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In the extremities of war, we may know what we've been, but not what we will become. "Damage" is a tale of desperate times, desperate measures, and the inner life of a fighter spacecraft.

This story is included in the anthologies The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume 1 (2016), edited by Neil Clarke, Nebula Awards Showcase 2017, edited by Julie E. Czerneda, and Worlds Seen in Passing: Ten Years of Tor.com Short Fiction (2018), edited by Irene Gallo.

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Jason Carmelke's father has decided to make a life-altering change so dramatic that it draws Jason to his father's bedside, their first encounter since his childhood. There, he discovers just how irrevocable a change is coming, and Jason must decide exactly what love and loyalty really mean.

This short story originally appeared in Albedo One, #31 (2006) and was reprinted at infinity plus, July 2006. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fourth Annual Collection (2007), edited by Gardner Dozois, and Telling Tales: The Clarion West 30th Anniversary Anthology (2013), edited by Ellen Datlow. The story can also be found in the collection Space Magic (2008).

Read the full story for free at infinity plus.

This Endeavour Award-winning collection pulls together 15 critically acclaimed science fiction and fantasy stories that take readers from a technicolor cartoon realm to an ancient China that never was, and from an America gone wrong to the very ends of the universe. Including the Hugo Award-winning "Tk'Tk'Tk," the Writers of the Future Award winner "Rewind," "Nucleon," "The Tale of the Golden Eagle," and many other highly-praised stories, Space Magic shows David D. Levine's talents not only as a gifted writer but as a powerful storyteller whose work explores the farthest reaches of space as well as the depths of the human heart.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - essay by Bruce Holland Rogers
• Wind from a Dying Star - (2001) - shortstory
• Nucleon - (2001) - shortstory
• I Hold My Father's Paws - (2006) - shortstory
• Zauberschrift - (2002) - shortstory
• Rewind - (2002) - shortstory
• Fear of Widths - (2002) - shortfiction
• Brotherhood - (2004) - novelette
• Circle of Compassion - (2005) - novelette
• Tk'tk'tk - (2005) - shortstory
• Charlie the Purple Giraffe Was Acting Strangely - (2004) - shortstory
• Falling Off the Unicorn - shortfiction by Sara Mueller and David D. Levine
• The Ecology of Faerie - (2005) - shortfiction
• At the Twenty-Fifth Annual Meeting of Uncle Teco's Homebrew Gravitics Club - shortfiction
• Love in the Balance - (2004) - shortstory
• The Tale of the Golden Eagle - (2003) - shortstory

Hugo and Sturgeon Award nominated short story.

Legends begin at the nexus of love and and pain and truth. Nerissa Zeebnen-Feersig is an awesome creation to behold: a mechanical, platinum-skinned beauty with a gift for telling stories. Denali Eu is a rogue and a gambler with a dangerous secret. Each takes an incredible journey, and together they give birth to a passionate, impossible story.

It originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, June 2003. The story can also be found in the anthology Science Fiction: The Best of 2003, edited by Karen Haber and Jonathan Strahan. It is included in the collection Space Magic (2008).

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Nebula Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, April 2007 and can also be found in the Nebula Awards Showcase 2009, edited by Ellen Datlow.

Hugo Award winning short story.

Walker's got a problem. A human salesman on an alien world, he's got software to sell. But he doesn't understand the language or the culture, and he's running out of resources. Sometimes survival means understanding the difference between what's most valuable and what's most important.

The story originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, March 2005. It can also be found in the anthology Twenty-First Century Science Fiction (2013), edited by David G. Hartwell and Patrick Nielsen Hayden and is included in the collectionn Space Magic (2008).

Since Newton witnessed a bubble rising from his bathtub, mankind has sought the stars. When William III of England commissioned Capt. William Kidd to command the first expedition to Mars in the late 1600s, he proved that space travel was both possible and profitable.

Now, one century later, a plantation in a flourishing British colony on Mars is home to Arabella Ashby, a young woman who is perfectly content growing up in the untamed frontier. But days spent working on complex automata with her father or stalking her brother Michael with her Martian nanny is not the proper behavior of an English lady. That is something her mother plans to remedy with a move to an exotic world Arabella has never seen: London, England.

However, when events transpire that threaten her home on Mars, Arabella decides that sometimes doing the right thing is far more important than behaving as expected. She disguises herself as a boy and joins the crew of the Diana, a ship serving the Mars Trading Company, where she meets a mysterious captain who is intrigued by her knack with clockwork creations. Now Arabella just has to weather the naval war currently raging between Britain and France, learn how to sail, and deal with a mutinous crew... if she hopes to save her family remaining on Mars.

Arabella of Mars, the debut novel by Hugo-winning author David D. Levine offers adventure, romance, political intrigue, and Napoleon in space!

The swashbuckling Arabella Ashby is back for brand new adventure in the ongoing story of her life among the stars.

Arabella's wedding plans to marry Captain Singh of the Honorable Mars Trading Company are interrupted when her fiancé is captured by the French and sent to a prisoner-of-war camp on swampy Venus. Now, Arabella must find passage to an enemy-controlled planet in the middle of a war, bribe or fight her way past vicious guards, and rescue her Captain.

To do this she must enlist the help of the dashing privateer, Daniel Fox of the Touchstone and build her own clockwork navigational automaton in order to get to Venus before the dread French general, Joseph Fouché, the Executioner of Lyon.

Once on Venus, Arabella, Singh, and Fox soon discover that Napoleon has designed a secret weapon, one that could subjugate the entire galaxy if they can't discover a way to stop Fouché, and the entire French army, from completing their emperor's mandate.

Hail the conquering heroes!

The tyrant, Napoleon, has been defeated with Arabella and the crew of the Diana leading the final charge. But, victory has come at a tremendous cost. Britain's savior, Lord Nelson, has not survived the final battle and the good people of the Diana must now return to London as both heroes and pallbearers.

At last husband and wife, Arabella and Captain Singh seem to have earned the attention of great men, ones who have new uses in mind for the Mars Company captain and his young wife. Both Company and Crown have decided that it is time to bring Mars into the folds of Empire, and they think Singh is the perfect man to do it.

Now, Arabella must decide between staying loyal to the man she loves and the country of her father or betraying all that she has known to fight alongside the Martians in a hopeless resistance against the Galaxy's last remaining superpower.

The Wild Cards universe has been thrilling readers for over 25 years. David D. Levine's "Discards" introduces Tiago Gonçalves, a teenager who scrapes collecting recyclables from the landfills of Rio de Janeiro. But after the Wild Card virus infects him, he learns to build something more.

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