Search Worlds Without End

Table of Contents:

• Foreword - essay
• Nuclear Tan - short story
• Over the Rainbow - short story
• The Last Dragon Master - short story
• Monkey Puzzle - short story
• Sherlock Holmes and Basho - short story
• Matter Mutter Mother - short story
• The Answerer of Dreams - novelette

Another mind-bending science fiction epic from a true visionary, Centuries explores a barely recognizable future where humans control their own evolution. Genetic manipulation and artificial intelligence shape an astounding destiny for our species.

With these wondrous changes come unexpected new truths of heart and mind that challenge the very definition of human--and that threaten not only our existence but the universe itself as our surprising powers--both miraculous and monstrous--evolve through the centuries.

50,000 years ago, three young friends band together for a perilous journey to find a new home after plague devastates their coastal tribe. Accompanied by a blind horse and armed with meager weapons and their own elusive courage, Hamr, Timov and Duru defy savage odds to survive in the strange and brutal realm of Ice Age Europe. This incredible quest takes them through primeval forests stalked by cave lions and across vast glacial moraines of thundering woolly rhinoceros - to the Thundertree clan. These forest people accept Duru, the girl, for her magical powers. But the two young men must prove themselves worthy by hunting down a giant Neanderthal - the last of his line - who has been terrorizing the tribe.

The speaker is a hickory-faced crone trying to explain to Chet, a shy kid with eyeglasses and pocket protector, why he can't take her granddaughter to the high school dance. For quiet, elfin Flannery is not like other kids. A living Blud-eye-eth, she has caught the attention of the faerie, beautiful evil creatures from a mysterious Otherworld, who seduce their victims with moonlight raves before feeding them to a dragon and hunting souls with a supernatural black dog of prodigious evil. And they have taken Flannery for one of their own. And she won't be going to the school dance-not unless Chet rescues her.

Ten years after the aged Baroness Ailena Valaise was turned out of her castle by her son, Guy, Ailena returns, restored to her youth by a drink from the Holy Grail, and announces her plans to end Guy's reign.

Mr. Charlie is a brain without a body, revived after being frozen for a thousand years.

Charlie Outis has no idea of what the world might be like in the far future after he decides to have his brain frozen with the slim hope of it being revived one day.

But even a thousand years from now, brains are a valuable commodity - even brains without heads. But who does the brain belong to? And who controls a mind without a body?

Life is lonely for 13-year-old Jane Riggs in the historical New England village that is her new home - until she discovers a four-hundred-year-old book of spells that really works. Guided by the ghost of the witch who wrote the conjure book, Jane embarks on a terrifying but glorious quest for magical power. Her ambition is to contact her mother, dead these ten years and remembered only in photographs. For such a great prize, Jane is willing to risk much among the weird creatures she conjures out of the spirit world. But she will need more than courage when her magic follows her to school. After an evil spirit fox steals her classmate's soul, life suddenly gets very complicated. Coming of age among dark, elemental powers while not missing a day of seventh grade is not easy. And the answers Jane needs for growing up don't seem to be in the conjure book.

A young bookkeeper in upstate New York, Sigrid Lindo is painfully aware that her life has narrowed down to working a dull job and caring for her widowed mother, when she steps out on Tappan Down to hear the moon's velvet voice asking her to be his wife. It is a seduction Siggy will resist with all the stoic reason and practicality she has learned from her beloved father. But the moon's gift of glamour is powerful and beyond her control.

Mesmerizing explorations into the limitless realm of creativity, and bold, exciting tales that captivate, thrill, and give form to a universe that is both wonderful & terrifying

Table of Contents:

• Foreword
• Ink from the New Moon
• Maps for the Spiders
• Demons Hide Their Faces
• Slain
• The Dark One: A Mythograph
• Zero's Twin
• Atlantis Rose
• Death's Head Moon
• Brave Tails
• Shagbark
• Riversplash Mountain
• The Strange, Wild Provenance of the Brave Tails
• Thirteen Raptures of the Black Goat
• Glimpses
• The Star Pools
• A Priestess of Nodens
• Time in the Hourless House
• Twice Dead Things: Investigations of the Fractal Blood Soul

Headhunters, sorcerers, pirates and Indian princes thrive in this exciting and poetic tale of a young outcast in Borneo. Born in 1609, son of a native woman and a Dutch sea captain he never knew, Jaki Gefjon grows up in the jungle as a sorcerer's apprentice. Later kidnapped by pirates, he befriends his captor, Trevor Pym, notorious for his dreaded man-of-war, Wyvern.

The scientific marvels on the European privateer become the young soul-catcher's passion -- until he falls for Lucinda, the headstrong daughter of Pym's sworn enemy. Propelled by intrigue, pirates' battles, curses and visions, this seafaring saga takes Lucinda and Jaki from the South Seas to India -- and to a bold, unforeseen destiny in the New World.

A young man's odyssey of self discovery in a world eerily alien, yet hauntingly familiar. Set thirteen centuries in the future, A. A. Attanasio meticulously creates a brilliantly realized Earth, rich in detail and filled with beings brought to life with intense energy. In this strange and beautiful world, Sumner Kagan will change from an adolescent outcast to a warrior with god-like powers and in the process take us on an epic and transcendent journey.

One star-chained evening in a Manhattan bathroom, Carl Schirmer spontaneously combusts! His body transforms into light, mysteriously snatched from his banal life by an alien intelligence 130 billion years in the future. There, all spacetime is collapsing into a cosmic black hole, the Big Crunch -- and a bold, cosmic destiny awaits Carl. Rebuilt from the remnants of his light by extraterrestrials for a cryptic purpose, he awakens in time's last world, the strangest of all -- the Werld.

At the edge of infinity, Carl discovers the Foke, nomadic humans who travel among the floating islands of the Werld. The Foke teach him how to live -- and love -- at the end of time, and he loses his heart to his plucky guide, the beautiful Evoë. Their life together in this blissful kingdom that knows no aging or disease brings them to rapture -- until Evoë falls prey to the zotl, a spidery intelligence who hunt the Foke and eat the chemical by-products of their pain. In order to save his beloved from a gruesome death, Carl must return to Earth -- 130 billion years earlier -- where he is shocked to discover that the Earth he's come back to is not the one he left.

Can he meet the harsh demands of his task before the zotl find him and begin ravishing the Earth?

The Arc - Earth's last hope? The Arc, a being of immense power, trapped within a continuum too small, fights for its freedom. Its monumental struggle will touch a few select individuals on Earth—and in doing so, change their lives forever. The Arc may also be the last hope for humanity's survival

Seven billion years from now, long after the Sun has died and human life has become extinct, alien beings reconstruct homo sapiens from our fossilized DNA drifting as debris in deep space. We are reborn to serve as bait in a battle to the death between the Rimstalker, humankind's re-animator, and the zotl, horrific creatures who feed vampire-like on the suffering of intelligent lifeforms.

The resurrected children of Earth are told: "You owe no debt to the being that roused you to this second life. Neither must you expect it to guide you or benefit you in any way." Yet humans choose sides, as humans will, participating in the titanic struggle between Rimstalker and zotl in ways strange and momentous.

Set in the artificial planetary system of Chalco-Doror, which is no more and no less than a vast cosmic machine, The Last Legends of Earth is a love story, a gripping saga of struggle against alien control, and an examination of the machinery of creation and destruction.

A queen, a pilgrim, a demon - and a king with a world to save.

Beneath every beloved legend there is a deeper legend still, etched in ancient stone. The Dragon and the Unicorn begins before the beginning of Time, as light first cools to matter, bearing within it the electron glow of lost Heaven. Attanasio's epic tale of a quest for immortality spans all history, human and demihuman, from the dung fires on the steppes to the snows of the Himalayas, from the mudhut cities on the Euphrates to the glass and steel towers of tomorrow, from the hunt for the Unicorn's horn to the ceaseless wars of elf and dragon, Celt and Roman. It is a quest that ends - and begins - in a legend-heavy place at the edge of the Western Sea, with the first cry of a King new born. A place called Tintagel. A King, the heir Pendragon, called Eagle of Thor, or... Arthur.

Attanasio continues The Perilous Order of Camelot, the epic fantasy series begun in The Dragon and the Unicorn, with the story of young Arthor on his journey to Camelot. When Merlin discovers that Arthor's only joy is killing, he vows to turn the youth around with a magical sword.

Merlinus has fostered the future king of Britain with Kyner, a Celtic chieftain, protected by obscurity from the jealous hatred of the sorceress Morgeu. As Arthor grows to manhood, though, he becomes a twisted creature, loving violence and hating himself. What kind of king will he be? A chance journey leading to woodland encounters shapes his character and settles his destiny.

Arthor's story is a single thread in a vast, complex web of gods, demons, angels, a sorceress, a unicorn, a carpenter with a wish, a dragon, Saxons, an impoverished Aquitanian lady with a secret weapon, battle-hardened Celtic chieftains and treacherous Roman nobles, knights, warring religions, and fairies. A. A. Attanasio's metaphysics, marvels, and magic will keep your interest and suspense high.

The Warrior King Arthor, Eagle of Thor, must lead his people not only against their own ancient sorceries, but against the worldly empire that would make Britain's destiny a footnote to its own. Already rolling on the roads from Tintagel to Camelot is the great wheel that will become the Round Table.

But the perilous order promised by Arthor's victory is threatened by forces beyond human ken. For Merlin has descended into Hell, to fend with the Fire Lords who give the Universe its shimmering form. And for the young king himself, there is a sacred Grail, and an Earthly love, to seek.

The boy-king Arthor has beaten back the berserker wolf warriors of the Saxon god, uniting his island kingdom -- but at a terrible cost. For the Grail, the chalice of the Last Supper and the magical shield of Britain, has been stolen.

Without the Grail's protection, Britain lies parched and barren, a demon-haunted landscape where sulfurous vapors taint ther air. To find the Grail, Arthor's mother, Ygrane, must strike a dark bargain with Bright Night, elf-prince of the "pale people,"in the hollow hills. Merlin must use his magic to show the way. But it is Arthor himself who must confront the Serpent, Sword in hand.