Space Humor

When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped onto the lunar surface in July of 1969, they wore spacesuits made by Playtex: 21 layers of fabric, each with a distinct yet interrelated function, custom-sewn for them by seamstresses whose usual work was fashioning bras and girdles. This book is the story of that spacesuit. It is a story of the triumph over the military-industrial complex by the International Latex Corporation, best known by its consumer brand of "Playtex" - a victory of elegant softness over engineered hardness, of adaptation over cybernetics.

Steven Erikson has taken his lifelong passion for Star Trek and transformed it into a smart, inventive, and hugely entertaining spoof on the whole overblown mankind-exploring-space-for-the-good-of-all-species-but-trashing-stuff-with-a-lot-of-high-tech-gadgets-along-the-way adventure. The result is a novel that deftly parodies the genre while also paying fond homage to it.

It's the 25th century, and the American President has taken over the world. Meanwhile, after a cleaner unplugged his cryogenic freezing machine by accident, Detective Inspector Capstan wakes up to find that he's been in a state of suspended animation for more than 400 years. As he's forced to adjust to life in the future, he finds himself reinstated as a policeman, and together with the great-great-great-great-grandson of his former subordinate, Sergeant Dewbush, he's put on the case of a missing cow.

Contains books eight and nine of the Bob and Nikki series!

Interstellar con man Rex Nihilo has a price tag on his head. Railroaded into smuggling a shipment of contraband corn to a planet short on food, Rex finds himself on the run from an insidious corporation named Ubiqorp, which reaps obscene profits by keeping the planet dependent on shipments of synthetic rations. When Rex and his long-suffering robot companion Sasha are sentenced to work as slave labor on a massive Ubiqorp plantation, they learn the terrible secret behind the corporation's products.

Meet Moon! She's more than just a rock - she’s Earth’s rock, her best friend she can always count on. Moon never turns her back on her friend (Literally: She's always facing Earth with the same side!). These two will stick together forever. With characteristic humor and charm, Stacy McAnulty channels the voice of Moon in this next celestial "autobiography" in the Our Universe series.

Oswalt combines memoir with uproarious humor, from snow forts to Dungeons & Dragons to gifts from Grandma that had to be explained. He remem­bers his teen summers spent working in a movie Cineplex and his early years doing stand-up. Readers are also treated to several graphic elements, includ­ing a vampire tale for the rest of us and some greeting cards with a special touch.

Nestled among Seattle's skyscrapers, The Zephyr Holdings Building is a bleak rectangle topped by an orange-and-black logo that gives no hint of Zephyr's business. Lack of clarity, it turns out, is Zephyr's defining characteristic. The floors are numbered in reverse. No one has ever seen the CEO or glimpsed his office on the first (i.e., top) floor. Yet every day people clip on their ID tags, file into the building, sit at their desks, and hope that they're not about to be outsourced.

After saving the grim and gritty alien city of Down Here from something big, mean, and mind-bendingly horrible, Dan is looking forward to unwinding in the closest available bar. Annoyingly, the universe has other ideas. Instead, Dan finds himself investigating a cheating husband, two horrible murders, and the potential enslavement of everyone in the galaxy. With his caseload stretching his woefully limited detective skills, his car in pieces, and the whole "being dead" thing not doing him any favors, Dan has no choice but to ask his friends for help.

Random Facts You Should Know: WTF Edition is jam-packed with fun and strange facts that you will be itching to unpack in any conversation to impress those around you. Whether you enjoy listening through these by yourself, with a partner, or with a group, you are bound to lose track of time while having a laugh and learning something new.

The first carnival to take place on Union Station since humanity joined the galactic community is coming, and the ambassadors of the different species are all entered in the election to become Carnival King or Queen. It's not a job that Kelly wants, and, fortunately for her, the humans get a late start at electioneering.

Two years after the events of Alien Night on Union Station, Kelly faces new challenges as the EarthCent Ambassador. The growing acceptance of humans by their alien neighbors plus a measure of her own personal fame (or infamy) is resulting in too much work for an embassy with only two full-time staffers. Friends and family must wonder if the stress is finally getting to Kelly when she starts acting even more peculiar than usual.

NASA’s scientists thought he’d be the PERFECT chimp to send into space. Little did Chump know that he had been selected for a deadly-dangerous mission. If a chimp could orbit Earth, then chances were a human could too. With Chump the chimp at the controls of a spacecraft, what could possibly go wrong? As it turned out, EVERYTHING.

The Believer magazine presents a compendium of advice from producers, writers, and actors of The Daily Show, Saturday Night Live, Parks and Recreation, Late Show with David Letterman, The Hangover, and The Colbert Report, along with other musicians, cartoonists, New Yorker writers, and those similarly unqualified to offer guidance.

Walter Reddie is a washed-up former astronaut who takes it upon himself to build a rocket ship to rescue his cousin, who is stuck on the International Space Station after a mission gone wrong. If America won’t rescue its astronauts, Walter will do it himself. Violating numerous laws, common sense, logic, and reason, Walter Reddie becomes a lightning rod for people who aren’t ready to lay down and die just yet.

In Lionel Shriver's entertaining send-up of today's cult of exercise - which not only encourages better health, but now like all religions also seems to promise meaning, social superiority, and eternal life - an aging husband's sudden obsession with extreme sport makes him unbearable.

A mysterious pyramid appears in Chicago, oozing fantastic creatures and sucking humans into our own mythological past. It's an alien invasion from within! When a special forces team sent to capture an AWOL official gets into deep trouble with a certain one-eyed Norse god, redoubtable comparative mythologist Jerry Lukacs must rescue them, strike a deal with the droll and dangerous Loki, and risk bringing on Ragnarok itself to once again save human myth from alien domination.

Dave's first day working on the wall does not go well. Through very little fault of his own, he finds himself embroiled in the ruthless, backstabbing, corrupt world of interplanetary politics. The money has all gone, people are turning on each other, and the whole colony of Copernicus is in utter turmoil.

When sociologist Nalini Jackson joins the SS Delany for the first manned mission to Jupiter, all she wants is a career opportunity: the chance to conduct the first field study of group dynamics on long-haul cryoships. But what she discovers instead is an entire city encased in a bubble on Europa, Jupiter’s largest moon.

You think you’re struggling to find your place in the universe? Consider poor old Colin Douglass, a terminally ill insurance agent who awakens from centuries in cryogenic freeze to find Earth is a devastated wasteland. Now, he’s being pursued by a homicidal interstellar tourist board, and calculating insurance dividends is as outdated as making stone axes. Sci-fi-hating technophobe Colin seeks a cure for his illness in this strange new galaxy where toilets talk back, and door handles are a long-forgotten relic.