When curious Colin dives into the bin after Harry one day, he doesn't find banana peel and custard in there...

When Harry the alien lands his spacebin in his friend Colin's garden, it's time for an adventure!

Vastrap. Our very own nuclear testing site, so far into the desert that the Russians and the Americans don’t even have a clue about it. You don’t mess with an Afrikaner, not if you don’t want to get a proper klap. An unauthorised nuclear blast beyond belief at Vastrap Airbase outside Upington not only winds up the Americans, but also launches Africa’s first spacecraft. Propelled by an engine harnessing the power of a nuclear bomb never disarmed in the eighties, the rocket leaves Earth without its pilot or crew. But how did this spaceship, designed by the previous government to extend the Afrikaner’s history as a nation of pioneers, survive? And more pressingly, who’s working its joystick? Small-time journalist Greg Hall sets out to uncover the details of the ship that has captured the world’s imagination. In the wreckage of the blast, he discovers a man badly burnt and almost dead. A man who has an alarming story to tell and a frightening plan of his own. Funny and thrilling, The Space Race twinkles with its author’s humour and trademark irony.

Pilot Rocky Waddle wants to enter the Superchase Space Race, and when the penguins rescue a racing spaceship, and the owner tells them to keep it, he gets his chance--but the Space Race is a dangerous event, and some pilots will do anything to win.

This collection brings together the work of a range of scholars from around the world with different perspectives on one simple question: How can we assess the value of various entertainment products and forms? Entertainment is everywhere. The industries that produce it earn billions of dollars each year and employ hundreds of thousands of people. Its pervasiveness means almost everyone has something to say about entertainment, too, whether it be our opinion on the latest Hollywood blockbuster, a new celebrity couple, or our concerns over its place in the world of politics. And yet, in spite of its significance, entertainment has too-often been dismissed with surprising ease within the academy as a ‘mindless’, ‘lowbrow’ – even ‘dangerous’ – form of culture, and therefore unworthy of serious appraisal (let alone praise). Entertainment Values, challenges this assumption, offering a better understanding of what entertainment is, why we should take it seriously, as well as helping us to appreciate the significant and complex impact it has on our culture.

When Stink discovers that Pluto has been downgraded from a planet to a dwarf planet, he launches a campaign in his classroom to restore its status to that of a full-fledged member of the solar system.

When a space scooter race on CLEO-7 becomes a battle between the boys and the girls, the AstroKids need a reminder to work together as a team.

Publishers Weekly Best Summer Reads Overturn everything you knew about history’s greatest minds in this raucous and hilarious book, where it turns out there's a finer line between "genius" and "idiot" than we've previously known. “As Albert Einstein almost certainly never said, everyone is a genius – but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” So begins Katie Spalding’s spunky takedown of the Western canon, and how genius may not be as irrefutably great as we commonly understand. While most of us may never become Einstein, it may surprise you to learn that there’s probably a bunch of stuff you can do that Einstein couldn’t. And, as Spalding shows, the famous prodigies she explores here were quite odd by any definition. For example: Thomas Edison, inventor of the lightbulb, believed that he could communicate with the undead and built the world’s very first hotline to heaven: the Spirit Phone. Marie and Pierre Curie, famous for discovering radioactivity, slept next to a lump of radioactive material for years and strapped it to their arms to watch it burn them in real-time. Lord Byron, acclaimed British poet, literally took a bear with him to university. Isaac Newton discovered the laws of gravity and motion, but he also looked up at the sun without eye protection. The result? Three days of blindness. Tesla, whose scientific work led to the invention of the AC unit, fell in love with a pigeon. Edison's Ghosts is filled with examples of the so-called best of humanity doing, to put it bluntly, some really dumb shit. You’ll discover stories that deserve to be told but never are: the hilarious, regrettable, and downright bafflingly lesser-known achievements that never made it into our history books, until now.

Meet Ham, Minnie, Enos, Roscoe, Tiger, and Rocky. When the United States was scrambling to catch up to the Soviets after their successful launch of Sputnik, they didn't turn to Mercury Seven astronauts Alan Shepard and John Glenn. Rather, they began bringing chimpanzees to Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico for a top-secret program. The goal? To do everything America needed to make space travel safe for humans and beat the Soviets. Based on extensive research and interviews with living members of the team of veterinarians, handlers, and psychologists who worked with the animals, The Astrochimps offers a fresh perspective on animal intelligence and the rise of the space age. Detailed back matter provides resources, space mission stats, and calls to action for young readers to honor the astrochimps' legacy and advocate for the humane treatment of chimpanzees today. Vividly depicted at work, at play, in and out of spacecrafts, these chimps played an under-appreciated part in helping the United States win the Space Race.

When the spacebin lands Harry the alien and Cosmic Colin on a strange planet where fuzzy hamsters rule the realm, the boys are in for an adventure.