Who is the true master of disaster? Earthlings: prepare for the shock of your lives! Global warming . . . reversed. The energy crisis . . . over. The greatest problem on Earth . . . solved. Voltarian Royal Officer of the Fleet, Jettero Heller, has it all figured out. And he’s devised a daring and ingenious plan to make it all happen . . . if he lives to see the day. Saving the world is never easy, and for Heller, it turns out to be a tricky—and risky—business. He’ll have to blast a gang of space pirates in a lethal laser firefight. He’ll have to find a way to capture and control a black hole. He’ll have to undertake a perilous journey to Saturn and back and transport a titanic chunk of ice across the solar system. Then comes the hard part . . . because Heller is headed back to Voltar, where he’s about to uncover the identity of the powerful figure behind the conspiracy to end all conspiracies. He’s facing his deadliest nemesis yet, and before the intergalactic battle is over, the entire mission could end in DISASTER. “Features rich inventiveness, brisk pacing and a large cast of appealing characters.” —BOOKLIST

Knowledge about carnality and its limits provides the agenda for much of the fiction written for adolescent readers today, yet there exists little critical engagement with the ways in which it has been represented in the young adult novel in either discursive, ideological, or rhetorical forms. Death, Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Adolescent Literature is a pioneering study that addresses these methodological and contextual gaps. Focusing on texts produced since the late-1980s, and drawing on a range of theoretical perspectives, Kathryn James shows how representations of death in young adult literature are invariably associated with issues of sexuality, gender, and power. Under particular scrutiny are the trope of woman/death, the eroticizing and sexualizing of death, and the ways in which the gendered subject is represented in dialogue with the processes of death, dying, and grief. Through close readings of historical literature, fantasy fictions, realistic novels, dead-narrator tales, and texts from genres including Gothic, horror, and post-disaster, James reveals not only how cultural discourses influence and are influenced by literary works, but how relevant the study of death is to adolescent fiction--the literature of "becoming."