Search Worlds Without End

Anne Harris returns with an outstanding look at the near future. Never before has her technological insight been so acute, or her portrayal of sex and gender issues more startling or insightful.

A bio-technology corporation has created a new species, intelligent, four-armed, humanoid "tetras" who can live in the vats in which "the company" grows biopolymers. Both the tetras and the human vat-divers they were created to replace are at the mercy of vicious corporate politics. But soon the victims become the aggressors, and something amazing, a transcendent change, occurs not only in their lives, but throughout the world. Anne Harris has created an extraordinary, breathtaking vision of the future.

A one-of-a-kind novel, like nothing you've ever read, Inventing Memory is a stunning blend of fantasy and reality, exposing the secret links between the mythic, the mundane, and the timeless mysteries of the human heart.

Shula is a slave in fabled Sumer---until Inanna, Queen of Heaven, appears before her. Chosen by the Goddess for reasons she cannot begin to fathom, Shula is freed from bondage and set upon an uncertain path toward a new and mysterious destiny. But the attention of the gods is a dangerous thing, and Shula may have cause to regret the day she first laid eyes on the Holy Inanna.

Wendy Chrenko, former high school misfit, is now an overworked graduate student, researching her dissertation "Remnants of Matriarchy in the Ancient Sumerian Inanna Cycle." Still smarting from the painful wounds of a failed love affair, Wendy is bound and determined to prove that men and women once lived together in perfect equality, even if it means volunteering for a bizarre and dangerous scientific experiment.

Separated by millennia, Shula and Wendy appear to be two very different women, leading completely separate lives.

Or maybe not.

Nebula Award nominated short story. It first appeared in Talebones #30, Summer 2005 and has been reprinted in Year's Best Fantasy 6 (2006), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer, and the Nebula Awards Showcase 2007, edited by Mike Resnick.

Read the full story for free at the Baen website.

Running away from her dysfunctional family to New York City, Magnolia becomes enmeshed in the lethal schemes of brilliant megalomaniac Rahul, but with the help of Cid, a biophysicist, she finds a way to escape a deadly fate and remake the world.