Search Worlds Without End

For fans of The Maze Runner and The 5th Wave, this debut YA novel from Hugo Award-winner Will McIntosh pits four teens against an evil billionaire in the race of a lifetime.

Sully is a sphere dealer at a flea market. It doesn't pay much - Alex Holliday's stores have muscled out most of the independent sellers - but it helps him and his mum make the rent. No one knows where the brilliant-coloured spheres came from. One day they were just there, hidden all over the earth like huge gemstones. Burn a pair and they make you a little better: an inch taller, skilled at maths, better-looking. The rarer the sphere, the greater the improvement - and the more expensive the sphere.

When Sully meets Hunter, a girl with a natural talent for finding spheres, the two start searching together. What they find will change more than just their lives... Because the entire world fights over spheres, but no one knows why they're here or what their powers are... until now.

When Earth is invaded by telepathic aliens, humanity responds by creating the defenders. They are the perfect warriors - seventeen feet tall, knowing and loving nothing but war, their minds closed to the aliens. The question is, what do you do with millions of genetically engineered warriors once the war is won?

A novel of power, alliances, violence, redemption, sacrifice and yearning for connection, Defenders presents a revolutionary new vision of alien invasion.

This short story originally appeared in Lightspeed, August 2011. It was later expanded into the Campbell-nominated full-length novel Defenders.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

This short story originally appeared in Lightspeed, September 2013.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

Faller is a new gripping standalone, science fiction thriller by Hugo Award-winning author Will McIntosh.

Day One: No one can remember anything--who they are, family and friends, or even how to read. Reality has fragmented and Earth consists of an islands of rock floating in an endless sky. Food, water, electricity--gone, except for what people can find, and they can't find much.

Faller's pockets contain tantalizing clues: a photo of himself and a woman he can't remember, a toy solider with a parachute, and a mysterious map drawn in blood. With only these materials as a guide, he makes a leap of faith from the edge of the world to find the woman and set things right.

He encounters other floating islands, impossible replicas of himself and others, and learns that one man hates him enough to take revenge for actions Faller can't even remember.

Two years ago, on the same day but miles apart, Finn Darby lost two of the most important people in his life: his wife Lorena, struck by lightning on the banks of the Chattahoochee River, and his abusive, alcoholic grandfather, Tom Darby, creator of the long-running newspaper comic strip Toy Shop. Against his grandfather's dying wish, Finn has resurrected Toy Shop, adding new characters, and the strip is more popular than ever, bringing in fan letters, merchandising deals, and talk of TV specials. Finn has even started dating again.

When a terrorist attack decimates Atlanta, killing half a million souls, Finn begins blurting things in a strange voice beyond his control. The voice says things only his grandfather could know. Countless other residents of Atlanta are suffering a similar bizarre affliction. Is it mass hysteria, or have the dead returned to possess the living? Finn soon realizes he has a hitcher within his skin... his grandfather. And Grandpa isn't terribly happy about the changes Finn has been making to Toy Shop. Together with a pair of possessed friends, an aging rock star, and a waitress, Finn races against time to find a way to send the dead back to Deadland... or die trying!

Asimov's Readers Award Finalist Novella

The AI City Manager's contract is about to end, and in order to prove its worth (and save its own life), it concocts a matchmaking project to decrease the city's divorce rate and increase its residents' happiness. But there's obviously something very wrong with its compatibility algorithm: it's matched up two wildly-different people who each already have fiancées.

This novella originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, July-August 2020. Read it for free at the publisher's website.

Sturgeon Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, January 2013. There are no other known publications available at this time.

This short story originally appeared in On Spec, Summer 2007. It can also be found in the anthology Science Fiction: The Best of the Year, 2008 Edition, edited by Rich Horton.

What happens when resources become scarce and society starts to crumble? As the competition for resources pulls America's previously stable society apart, the "New Normal" is a Soft Apocalypse. This is how our world ends; with a whimper instead of a bang. "It's so hard to believe," Colin said as we crossed the steaming, empty parking lot toward the bowling alley. "What?" "That we're poor. That we're homeless." "I know." "I mean, we have college degrees," he said. "I know," I said. There was an ancient miniature golf course choked in weeds alongside the bowling alley. The astroturf had completely rotted away in places. The windmill had one spoke. We looked it over for a minute (both of us had once been avid mini golfers), then continued toward the door. "By the way," I added. "We're not homeless, we're nomads. Keep your labels straight." New social structures and tribal connections spring up across America, as the previous social structures begin to dissolve. Soft apocalypse follows the journey across the South East of a tribe of formerly middle class Americans as they struggle to find a place for themselves and their children in a new, dangerous world that still carries the ghostly echoes of their previous lives.

This short story originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, March-April 2017. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2018, edited by Rich Horton.

This short story originally appeared in Black Static Horror Magazine, January-February 2008. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2009, edited by Rich Horton.

Listen to the full story for free at Drabblecast.

A chilling new short story from Hugo Award winner Will McIntosh. The settlers of Cyan have not ventured far beyond the perimeter fence that keeps the planet's strange creatures at bay. But one unlucky woman is about to find out what lies beyond...Word Count ~ 7,109

This short story originally appeared in Lightspeed, January 2016.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

This novelette originally appeared in Lightspeed, April 2018.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

Eighty years after her death in a car accident, Mira awakens in a "dating center". The patrons of the dating center are lonely men seeking wives, and dead women in cryogenic storage. A male patron can revive a female patron's head and interview her -- and, if he doesn't like her, press a button to immediately return her to storage. As various suitors reject her, and the years go by, Mira's only chance to avoid being frozen forever is to convince a total stranger that she loves him enough that he should pay for her full revival.

This Hugo Award-winnning and Nebula Award-nominated short story was originally published in Asimov's Science Fiction, January 2009, and can also be found in Nebula Awards Showcase 2011, edited by Kevin J. Anderson.

Listen to a podcast of this story at EscapePod.

In the future, love is complicated and death is not necessarily the end. Love Minus Eighty follows several interconnected people in a disquieting vision of romantic life in the century to come.

There's Rob, who accidentally kills a jogger, then sacrifices all to visit her in a cryogenic dating facility, seeking forgiveness but instead falling in love.

Veronika, a shy dating coach, finds herself coaching the very woman who is stealing the man she loves.

And Mira, a gay woman accidentally placed in a heterosexual dating center near its inception, desperately seeks a way to reunite with her frozen partner as the years pass.

In this daring and big-hearted novel based on the Hugo-winning short story, the lovelorn navigate a word in which technology has reached the outer limits of morality and romance.