Search Worlds Without End

In her first North American collection, Vandana Singh's deep humanism interplays with her scientific background in stories that explore and celebrate this world and others and characters who are trying to make sense of the people they meet, what they see, and the challenges they face. An eleventh century poet wakes to find he is as an artificially intelligent companion on a starship. A woman of no account has the ability to look into the past. In "Requiem," a major new novella, a woman goes to Alaska to try and make sense of her aunt's disappearance.

Singh's stories have been performed on BBC radio, been finalists for the British SF Association award, selected for the Tiptree award honor list, and oft reprinted in Best of the Year anthologies. Her dives deep into the vast strangeness of the universe without and within and with her unblinking clear vision she explores the ways we move through space and time: together, yet always apart.

Table of Contents:

• With Fate Conspire - (2013) - novelette
• A Handful of Rice - (2012) - short fiction
• Peripeteia - (2013) - short story (variant of Peripateia)
• Lifepod - short story (variant of Life-Pod 2007)
• Oblivion: A Journey - (2008) - short story
• Somadeva: A Sky River Sutra - (2010) - short story
• Are You Sannata3159? - (2010) - short fiction
• Indra's Web - (2011) - short story
• Ruminations in an Alien Tongue - (2012) - short story
• Sailing the Antarsa - (2013) - novelette
• Cry of the Kharchal - (2013) - novelette
• Wake-Rider - (2014) - short story
• Ambiguity Machines: An Examination - (2015) - novelette
• Requiem - novelette

This tale is an unusual take on an engineering exam that explores new concepts in machine design and function. All new machine discoveries must be investigated and classified. This is the story of three such machines and the truth or lie of their existence.

This story is included in the collection Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories (2018).

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

This short story originally appeared in the collection The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet and Other Stories (2008). It was reprinted in Uncanny Magazine, Issue 20, January-February 2018.

Read the full story for free at Uncanny.

BSFA nominated short story. It originally appeared in the anthology So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction & Fantasy (2004), edited by Uppinder Mehan and Nalo Hopkinson, and was reprinted in Lightspeed: People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction! Special Issue, June 2016. The story can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Second Annual Collection (2005), edited by Gardner Dozois, and The Time Traveler's Almanac (2014), edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer. The story is included in the collection The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet and Other Stories (2008).

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

This novella originally appeared in the anthology Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better World (2014), edited by Ed Finn and Kathryn Cramer. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Second Annual Collection (2015), edited by Gardner Dozois, and Loosed Upon the World: The Saga Anthology of Climate Fiction (2015), edited by John Joseph Adams.

This novelette originally appeared in the collection The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet and Other Stories (2008) and was reprinted in Clarkesworld Magazine, #89 February 2014. It can also be found in The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Seventh Annual Collection (2010), edited by Gardner Dozois, Year's Best SF 15 (2010), edtied by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Kramer, and Twenty-First Century Science Fiction (2013), edited by David G. Hartwell and Patrick Nielsen Hayden.

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

This short story originally appeared in Foundation, #100 Summer 2007, and was reprinted in Lightspeed, August 2015. It can also be found in the anthology Mothership: Tales from Afrofuturism and Beyond (2013), edited by Edward Austin Hall and Bill Campbell. The story is included in the collection Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories (2018).

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Clockwork Phoenix: Tales of Beauty and Strangeness (2008), edited by Mike Allen. It can also be found in the anthology Year's Best SF 14 (2014), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. The story is included in the collection Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories (2018).

This short story originally appeared in Lightspeed, April 2012. It can also be found in the anthologies Other Worlds Than These (2012), edited by John Joseph Adams and The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirtieth Annual Collection (2013), edited by Gardner Dozois. The story is included in the collection Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories (2018).

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

This novelette originally appeared in the anthology Visions, Ventures, Escape Velocities: A Collection of Space Futures (2017), edited by Ed Finn, Joey Eschrich and Juliet Ulman. It can also be found in the anthology The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume 3 (2018), edited by Neil Clarke.

Well known and well regarded in the world of science fiction and fantasy writing, Vandana Singh brings her unique imagination to a wider audience in this collection of stories, newly reissued by Zubaan Books. In the title story, a woman tells her husband of her curious discovery: that she is inhabited by small alien creatures. In another, a young girl making her way to college through the streets of Delhi comes across a mysterious tetrahedron. Is it a spaceship? Or a secret weapon?

The first Indian female speculative fiction writer, Singh has said that her genre is a chance to find ourselves part of a larger whole; to step out of the claustrophobia of the exclusively human and discover joy, terror, wonder, and meaning in the greater universe. A revolutionary voice in fantasy writing, Singh brings her passion for discovery to these stories, and the result is like nothing of this world.

Table of Contents:

• Hunger - (2007) - short story
• Delhi - (2004) - short story
• The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet - (2003) - short story
• Infinities - novelette
• Thirst - (2004) - short story
• Conservation Laws - short story
• Three Tales from Sky River: Myths for a Starfaring Age - (2004) - short story
• The Tetrahedron - (2005) - short story
• The Wife - (2003) - short story
• The Room on the Roof - (2002) - novelette
• A Speculative Manifesto - essay

This short story originally appeared in Lightspeed, December 2014. The story is included in the collection Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories (2018).

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

This shot story originally appeared in the anthology The Bestiary (2016), edited by Ann VanderMeer, and was reprinted in Lightspeed, June 2017.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

Distances is fascinating far-future science fiction, set in a desert city. For Anasuya, mathematics was experiential, a sixth sense that bared before her the harmonies, natural and artificial, that formed the sub-text of the world. So when mathematicians from the planet Tirana, 18-light-years-distant, ask Anasuya's help in solving a series of equations, she finds the new geometrical space they present her with intriguing. But as she explores the new space, she soon comes to suspect that it represents an actual physical system, and that the equations she is ebing asked to solve have a significance the Tiranis are concealing.

This is a story of intrigue, science, and art, rich with emotional and social exploration.

At age seventeen, Arun, the narrator of Of Love and Other Monsters, emerges from a fire, his memories and identity vanished with the flames. He finds a refuge and home with Janani and soon discovers his unique ability to sense and manipulate the minds of others around him. Intimately connected yet isolated by this insight, he inhabits a dangerous place outside conventional boundaries: man/woman, mind/body. When someone who shares his ability, Rahul Moghe, arrives on his doorstep, he senses a power beyond any he has known. Janani warns of the grave danger posed by Rahul and sends Arun on his journey, fleeing the one person who may have answers to the mystery of his past.

Of Love and Other Monsters was chosen for Gardner Dozois's The Year's Best Science Fiction for 2008. It was reprinted in Lightspeed, Issue 106, March 2019.

"Arctic Sky" tells of a young climate activist who discovers her own courage in the frozen depths of a Russian prison. "Palimpsest" is set on a bionic (living)space station that launches explorers into the farthest reaches of Time and Space. In "The Room on the Roof" an ancient culture meets modern mysteries with unexpected results. Our non-fiction title piece, "Utopias of the Third Kind," is a first look at actual utopias that are responding to our looming dystopian nightmare. "Hunger" is a short story that finds both understanding and forgiveness for humankind's original sin. Our Outspoken Interview and a bibliography round out this new collection.

Contents:

• 1 - Lamentations in a Lost Tongue - short story
• 9 - Arctic Sky - (2014) - short story (variant of Arctic Light)
• 19 - Utopias of the Third Kind - essay
• 37 - Hunger - (2007) - short story
• 61 - "A Source of Immense Richness" - interview of Vandana Singh - interview by Terry Bisson
• 71 - The Room on the Roof - (2002) - novelette
• 97 - True Journey Is Return: A Tribute to Ursula K. Le Guin - (2018) - essay

This short story originally appeared on Strange Horizons, 29 March 2010. It can also be found in the anthologies Year's Best SF 16 (2011), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer, and The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women (2014), edited by Alex Dally MacFarlane. The story is included in the collection Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories (2018).

Read the full story for free at Strange Horizons.