Search Worlds Without End

This short story originally appeared in Lightspeed, May 2014.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

"Anna, I came to Earth tracking a very old story, a story that goes back to the dawn of time. It's very unlikely that you'll die right now. It wouldn't be narratively complete."

Anna Sinjari -- refugee, survivor of genocide, disaffected office worker -- has a close encounter that reveals universe-threatening stakes. Enter Ssrin, a many-headed serpent alien who is on the run from her own past. Ssrin and Anna are inexorably, dangerously drawn to each other, and their contact reveals universe-threatening stakes.

While humanity reels from disaster, Anna must join a small team of civilians, soldiers, and scientists to investigate a mysterious broadcast and unknowable horror. If they can manage to face their own demons, they just might save the world.

This short story originally appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, #200, May 2016. It can also be found in the anthologies The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume 11 (2017), edited by Jonathan Strahan and The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2017, edited by Rich Horton.

Read the full story for free at Beneath Ceaseless Skies.

This novelette originally appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine, December 2015. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Military & Adventure SF 2015 (2016), edited by David Afsharirad.

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

Ever feel like you care too much? After a breakup, after the funeral... it feels like the way to win at life is to care the least.

That's not an option for Dominga, an EMT who cares too much, or her drinking buddy Nico, who just lost his poor cat. Life hurts. They drink. They talk:

Nico's tired of hurting people. He wants out. Not suicide, not that - he'd just hurt everyone who loves him. But what if he could erase his whole life? Undo the fact of his birth? Wouldn't Dominga be having a better night, right now, if she didn't have to take care of him?

And when Dominga finds a way to do just that, when she is gifted or armed with a terrible cosmic mercy, she still cares enough to say:

I am not letting him have this. I am not letting Nico go without a fight.

This short story can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2016, edited by Rich Horton, and Worlds Seen in Passing: Ten Years of Tor.com Short Fiction (2018), edited by Irene Gallo.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

This short story originally appeared in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, June 2015. It can also be found in the anthologies The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016, edited by John Joseph Adams, The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume 1 (2016), edited by Neil Clarke, The Final Frontier (2018), edited by Neil Clarke.

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In Seth Dickinson's highly-anticipated debut The Traitor Baru Cormorant, a young woman from a conquered people tries to transform an empire in this richly imagined geopolitical fantasy.

Baru Cormorant believes any price is worth paying to liberate her people-even her soul.

When the Empire of Masks conquers her island home, overwrites her culture, criminalizes her customs, and murders one of her fathers, Baru vows to swallow her hate, join the Empire's civil service, and claw her way high enough to set her people free.

Sent as an Imperial agent to distant Aurdwynn, another conquered country, Baru discovers it's on the brink of rebellion. Drawn by the intriguing duchess Tain Hu into a circle of seditious dukes, Baru may be able to use her position to help. As she pursues a precarious balance between the rebels and a shadowy cabal within the Empire, she orchestrates a do-or-die gambit with freedom as the prize.

But the cost of winning the long game of saving her people may be far greater than Baru imagines.

Her world was shattered by the Empire of Masks.
For the power to shatter the Masquerade,
She betrayed everyone she loved.

The traitor Baru Cormorant is now the cryptarch Agonist?a secret lord of the empire she's vowed to destroy.

Hunted by a mutinous admiral, haunted by the wound which has split her mind in two, Baru leads her dearest foes on an expedition for the secret of immortality. It's her chance to trigger a war that will consume the Masquerade.

But Baru's heart is broken, and she fears she can no longer tell justice from revenge... or her own desires from the will of the man who remade her.

The hunt is over. After fifteen years of lies and sacrifice, Baru Cormorant has the power to destroy the Imperial Republic of Falcrest that she pretends to serve. The secret society called the Cancrioth is real, and Baru is among them.

But the Cancrioth's weapon cannot distinguish the guilty from the innocent. If it escapes quarantine, the ancient hemorrhagic plague called the Kettling will kill hundreds of millions...not just in Falcrest, but all across the world. History will end in a black bloodstain.

Is that justice? Is this really what Tain Hu hoped for when she sacrificed herself?

Baru's enemies close in from all sides. Baru's own mind teeters on the edge of madness or shattering revelation. Now she must choose between genocidal revenge and a far more difficult path?a conspiracy of judges, kings, spies and immortals, puppeteering the world's riches and two great wars in a gambit for the ultimate prize.

If Baru had absolute power over the Imperial Republic, she could force Falcrest to abandon its colonies and make right its crimes.