wrenching to the whimsical. They examine abuse, neglect, and abandonment on the one hand, and loving, caring, and nurturing on the other. They are about children, but not necessarily for children. Some are happy stories, others are sad, but all testify to the strength and resilience of young people as they adapt to circumstances good and bad. The future, as is so often said, belongs to the young. These stories are dedicated...

Rudy admires and fears his white supremacist stepfather, Judd. Under his tutelage, he joins Aryan Salvation, an organization that proclaims white people the highest level of creation, Jews the lowest, and all others "muds." It also claims the Holocaust of World War II is a Jewish myth fabricated to gain sympathy. After participating in a botched graffiti attack on a synagogue, Rudy questions his fitness as an Aryan. But when asked to prepare a report for his highschool history class, he decides he can best serve his cause by proving the Holocaust never happened. He begins, certain of the...

H. P. Devlin, the billionaire owner and CEO of Universal Resources International, a corporation founded on the most advanced technology in the world, establishes Aanland as an experimental socialist community. His agents 'rescue' Rex Anderson, a brilliant electrical engineer, from a prolonged alcoholic binge brought on by the death of his wife and unborn child. Partly to rehabilitate Rex, partly to solve a systems control problem, Devlin puts him in charge of a URI fuel cell development project. Rex resists at first, but finds the research so compelling and the remarkable Aanlandan society,...

The visitor arrived in orbit high above the earth on a fine northern hemisphere summer day. It came quite unexpectedly, though astronomers retrospectively tracked its trajectory back weeks as it approached the solar system from high above the plain of the ecliptic. It was enormous, a huge cylinder with mass and volume greater than the combined total of everything that humans had built in the history of their civilization. What was it? Where did it come from? Why had it come? Humans made every imaginable effort to communicate with their alien visitor, but it remained utterly silent. Then, some...