Search Worlds Without End

The year is 2312. Scientific and technological advances have opened gateways to an extraordinary future. Earth is no longer humanity's only home; new habitats have been created throughout the solar system on moons, planets, and in between. But in this year, 2312, a sequence of events will force humanity to confront its past, its present, and its future.

The first event takes place on Mercury, on the city of Terminator, itself a miracle of engineering on an unprecedented scale. It is an unexpected death, but one that might have been foreseen. For Swan Er Hong, it is an event that will change her life. Swan was once a woman who designed worlds. Now she will be led into a plot to destroy them.

This novelette originally appeared in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, April 1991, and was reprinted on infinity plus, october 1999. It can be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Ninth Annual Collection (1992). The story is included in the collections A Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions (1991), Remaking History (1991), Remaking History and Other Stories (1994), Vinland the Dream and Other Stories (2002) and The Best of Kim Stanley Robinson (2010).

Read the full story for free at Infinity Plus.

This novelette originally appeared in the collection The Martians (1999), and was reprinted in Asimov's Science Fiction, October-November 1999. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Seventeenth Annual Collection (2000) and Worldmakers: SF Adventures in Terraforming (2001), both edited by Gardner Dozois.

A man tumbles through wild surf, half drowned, to collapse on a moonlit beach. When he regains consciousness, he has no memory of who he is or where he came from. he know only that the woman who washed ashore with him has disappeared sometime in the night, and that he has awakened in a surreal landscape of savage beauty -- a mysterious watery world encircled by a thin spine of land. Aided by strange tribesmen, he will journey to the cove of the spine kings, a brutal race that has enslaved the woman and several of the tribesmen. That is only the beginning of his quest, as he struggles to find her identity in this wondrous and cruel land -- and seeks out the woman whose hold on his imagination is both unfathomable and unshakable.

Haunting and lyrical, filled with uncommon beauty and terrible peril, A Short, Sharp Shock is an ambitious and enthralling story by one of science fiction's most respected talents.

A stark and inhospitable place, its landscape poses a challenge to survival; yet its strange, silent beauty has long fascinated scientists and adventurers. Now Antarctica faces an uncertain future. The international treaty that protects the continent is about to dissolve, clearing the way for Antarctica's resources and eerie beauty to be plundered. As politicians and corporations move to determine its fate from half a world away, radical environmentalists carry out a covert campaign of sabotage to reclaim the land. The winner of this critical battle will determine the future for this last great wilderness....

AURORA tells the incredible story of our first voyage beyond the solar system.

Our voyage from Earth began generations ago.

Now, we approach our destination.

A new home.

AURORA.

Nebula Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in Interzone, #27 January-February 1989 and a bit later in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, April 1990. The story can be found in the anthology The Big Book of Science Fiction (2016), edited by Jeff and Ann Vandermeer, and the collections Down and Out in the Year 2000 (1990), Remaking History and Other Stories (1994) and The Best of Kim Stanley Robinson (2010).

Read the full story for free at Baen.

Hugo and Nebula Award nominated novelette. Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, March 1983. Anthologized in Gardner Dozois' The Year's Best Science Fiction: First Annual Collection (1984) and collected in The Planet on the Table (1986), Remaking History and Other Stories (1994), Vinland the Dream and Other Stories (2002) and The Best of Kim Stanley Robinson (2010). It was also published as a chapbook by Pulphouse Publishing in 1991.

Read the full story for free at the Baen website.

Table of Contents:

• A Short, Sharp Shock - (1990) - novella
• The Blind Geometer - (1986) - novella
• The Lunatics - (1988) - novelette
• A Transect - (1986) - shortstory
• Down and Out in the Year 2000 - (1986) - shortstory
• Our Town - (1986) - shortstory
• The Return from Rainbow Bridge - (1987) - novelette
• The Translator - (1990) - novelette
• Glacier - (1988) - novelette
• Before I Wake - (1989) - shortstory
• Zürich - (1990) - shortstory

This short story originally appeared in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, April 1986. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fourth Annual Collection (1987), edited by Gardner Dozois, and Future on Fire (1991), edited by Orson Scott Card. The story is included in the collections Remaking History (1991), Down and Out in the Year 2000 (1992) and Remaking History and Other Stories (1994).

Hugo and Nebula Award nominated novella. It originally appeared in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, September 1986. The story can also be found in the anthology Best SF of the Year #16 (1987), edited by Terry Carr. It is included in the collections Escape from Kathmandu (1989) and The Best of Kim Stanley Robinson (2010).

Robinson's light-hearted fantasy tribute to the world of extreme mountain climbing follows the adventures of two American expatriates living in Nepal. George and Freds encounter Yeti, and the lost city of Shangri-La.

Table of Contents:

• Escape from Kathmandu - (1986) - novella
• Mother Goddess of the World - (1987) - novella
• The True Nature of Shangri-La - novella
• The Kingdom Underground - novella

Ernest Callenbach's classic novel Ecotopia sparked a movement that is growing rapidly around the world. Ecotopians embrace high technology as a a tool for preserving and living gently within the natural environment of Planet Earth.

Kim Stanley Robinson has gathered here in this volume bright tales of Ecotopian futures, as well as a few cautionary ones. Writers and poets, from Gary Snyder to Ursula K. LeGuin to Ernest Callenbach himself have contributed their visions, along with Pat Murphy, Paul Park, R.A. Lafferty, Rachel Pollack, Garry Kilworth, Robert Silverberg, Gene Wolfe, Howard Waldrop, Carol Emshwiller, Frederick Turner, and Robinson Jeffers.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction (Future Primitive: The New Ectopias) - essay by Kim Stanley Robinson
• Tomorrow's Song - (1974) - poem by Gary Snyder
• Bears Discover Fire - (1990) - shortstory by Terry Bisson
• In the Abode of the Snows - (1986) - novelette by Pat Murphy
• Boomer Flats - (1971) - shortstory by R. A. Lafferty
• Hogfoot Right and Bird-Hands - (1987) - shortstory by Garry Kilworth
• House of Bones - (1988) - shortstory by Robert Silverberg
• "A Story" by John V. Marsch - (1972) - novelette by Gene Wolfe
• The Bead Woman - (1989) - shortstory by Rachel Pollack
• Chocco - (1994) - shortfiction by Ernest Callenbach
• Excerpt From The New World - (1994) - shortfiction by Frederick Turner
• Rangriver Fell - (1987) - shortfiction by Paul Park
• Mary Margaret Road-Grader - (1976) - shortstory by Howard Waldrop
• Looking Down - (1990) - shortstory by Carol Emshwiller
• Newton's Sleep - (1991) - novelette by Ursula K. Le Guin
• Return - (1935) - poem by Robinson Jeffers
• Endnotes (Future Primitive) - essay by Kim Stanley Robinson
• Further Reading (Future Primitive) - essay by Kim Stanley Robinson

In a novel of stunning dimensions, the acclaimed author of the MARS trilogy brings us the story of the incredible life -- and death -- of Galileo, the First Scientist. Late Renaissance Italy still abounds in alchemy and Aristotle, yet it trembles on the brink of the modern world. Galileo's new telescope encapsulates all the contradictions of this emerging reality.

Then one night a stranger presents a different kind of telescope for Galileo to peer through. Galileo is not sure if he is in a dream, an enchantment, a vision, or something else as yet undefined. The blasted wasteland he sees when he points the telescope at Jupiter, of harsh yellows and reds and blacks, looks just like hell as described by the Catholic church, and Galileo is a devout Catholic. But he's also a scientist, perhaps the very first in history. What he's looking at is the future, the world of Jovian humans three thousand years hence. He is looking at Jupiter from the vantage point of one of its moons whose inhabitants maintain that Galileo has to succeed in his own world for their history to come to pass.

Their ability to reach back into the past and call Galileo "into resonance" with the later time is an action that will have implications for both periods, and those in between, like our own. By day Galileo's life unfurls in early seventeenth century Italy, leading inexorably to his trial for heresy. By night Galileo struggles to be a kind of sage, or an arbiter in a conflict ...but understanding what that conflict might be is no easy matter, and resolving his double life is even harder. This sumptuous, gloriously thought-provoking and suspenseful novel recalls Robinson's magnificent Mars books as well as bringing to us Galileo as we have always wanted to know him, in full.

This novelette originally appeared in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, September 1988. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Sixth Annual Collection (1989), edited by Gardner Dozois. The story is included in the collections Remaking History (1991), Down and Out in the Year 2000 (1991), Remaking History and Other Stories (1994), and The Best of Kim Stanley Robinson (2010).

Contemporary visions of the future have been shaped by hopes and fears about the effects of human technology and global capitalism on the natural world. In an era of climate change, mass extinction, and oil shortage, such visions have become increasingly catastrophic, even apocalyptic. Exploring the close relationship between science fiction, ecology, and environmentalism, the essays in Green Planets consider how science fiction writers have been working through this crisis. Beginning with H. G. Wells and passing through major twentieth-century writers like Ursula K. Le Guin, Stanislaw Lem, and Thomas Disch to contemporary authors like Margaret Atwood, China Miéville, and Paolo Bacigalupi--as well as recent blockbuster films like Avatar and District 9--the essays in Green Planets consider the important place for science fiction in a culture that now seems to have a very uncertain future. The book includes an extended interview with Kim Stanley Robinson and an annotated list for further exploration of "ecological SF" and related works of fiction, nonfiction, films, television, comics, children's cartoons, anime, video games, music, and more.

Table of Contents:

• Preface - essay by Gerry Canavan
• Introduction: If This Goes On (Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction) - essay by Gerry Canavan
• Extinction, Extermination, and the Ecological Optimism of H.G. Wells - essay by Christina Alt
• Evolution and Apocalypse in the Golden Age - essay by Michael Page
• Daoism, Ecology, and World Reduction in Le Guin's Utopian Fictions - essay by Gib Prettyman
• Biotic Invasions: Ecological Imperialism in New Wave Science Fiction - essay by Rob Latham
• "The Real Problem of a Spaceship Is Its People": Spaceship Earth as Ecological Science Fiction - essay by Sabine Höhler
• The Sea and Eternal Summer: An Australian Apocalypse - essay by Andrew Milner
• Care, Gender, and the Climate-Changed Future: Maggie Gee's The Ice People - essay by Adeline Johns-Putra
• Future Ecologies, Current Crisis: Ecological Concern in South African Speculative Fiction - essay by Elzette Steenkamp
• Ordinary Catastrophes: Paradoxes and Problems in Some Recent Post-Apocalypse Fictions - essay by Christopher Palmer
• "The Rain Feels New": Ecotopian Strategies in the Short Fiction of Paolo Bacigalupi - essay by Eric C. Otto
• Life after People: Science Faction and Ecological Futures - essay by Brent Bellamy and Imre Szeman
• Pandora's Box: Avatar, Ecology, Thought - essay by Timothy Morton
• Churning Up the Depths: Nonhuman Ecologies of Metaphor in Solaris and "Oceanic" - essay by Melody Jue
• Afterword: Still, I'm Reluctant to Call This Pessimism (Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction) - interview of Kim Stanley Robinson - interview by Gerry Canavan
• Of Further Interest - essay by Gerry Canavan

On the North Pole of Pluto there stands an enigma: a huge circle of standing blocks of ice, built on the pattern of Earth's Stonehenge--but ten times the size, standing alone at the farthest reaches of the Solar System. What is it? Who came there to build it?

In Kim Stanley Robinson's Icehenge,the secret lies, perhaps, in the chaotic decades of the Martian Revolution, in the lost memories of those who have lived for centuries.

This novelette was originally published in the Terry Carr anthology Universe 15. It can also be found in the collections The Planet on the Table (1985), Remaking History and Other Stories (1994) and Vinland the Dream and Other Stories (2002) as well as the anthology Future Crimes (2003), edited by Gardner Dozois and Jack Dann.

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

Hugo Award nominated novella. It originally appeared in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, October 1987. The story can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fifth Annual Collection (1988). It is included in the collection Escape from Kathmandu (1989).

As the sea levels rose, every street became a canal. Every skyscraper an island. For the residents of one apartment building in Madison Square, however, New York in the year 2140 is far from a drowned city.

There is the market trader, who finds opportunities where others find trouble. There is the detective, whose work will never disappear -- along with the lawyers, of course.

There is the internet star, beloved by millions for her airship adventures, and the building's manager, quietly respected for his attention to detail. Then there are two boys who don't live there, but have no other home - and who are more important to its future than anyone might imagine.

Lastly there are the coders, temporary residents on the roof, whose disappearance triggers a sequence of events that threatens the existence of all -- and even the long-hidden foundations on which the city rests.

International bestseller Kim Stanley Robinson gives us a glimpse into a very green future.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

This short story originally appeared in Omni, November 1986 and was reprinted in Lightspeed, April 2012. It is included in the collections Down and Out in the Year 2000 (1992), Remaking History and Other Stories (1994) and The Best of Kim Stanley Robinson (2010).

Read the full story for free at Lighspeed.

It is thirty years from now, and we have colonized the moon.

American Fred Fredericks is making his first trip, his purpose to install a communications system for China's Lunar Science Foundation. But hours after his arrival he witnesses a murder and is forced into hiding.

It is also the first visit for celebrity travel reporter Ta Shu. He has contacts and influence, but he too will find that the moon can be a perilous place for any traveler.

Finally, there is Chan Qi. She is the daughter of the Minister of Finance, and without doubt a person of interest to those in power. She is on the moon for reasons of her own, but when she attempts to return to China, in secret, the events that unfold will change everything - on the moon, and on Earth.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Other Edens II (1988), edited by Christopher Evans and Robert Holdstock. It was reprinted in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, March 1989, and Lightspeed, Issue 103, December 2018. The story can also be found in the anthology What Might Have Been? Volume 1: Alternate Empires (1989), edited by Gregory Benford and Martin H. Greenberg. It is included in the collections Remaking History (1991), Remaking History and Other Stories (1994), Vinland the Dream and Other Stories (2002) and The Best of Kim Stanley Robinson (2010).

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

An expanded editon of this collection appeared under the tilte Remaking History and Other Stories in 1994.

Table of Contents:

• The Part of Us That Loves - juvenile - (1989) - novelette by Kim Stanley Robinson
• The Translator - (1990) - novelette by Kim Stanley Robinson
• Before I Wake - (1989) - short story by Kim Stanley Robinson
• A History of the Twentieth Century, with Illustrations - (1991) - novelette by Kim Stanley Robinson
• Remaking History - (1988) - short story by Kim Stanley Robinson
• Vinland the Dream - (1991) - short story by Kim Stanley Robinson
• Rainbow Bridge - juvenile - (1987) - novelette by Kim Stanley Robinson
• Muir on Shasta - (1991) - short story by Kim Stanley Robinson
• Glacier - (1988) - novelette by Kim Stanley Robinson
• A Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions - (1991) - short story by Kim Stanley Robinson
• Down and Out in the Year 2000 - (1986) - short story by Kim Stanley Robinson
• Our Town - (1986) - short story by Kim Stanley Robinson
• A Transect - (1986) - short story by Kim Stanley Robinson
• The Lunatics - (1988) - novelette by Kim Stanley Robinson
• Zurich - (1990) - short story by Kim Stanley Robinson

For the first time in one volume: the collected short fiction of the award-winning author of Red Mars.

Table of Contents:

• Venice Drowned - (1981) - novelette
• Mercurial - (1985) - novelette
• Ridge Running - (1984) - shortstory
• The Disguise - (1977) - novella
• The Lucky Strike - (1984) - novelette
• Coming Back to Dixieland - (1976) - novelette
• Stone Eggs - (1983) - shortstory
• Black Air - (1983) - novelette
• The Part of Us That Loves - (1989) - novelette
• The Translator - (1990) - novelette
• Before I Wake - (1989) - shortstory
• A History of the Twentieth Century, with Illustrations - (1991) - novelette
• Remaking History - (1988) - shortstory
• Vinland the Dream - (1991) - shortstory
• Rainbow Bridge - (1987) - novelette
• Muir on Shasta - (1991) - shortstory
• Glacier - (1988) - novelette
• A Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions - (1991) - shortstory
• Down and Out in the Year 2000 - (1986) - shortstory
• Our Town - (1986) - shortstory
• A Transect - (1986) - shortstory
• The Lunatics - (1988) - novelette
• Zürich - (1990) - shortstory

Hugo Award nominated short story. It was originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, January 1984. The story can also be found in the collections The Planet on the Table (1986), Remaking History and Other Stories (1994) and The Best of Kim Stanley Robinson (2010).

There is Thorn, a shaman himself. He lives to pass down his wisdom and his stories - to teach those who would follow in his footsteps. There is Heather, the healer who, in many ways, holds the clan together. There is Elga, an outsider and the bringer of change. And then there is Loon, the next shaman, who is determined to find his own path. But in a world so treacherous, that journey is never simple - and where it may lead is never certain.

Shaman is a powerful, thrilling and heart-breaking story of one young man's journey into adulthood - and an awe-inspiring vision of how we lived 30,000 years ago.

Adventurers, scientists, artists, workers, and visionaries -- these are the men and women you will encounter in the short fiction of Kim Stanley Robinson. In settings ranging from the sunken ruins of Venice to the upper reaches of the Himalayas to the terraformed surface of Mars itself, and through themes of environmental sustainability, social justice, personal responsibility, sports, adventure, and fun, Robinson's protagonists explore a world which stands in sharp contrast to many of the traditional locales and mores of science fiction, presenting instead a world in which Utopia rests within our grasp.

Table of Contents:

• "Venice Drowned"
• "Ridge Running"
• "Before I Wake"
• "Black Air"
• "The Lucky Strike"
• "A Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions"
• "Arthur Sternbach Brings The Curveball To Mars"
• "The Blind Geometer"
• "Our Town"
• "Escape from Kathmandu"
• "Remaking History"
• "The Translator"
• "Glacier"
• "The Lunatics"
• "Zurich"
• "Vinland the Dream"
• "'A History of the Twentieth Century, with Illustrations'"
• "Muir On Shasta"
• "Sexual Dimorphism"
• "Discovering Life"
• "Prometheus Unbound, At Last"
• "The Timpanist of the Berlin Philharmonic, 1942″ *

Nebula Award winning and Hugo Award nominated novella. It originally appeared as a limmited edition chapbook. An abriged version was published in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, August 1987. Most subsequent publications contain a third version of the novella, which reinstates an revises the original material Asimov's omitted. The story can be found in the anthologies Nebula Awards 23 (1989), edited by Michael Bishop, and The Mammoth Book of Modern Science Fiction: Short Novels of the 1980s (1993) edited by Martin H. Greenberg, Isaac Asimov and Charles G. Waugh. The story is half of Tor Double #13: The Blind Geometer/The New Atlantis (1989), with Ursula K. Le Guin. It is included in the collections Down and Out in the Year 2000 (1992) and The Best of Kim Stanley Robinson (2010).

Hugo and Nebula Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared in the anthology Universe 14 (1984), edited by Terry Carr. It has been reprinted many times. The story can also be found in the anthologies:

• The Year's Best Science Fiction: Second Annual Collection (1985), edited by Gardner Dozois
• Best SF of the Year #14 (1985), edited by Terry Carr
• Nebula Awards 20 (1985), edited by George Zebrowski
• There Won't Be War (1991), edited by Harry Harrison and Bruce McAllister
• The Norton Book of Science Fiction: North American Science Fiction, 1960-1990 (1993), edited by Ursula K. Le Guin and Brian Attebery
• The Best Alternate History Stories of the 20th Century (2001), edited by Harry Turtledove and Martin H. Greenberg
• The Mammoth Book of Alternate Histories (2010), edited by Ian Watson and Ian Whates.

The story is included in the collections:

• The Planet on the Table (1986)
• Remaking History and Other Stories (1994)
• Vinland the Dream and Other Stories (2002)
• The Lucky Strike (2009)
• The Best of Kim Stanley Robinson (2010)

Read the full story for free at Strange Horizons or Baen.

This novelette first appeared in Beth Meacham's anthology Terry's Universe (1988) and Asimov's Mid-December 1988. It has been reprinted numerous times, most recently in the collection The Best of Kim Stanley Robinson (2010), the John Joseph Adams anthology Brave New Worlds: Dystopian Stories (2011), and the Neil Clarke anthology The Eagle Has Landed: 50 Years of Lunar Science Fiction (2019).

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

In 3229 A.D., human civilization is scattered among the planets, moons, and asteroids of the solar system. Billions of lives depend on the technology derived from the breakthroughs of the greatest physicist of the age, Arthur Holywelkin. But in the last years of his life, Holywelkin devoted himself to building a strange, beautiful, and complex musical instrument that he called The Orchestra.

Johannes Wright has earned the honor of becoming the Ninth Master of Holywelkin's Orchestra. Follow him on his Grand Tour of the Solar System, as he journeys down the gravity well toward the sun, impelled by a destiny he can scarcely understand, and is pursued by mysterious foes who will tell him anything except the reason for their enmity.

Established in 2025, the purpose of the new organization was simple: To advocate for the world's future generations and to protect all living creatures, present and future. It soon became known as the Ministry for the Future, and this is its story.

The Ministry for the Future is a masterpiece of the imagination using fictional eyewitness accounts to tell the story of how climate change will affect us all over the decades to come. Its setting is not a desolate, postapocalyptic world, but a future that is almost upon us -- and in which we might just overcome the extraordinary challenges we face.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - (1986) - essay
• Venice Drowned - (1981) - novelette
• Mercurial - (1985) - novelette
• Ridge Running - (1984) - shortstory
• The Disguise - (1977) - novella
• The Lucky Strike - (1984) - novelette
• Coming Back to Dixieland - (1976) - novelette
• Stone Eggs - (1983) - shortstory
• Black Air - (1983) - novelette

It is the fourteenth century and one of the most apocalyptic events in human history is set to occur - the coming of the Black Death. History teaches us that a third of Europe's population was destroyed. But what if? What if the plague killed 99 percent of the population instead? How would the world have changed? This is a look at the history that could have been - a history that stretches across centuries, a history that sees dynasties and nations rise and crumble, a history that spans horrible famine and magnificent innovation. These are the years of rice and salt.

This is a universe where the first ship to reach the New World travels across the Pacific Ocean from China and colonization spreads from west to east. This is a universe where the Industrial Revolution is triggered by the world's greatest scientific minds - in India. This is a universe where Buddhism and Islam are the most influential and practiced religions and Christianity is merely a historical footnote.

Through the eyes of soldiers and kings, explorers and philosophers, slaves and scholars, Robinson renders an immensely rich tapestry. Rewriting history and probing the most profound questions as only he can, Robinson shines his extraordinary light on the place of religion, culture, power, and even love on such an Earth. From the steppes of Asia to the shores of the Western Hemisphere, from the age of Akbar to the present and beyond, here is the stunning story of the creation of a new world.

Hugo Award nominated novella. It originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, November 1982. There are no other known publications of this novella but in slightly edited form, this novella forms the first of three parts of the novel Icehenge (1984).

Nebula Award nominated short story. It was originally published in the anthology Universe 11 (1981), edited by Terry Carr, and was reprinted in Clarkesworld, Issue 131, August 2017. It can also be found in the anthologies, The Best Science Fiction of the Year #11 (1982), edited by Terry Carr, Nebula Award Stories Seventeen (1985), edited by Joe Haldeman and Drowned Worlds (2016), edtied by Jonathan Strahan. It is included in the collections The Planet on the Table (1986), Remaking History and Other Stories (1994), Vinland the Dream and Other Stories (2002) and The Best of Kim Stanley Robinson (2010).

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

Nebula Award nominated short story. It originally appaered in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, November 1991. The story can also be found in the anthologies What Might Have Been? Volume 4: Alternate Americas (1992), edited by Gregory Benford and Martin H. Greenberg, Nebula Awards 28 (1994), edited by James Morrow, and The Mammoth Book of Science Fiction (2002), edited by Mike Ashley. It is included in the collections Remaking History and Other Stories (1994), Vinland the Dream and Other Stories (2002) and The Best of Kim Stanley Robinson (2010).

A new collection of stories including previously unpublished material from the author of the seminal MARS series. Kim Stanley Robinson is one of science fiction's outstanding stylists and storytellers. His award-winning short fiction shows off his versatility and talent. This new collection brings together fifteen memorable stories, some of them never before published. Peopled by characters that speak to us directly, and illuminated by reflections that are timeless and haunting, the stories explore different pasts and divergent futures. They revolve around questions of history and meaning, and how what we know about the past influences the way we look at the present and the future.

Table of Contents:

• Vinland the Dream - (1991) - shortstory
• A History of the Twentieth Century, with Illustrations - (1991) - novelette
• Remaking History - (1988) - shortstory
• The Lucky Strike - (1984) - novelette
• A Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions - (1991) - shortstory
• Discovering Life - (2000) - shortstory
• Venice Drowned - (1981) - novelette
• The Disguise - (1977) - novella
• Mercurial - (1985) - novelette
• Coming Back to Dixieland - (1976) - novelette
• Stone Eggs - (1983) - shortstory
• Ridge Running - (1984) - shortstory
• Black Air - (1983) - novelette
• Muir on Shasta - (1991) - shortstory

Table of Contents:

• A Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions - short story
• Muir on Shasta - short story
• A History of the Twentieth Century, with Illustrations - (1991) - novelette

Hugo and Nebula Award nominated novella. It originally appeared in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, September 1985. The story can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Third Annual Collection (1986) and form half of Tor Double #1: A Meeting With Medusa/Green Mars (1988 , whith Arthur C. Clarke). It is included in the collection The Martians (1999).

Tiptree nominated story in Robinson's Mars trilogy setting. Collected in The Martians (1999).

A glorious companion volume to Robinson's world-wide bestselling trilogy.

All Colours Mars

Red Mars. Green Mars. Blue Mars...

The Mars trilogy has rapidly assumed the status of modern science fiction classic, capturing the imagination of hundreds of thousands of readers around the world. Now, with The Martians, comes Kim Stanley Robinson essential companion to the Mars series. New novellas and short stories head the collection, featuring many of the trilogy's central characters in events previously only hinted at in the novels. Added to this are works on Martian mythology, poetry, character histories, alternative scenarios to the events that actually took place in the trilogy and finally various pieces which the author omitted in the final edit.

In short, The Martians is a unique collection of previously unpublished fiction, a fascinating addition to Robinson's oeuvre, and a must for all lovers of the red planet.

Contents:

• Michel in Antarctica
• Exploring Fossil Canyon
• The Archaea Plot
• The Way the Land Spoke to Us
  • The Great Escarpment
  • Flatness
• Maya and Desmond
• Four Teleological Trails
  • Wrong way
  • Mistakes can be good
  • You can't lose the trail
  • The natural genius
• Coyote Makes Trouble
• Michel in Provence
• Green Mars
• Arthur Sternbach Brings the Curveball to Mars
• Salt and Fresh
• The Constitution of Mars
• Some Worknotes and Commentary on the Constitution, by Charlotte Dorsa Brevia
• Jackie on Zo
• Keeping the Flame
• Saving Noctis Dam
• Big Man in Love
• An Argument for the Deployment of All Safe Terraforming Technologies
• Selected Abstracts from The Journal of Areological Studies, vols. 56-64
• Odessa
• Sexual Dimorphism
• Enough Is as Good as a Feast
• What Matters
• Coyote Remembers
• Sax Moments
• A Martian Romance
• If Wang Wei Lived on Mars and other poems
  • Visiting
  • After a Move
  • Canyon Colour
  • Vastitas Borealis
  • Night Song
  • Desolation
  • The Names of the Canals
  • Another Night Song
  • Six Thoughts on the Uses of Art
    • What's in My Pocket
    • In the Finale of Beethoven's Ninth
    • Reading Emerson's Journal
    • The Walkman
    • Dreams Are Real
    • Seen While Running
  • Crossing Mather Pass
  • Night in the Mountains
    • Camp
    • The Ground
    • Writing by Starlight
  • Invisible Owls
  • Tenzing
  • The Soundtrack
  • A Report on the First Reported Case of Areophagy
  • The Reds' Lament
  • Two Years
  • I Say Goodbye to Mars
• Purple Mars

For eons, sandstorms have swept the barren desolate landscape of the red planet. For centuries, Mars has beckoned to mankind to come and conquer its hostile climate. Now, in the year 2026, a group of one hundred colonists is about to fulfill that destiny.

John Boone, Maya Toitavna, Frank Chalmers, and Arkady Bogdanov lead a mission whose ultimate goal is the terraforming of Mars. For some, Mars will become a passion driving them to daring acts of courage and madness; for others it offers and opportunity to strip the planet of its riches. And for the genetic "alchemists, " Mars presents a chance to create a biomedical miracle, a breakthrough that could change all we know about life... and death.

The colonists place giant satellite mirrors in Martian orbit to reflect light to the planets surface. Black dust sprinkled on the polar caps will capture warmth and melt the ice. And massive tunnels, kilometers in depth, will be drilled into the Martian mantle to create stupendous vents of hot gases. Against this backdrop of epic upheaval, rivalries, loves, and friendships will form and fall to pieces--for there are those who will fight to the death to prevent Mars from ever being changed.

Winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel

Kim Stanley Robinson's classic trilogy depicting the colonization of Mars continues in a thrilling and timeless novel that pits the settlers against their greatest foes: themselves.

Nearly a generation has passed since the first pioneers landed on Mars, and its transformation to an Earthlike planet is under way. But not everyone wants to see the process through. The methods are opposed by those who are determined to preserve their home planet's hostile, barren beauty. Led by the first generation of children born on Mars, these rebels are soon joined by a handful of the original settlers. Against this cosmic backdrop, passions, partnerships, and rivalries explode in a story as spectacular as the planet itself.

The red planet is red no longer, as Mars has become a perfectly inhabitable world. But while Mars flourishes, Earth is threatened by overpopulation and ecological disaster. Soon people look to Mars as a refuge, initiating a possible interplanetary conflict, as well as political strife between the Reds, who wish to preserve the planet in its desert state, and the Green "terraformers". The ultimate fate of Earth, as well as the possibility of new explorations into the solar system, stand in the balance.

Selected by the members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America® Nebula® Awards Showcase 2002 presents the finest award-winning fiction of the year-and includes insightful commentary about the current state of science fiction.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - essay by Kim Stanley Robinson
• Philip Jose Farmer: An Appreciation - essay by Robert Silverberg
• Robert Sheckley: An Appreciation - essay by David G. Hartwell
• Daddy's World - (1999) - novelette by Walter Jon Williams
• Darwin's Radio (excerpt) - shortfiction by Greg Bear
• macs - (1999) - shortstory by Terry Bisson
• Stellar Harvest - (1999) - novelette by Eleanor Arnason
• Goddesses - (2000) - novella by Linda Nagata
• Commentary: Science Fiction and the World - essay by Ken MacLeod and Nalo Hopkinson and Paul J. McAuley and John Clute and Kathleen Ann Goonan and Gene Wolfe and Damon Knight and Andy Duncan and Gwyneth Jones
• A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows - (1999) - novelette by Gardner Dozois

Combining dazzling speculation with a profoundly humanist vision, this astounding alternate history tale presents a dramatic encounter with destiny wrapped around a simple yet provocative premise: the terrifying question of what might have happened if the fateful flight over Hiroshima had gone a bit differently. An extensive interview with the author, offering insight into his fiction and philosophies, is also included.

Table of Contents:

• The Lucky Strike - (1984)
• A Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions - (1991)
• "A Real Joy to Be Had" - (2009) - interview of Kim Stanley Robinson by Terry Bisson
• Bibliography
• About the Author

GREEN EARTH takes the stories first told in FORTY SIGNS OF RAIN, FIFTY DEGREES BELOW and SIXTY DAYS AND COUNTING and combines them in a fully updated, compressed and compelling single volume.

Catastrophe is in the air. Increasingly strange weather events are pummelling the Earth. When the Gulf Stream shuts down and the Antarctic ice sheet starts melting, climate extremes multiply, and some winters hit like an ice age. New US President Phil Chase is on a mission: he's determined to solve climate change. His science advisor, Frank Vanderwal, is a bit more messed up. When massive floods hit Washington, Frank finds himself living in a treehouse and in love with a woman who's definitely not what she seems, one who will draw him into the shadowy world of Homeland Security, and other, blacker agencies. Only science can save the day. Frank knows he has to find a way to save the world so that science can proceed.

The bestselling author of the classic Mars trilogy and The Years of Rice and Salt returns with a riveting new trilogy of cutting-edge science, international politics, and the real-life ramifications of global warming as they are played out in our nation’s capital—and in the daily lives of those at the center of the action. Hauntingly realistic, here is a novel of the near future that is inspired by scientific facts already making headlines.

When the Arctic ice pack was first measured in the 1950s, it averaged thirty feet thick in midwinter. By the end of the century it was down to fifteen. One August the ice broke. The next year the breakup started in July. The third year it began in May. That was last year.

It’s an increasingly steamy summer in the nation’s capital as Senate environmental staffer Charlie Quibler cares for his young son and deals with the frustrating politics of global warming. Charlie must find a way to get a skeptical administration to act before it’s too late—and his progeny find themselves living in Swamp World. But the political climate poses almost as great a challenge as the environmental crisis when it comes to putting the public good ahead of private gain.

While Charlie struggles to play politics, his wife, Anna, takes a more rational approach to the looming crisis in her work at the National Science Foundation. There a proposal has come in for a revolutionary process that could solve the problem of global warming—if it can be recognized in time. But when a race to control the budding technology begins, the stakes only get higher. As these everyday heroes fight to align the awesome forces of nature with the extraordinary march of modern science, they are unaware that fate is about to put an unusual twist on their work—one that will place them at the heart of an unavoidable storm.

With style, wit, and rare insight into our past, present, and possible future, this captivating novel propels us into a world on the verge of unprecedented change—in a time quite like our own. Here is Kim Stanley Robinson at his visionary best, offering a gripping cautionary tale of progress—and its price—as only he can tell it.

When the storm got bad, scientist Frank Vanderwal was at work, formalizing his return to the National Science Foundation for another year. He'd left the building just in time to help sandbag at Arlington Cemetery. Now that the torrent was over, large chunks of San Diego had eroded into the sea, and D.C. was underwater.

Shallow lakes occupied the most famous parts of the city. Reagan Airport was awash and the Potomac had spilled beyond its banks. Rescue boats dotted the saturated cityscape. Everything Frank and his colleagues in the halls of science and politics feared had culminated in this massive disaster. And now the world looked to them to fix it.

Whatever Frank can do, now that he is homeless, he'll have to do from his car. He's not averse to sleeping outdoors. Years of research have made him hyperaware of his status as just another primate. That plus his encounter with a Tibetan Buddhist has left him resolved to live a more authentic life.

Hopefully, this will prepare him for whatever is to come.

For even as D.C. bails out from the flood, a more extreme climate change looms. With the melting of the polar ice caps shutting down the warm waters of the Gulf Stream, another Ice Age could be imminent. The last time it happened, eleven thousand years ago, it took just three years to start.

By the time Phil Chase is elected president, the world’s climate is far on its way to irreversible change. Food scarcity, housing shortages, diminishing medical care, and vanishing species are just some of the consequences. The erratic winter the Washington, D.C., area is experiencing is another grim reminder of a global weather pattern gone haywire: bone-chilling cold one day, balmy weather the next.

But the president-elect remains optimistic and doesn’t intend to give up without a fight. A maverick in every sense of the word, Chase starts organizing the most ambitious plan to save the world from disaster since FDR–and assembling a team of top scientists and advisers to implement it.

For Charlie Quibler, this means reentering the political fray full-time and giving up full-time care of his young son, Joe. For Frank Vanderwal, hampered by a brain injury, it means trying to protect the woman he loves from a vengeful ex and a rogue “black ops” agency not even the president can control–a task for which neither Frank’s work at the National Science Foundation nor his study of Tibetan Buddhism can prepare him.

In a world where time is running out as quickly as its natural resources, where surveillance is almost total and freedom nearly nonexistent, the forecast for the Chase administration looks darker each passing day. For as the last–and most terrible–of natural disasters looms on the horizon, it will take a miracle to stop the clock . . . the kind of miracle that only dedicated men and women can bring about.

2047: For the small Pacific Coast community of San Onofre, life in the aftermath of a devastating nuclear attack is a matter of survival, a day-to-day struggle to stay alive. But young Hank Fletcher dreams of the world that might have been, and might yet be--and dreams of playing a crucial role in America's rebirth.

2027: Southern California is a developer's dream gone mad, an endless sprawl of condos, freeways, and malls. Jim McPherson, the affluent son of a defense contractor, is a young man lost in a world of fast cars, casual sex, and designer drugs. But his descent in to the shadowy underground of industrial terrorism brings him into a shattering confrontation with his family, his goals, and his ideals.

The Gold Coast is the second novel in Robinson's Three Californias trilogy.

2065: In a world that has rediscovered harmony with nature, the village of El Modena, California, is an ecotopia in the making. Kevin Claiborne, a young builder who has grown up in this "green" world, now finds himself caught up in the struggle to preserve his community's idyllic way of life from the resurgent forces of greed and exploitation.

A Meeting With Medusa:

In leading an expedition through the many-layered Jovian atmosphere in the hydrogen balloon craft Kon-Tiki, Captain Howard Falcon discovers a world where bioluminescent air plankton produce brilliant atmospheric sea-fire, predatory manta-ray creatures dominate the skies, and enormous jellyfish-like beings grow to be over a mile across.

Green Mars:

This is the original Novella that starts Robinson's Mars exploration and not the book of the same name.

This work is centered around climbing Olympus Mons, the tallest mountain on Mars (and the rest of the solar system).

The Blind Geometer:

Sight and Insight are two very different things...

A blind mathematician in nearish-future Washington, DC, is approached by a colleague to aid in a strange puzzle in the shape of a woman who draws esoteric geometric diagrams and talks in jumbled phrases.

The New Atlantis:

A Short Sharp Shock:

A man tumbles through wild surf, half drowned, to collapse on a moonlit beach. When he regains consciousness, he has no memory of who he is or where he came from. he know only that the woman who washed ashore with him has disappeared sometime in the night, and that he has awakened in a surreal landscape of savage beauty -- a mysterious watery world encircled by a thin spine of land. Aided by strange tribesmen, he will journey to the cove of the spine kings, a brutal race that has enslaved the woman and several of the tribesmen. That is only the beginning of his quest, as he struggles to find her identity in this wondrous and cruel land -- and seeks out the woman whose hold on his imagination is both unfathomable and unshakable.

The Dragon Masters:

The race of man is growing old, but it's not yet ready to die - not while there are dragons still to kill!

The cross-bred dragon armies of the Men of Aerlith are the most appalling horrors ever to threaten the sanity of our future:

Termagents ~ three hundred reptilian giants with six legs apiece, the most fecund breeders of them all

Jugglers ~ eighteen of them, growling amongst themselves, waiting for an opportunity to snap off a leg from any unwary groom

Murderers (striding and long-horned) ~ eighty-five of each, with scaly tails and eyes like crystals

Fiends ~ fifty-two powerful monsters, their tails tipped with spike steel balls

Blue Horrors, Basics, Spider Dragons...