Search Worlds Without End

In All Those Vanished Engines, Paul Park returns to science fiction after a decade spent on the impressive four-volume A Princess of Roumania fantasy, with an extraordinary, intense, compressed SF novel in three parts, each set in its own alternate-history universe. The sections are all rooted in Virginia and the Battle of the Crater, and are also grounded in the real history of the Park family, from differing points of view. They are all gorgeously imaginative and carefully constructed, and reverberate richly with one another.

The first section is set in the aftermath of the Civil War, in a world in which the Queen of the North has negotiated a two-nation settlement. The second, taking place in northwestern Massachusetts, investigates a secret project during World War II, in a time somewhat like the present. The third is set in the near-future United States, with aliens from history.

The cumulative effect is awesome. There hasn't been a three part novel this ambitious in science fiction since Gene Wolfe's classic The Fifth Head of Cerberus.

Paul Park's Nebula-nominated novel is an extraordinary, challenging work about a human colony on an alien world.

Celestis, settled by humans fleeing from a socially decaying Earth, is riven by racial strife. Those conquered aliens who can afford it surgically and pharmacologically alter themselves to appear more human. Simon, a human diplomat, is taken hostage by alien rebels and falls in love with Katherine, an altered alien. But, Katherine, cut off from her medications, rapidly begins to transform back into a creature of alien needs and desires.

Sturgeon and Word Fantasy Award nominated short story. It originally appeared on Omni Online, March 1997 and was later reprinted in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, December 1997 and Lightspeed, June 2013. The story can also be found in the anthology Digital Domains: A Decade of Science Fiction & Fantasy (2010), edited by Ellen Datlow. It is included in the collection If Lions Could Speak and Other Stories (2002).

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

Nebula-nominated Novella

A Confederate veteran revisits a haunted battleground outside of Petersburg, Virginia. Many years later, his great-grandson returns obsessively to a mansion (now a museum) in southern Vermont, the scene of an unsolved murder. In the late eighteenth century, in eastern Connecticut, a separatist minister receives a visit from a flying saucer, while, coincidentally, a young officer takes the stand at his own court-martial in 1919. Not a hundred and fifty years further on, a beautiful young woman self-destructs in New York State, while two hundred miles and a mere generation away, an old woman dances on a cold Rhode Island beach.

In Ghosts Doing the Orange Dance, Paul Park braids these and other seemingly mutually exclusive strands, and the resulting text, part memoir and part fiction, could serve as a last will and testament not only for Park himself, but also for John Crowley and Elizabeth Hand, old friends who, through a series of oversights, have guided it towards publication.

BSFA nominated short story. It originally appeared in Interzone, #177 March 2002, and was reprinted in Lightspeed, April 2017. The story is included in the collection If Lions Could Speak and Other Stories (2002).

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

This short story originally appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine, December 2009. It can also be found in the anthology Clarkesworld: Year Four (2013), edited by Neil Clarke and Sean Wallace.

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

After the end of the world, there's still love. And revenge. And a particular Glock Nine. A tale of post-apocalyptic Iceland, told in the manner of the ancient verse Eddas, by acclaimed science fiction author Paul Park.

This poem was anthologized in Year's Best SF 17 (2012), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer and After the End: Recent Apocalypses (2013), edited by Paula Guran.

Read the full poem for free at Tor.com.

This short story originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, June 1996. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fourteenth Annual Collection (1997) and Galileo's Children: Tales of Science vs. Superstition (2005), both edited by Gardner Dozois. The story is included in the collection If Lions Could Speak and Other Stories (2002).

This short story originally appeared in OMNI Magazine, 1982, and was reprinted in Lightspeed, December 2014. It is included in the collection If Lions Could Speak and Other Stories (2002).

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

WFA nominated short story. It originally appeared in Edison's Frankenstein (Postscripts #20/21, 2009), edtied by Nick Gevers and Peter Crowther. The story can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2010, edited by Rich Horton.

This is a truly magical tale, full of strangeness, terrors and wonders. Many girls daydream that they are really a princess adopted by commoners. In the case of teenager Miranda Popescu, this is literally true. Because she is at the fulcrum of a deadly political battle between conjurers in an alternate world where "Roumania" is a leading European power, Miranda was hidden by her aunt in our world, where she was adopted and raised in a quiet Massachusetts college town.

The narrative is split between our world and the people in Roumania working to protect or to capture Miranda: her Aunt Aegypta Schenck versus the mad Baroness Ceaucescu in Bucharest, and the sinister alchemist, the Elector of Ratisbon, who holds her true mother prisoner in Germany. This is the story of how Miranda -- with her two best friends, Peter and Andromeda -- is brought back to her home reality. Each of them is changed in the process and all will have much to learn about their true identities and the strange world they find themselves in.

This story is a triumph of contemporary fantasy.

Teenager Miranda Popescu is at the fulcrum of a deadly political and diplomatic battle between conjurers in an alternate fantasy world where "Roumania" is a leading European power. Miranda was hidden by her aunt in our world. An American couple adopted and raised her in their quiet Massachusetts college town, but she had been translated by magic back to her own world, and is at large, five years in the future.

The mad Baroness Ceaucescu in Bucharest, and the sinister alchemist, the Elector of Ratisbon, who holds her true mother prisoner in Germany, are her enemies. This is the story of how Miranda -- separated from her two best friends, Peter and Andromeda, who have been left behind in the forests of an alternate America -- begins to grow into her own personality. And how Peter and Andromeda are shockingly changed in the process of making their way to Roumania to find Miranda again.

Many girls daydream that they are really a princess adopted by commoners. In the case of teenager Miranda Popescu, this is literally true. Because she is at the fulcrum of a deadly political battle between conjurers in an alternate world where "Roumania" is a leading European power, Miranda was hidden by her aunt in our world, where she was adopted and raised in a quiet Massachusetts college town.

The narrative is split between our world and the people in Roumania working to protect or to capture Miranda: her Aunt Aegypta Schenck versus the mad Baroness Ceaucescu in Bucharest, and the sinister alchemist, the Elector of Ratisbon, who holds her true mother prisoner in Germany. This is the story of how Miranda -- with her two best friends, Peter and Andromeda -- is brought back to her home reality. Each of them is changed in the process and all will have much to learn about their true identities and the strange world they find themselves in.

After finding that she is the lost princess of Roumania and the mythical White Tyger, Miranda's fate is still uncertain. The ghosts of her enemies cluster about her, the insane spirit of the Baroness takes possession of her body for a time, and demons released by her mother are abroad. Through it all her heart calls out to Peter, whom she has come to love, and to her best friend Andromeda. Any answers may lie only in the hidden world of spirits, where death is but an inconvenience, and Miranda is the most powerful creature of all: the White Tyger.

Paul Park is one of modern fiction's major innovators. With characters truly alien and disturbingly normal, his work explores the shifting interface between traditional narrative and luminous dream, all in the service of a deeper humanism. "Climate Change," original to this volume, is an intimate and erotic take on a global environmental crisis. "A Resistance to Theory" chronicles the passionate (and bloody) competition between the armed adherents of postmodern literary schools. "A Conversation with the Author" gives readers a harrowing look behind the curtains of an MFA program. In "A Brief History of SF" a fan encounters the ruined man who first glimpsed the ruined cities of Mars. "Creative Nonfiction" showcases a professor's eager collaboration with a student intent on wrecking his career. The only nonfiction piece, "A Homily for Good Friday," was delivered to a stunned congregation at a New England church. Plus: a bibliography and a candid Outspoken Interview with one of today's most accomplished and least conventional authors.

Table of Contents:

• A Short History of Science Fiction, or The Microscopic Eye - (2015) - short story
• Blind Spot - (2016) - short story
• A Conversation with the Author - (2019) - short story
• Climate Change - (2019) - short story
• "Punctuality, Basic Hygiene, Gun Safety" - (2019) - interview of Paul Park by Terry Bisson
• A Resistance to Theory - (2019) - short story
• A Homily for Good Friday - (2019) - essay
• Creative Nonfiction - (2018) - short story
• Bibliography - (2019) - essay

Where the seasons last for generations, hard winter makes for hard religion. The worlds of the solar system are the hells through which all souls must incarnate on their journey to Paradise; all, that is, but the Starbridges, nobles who serve to enforce the "divine will." In the lowest slums of the city-state of Charn, a Starbridge doctor and a drunken prince defy the law to bring medicine to the poor and hear the story-music of the refugee Antinomials, a wild people who shun words, infidels pressed to the edge of extinction. As a decades-long pitched battle approaches the city and the Bishop of Charn herself is condemned for impurity, the doctor and the prince will follow their compassion into the heart of a revolution, just on the eve of spring, with its strange and treacherous sugar rain.

This is the first book of the Starbridge Chronicles, and is followed by SUGAR RAIN and THE CULT OF LOVING KINDNESS.

The second book in the Starbridge Chronicles, Sugar Rain relates the stories of Thanakar and Charity Starbridge during the revolution that ended the first book in the series, Soldiers of Paradise. The generations-long winter has drawn to a close, and with it the power of the tyrannical Starbridge theocracy that maintained order during the years of hunger. But a cruelly pragmatic priest has set the stage for a new faith, and even those who defy him seem fated to play out roles that will inevitably bring it to pass. As Thanakar struggles in exile to find safe harbor for his adopted family, Charity Starbridge undertakes a mythic journey, passing through various underworlds to join him.

As intellectual oppression reigns in Charn, a pair of changeling twins--seduced by the violent extremes of an outlaw religion--usher in a bizarre and terrifying future.