Search Worlds Without End

A secluded Pacific Northwest cottage becomes a door to the past for Tom Winter, who travels back to the New York City of 1962, followed by a human killing machine that he alone must stop.

In the hard years of the Depression, young Travis lives with his uncle and aunt. Upstairs lives the mysterious Anna. Anna says she's going to be "changing", and she needs Travis's help...for purposes she won't explain. What follows is a tale of passion, terror, and hope, opening out to a great, dark, and unsuspected universe.

In the 22nd century, humankind has colonized the solar system. Starflight is possible but hugely expensive, so humankind's efforts are focussed on Isis, the one nearby Earthlike world. Isis is verdant, Edenic, rich with complex DNA-based plant and animal life. And every molecule of Isian life is spectacularly toxic to human beings. The entire planet is a permanent Level Four Hot Zone.

Despite that, Isis is the most interesting discovery of the millennium: a parallel biology with lessons to teach us about our own nature. It's also the hardest of hardship posts, the loneliest place in the universe.

Zoe Fisher was born to explore Isis. Literally. Cloned and genetically engineered by a faction within the hothouse politics of Earth, Zoe is optimized to face Isis's terrors. Now at last Zoe has arrived on Isis. But there are secrets implanted within her that not even she suspects - and the planet itself has secrets that will change our understanding of life in the universe.

At Blind Lake, a large federal research installation in northern Minnesota, scientists are using a technology they barely understand to watch everyday life in a city of lobster like aliens upon a distant planet. They can't contact the aliens in any way or understand their language. All they can do is watch.

Then, without warning, a military cordon is imposed on the Blind Lake site. All communication with the outside world is cut off. Food and other vital supplies are delivered by remote control. No one knows why.

The scientists, nevertheless, go on with their research. Among them are Nerissa Iverson and the man she recently divorced, Raymond Scutter. They continue to work together despite the difficult conditions and the bitterness between them. Ray believes their efforts are doomed that culture is arbitrary, and the aliens will forever be an enigma.

Nerissa believes there is a commonality of sentient thought, and that our failure to understand is our own ignorance, not a fact of nature. The behavior of the alien she has been tracking seems to be developing an elusive narrative logic--and she comes to feel that the alien is somehow, impossibly, aware of the project's observers.

But her time is running out. Ray is turning hostile, stalking her. The military cordon is tightening. Understanding had better come soon....

Cassie Klyne, nineteen years old, lives in the United States in the year 2015-but it's not our United States, and it's not our 2015.

Cassie's world has been at peace since the Great Armistice of 1918. There was no World War II, no Great Depression. Poverty is declining, prosperity is increasing everywhere; social instability is rare. But Cassie knows the world isn't what it seems. Her parents were part of a group who gradually discovered the awful truth: that for decades-back to the dawn of radio communications-human progress has been interfered with, made more peaceful and benign, by an extraterrestrial entity. That by interfering with our communications, this entity has tweaked history in massive and subtle ways. That humanity is, for purposes unknown, being farmed.

Cassie's parents were killed for this knowledge, along with most of the other members of their group. Since then, the survivors have scattered and gone into hiding. Cassie and her younger brother Thomas now live with her aunt Nerissa, who shares these dangerous secrets. Others live nearby. For eight years they have attempted to lead unexceptional lives in order to escape detection. The tactic has worked.

Until now. Because the killers are back. And they're not human.

In 1912, history was changed by the Miracle, when the old world of Europe was replaced by Darwinia, a strange land of nightmarish jungle and antediluvian monsters. To some, the Miracle was an act of divine retribution; to others, it is an opportunity to carve out a new empire.

Leaving an America now ruled by religious fundamentalists, young Guilford Law travels to Darwinia on a mission of discovery that will take him further than he can possibly imagine... to a shattering revelation about mankinds destiny in the universe.

Hugo Award nominated novelette. The story first appeared in Starlight 2, edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden. It was included in Gardner Dozois' The Year's Best Science Fiction: Sixteenth Annual Collection (1999) and the collection The Perseids and Other Stories (2000).

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

This short story originally appeared in the audio only anthology Rip-Off! (2012), edited by Gardner Dozois. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2013, edited by Rich Horton, The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirtieth Annual Collection (2013), edited by Gardner Dozois, and Mash Up (2016), also edited by Dozois.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

Karen White can open "doors" between universes. This power has been suppressed since childhood, but now it appears in her teenage son, who is approached by a mysterious figure known as the Grey Man, who has haunted Karen's dreams for decades.

Two events made September 1st a memorable day for Jesse Cullum. First, he lost a pair of Oakley sunglasses. Second, he saved the life of President Ulysses S. Grant.

It's the near future, and the technology exists to open doorways into the past but not our past, not exactly. Each "past" is effectively an alternate world, identical to ours but only up to the date on which we access it. And a given "past" can only be reached once. After a passageway is open, it's the only road to that particular past; once closed, it can't be reopened.

A passageway has been opened to a version of late 19th century Ohio. It's been in operation for most of a decade, but it's no secret, on either side of time. A small city has grown up around it to entertain visitors from our time, and many locals earn a good living catering to them. But like all such operations, it has a shelf life; as the "natives" become more sophisticated, their version of the "past" grows less attractive as a destination.

Jesse Cullum is a native. And he knows the passageway will be closing soon. He's fallen in love with a woman from our time, and he means to follow her back - no matter whose secrets he has to expose in order to do it.

To escape his past, Keller has become an Eye - an all-seeing, unfeeling human video recorder. Teresa became addicted to extraterrestrial dreaming jewels because they made her remember. Together, this unlikely pair become involved in an international smuggling plot that threatens to destroy them and their budding love for one another...

A science fiction mystery from the author of THE HARVEST, in which a small American town vanishes, and its inhabitants wake up one morning in a world strangely different from their own - a world of curfews, rationing and secret police.

In our rapidly-changing world of "social media", everyday people are more and more able to sort themselves into social groups based on finer and finer criteria. In the near future of Robert Charles Wilson's The Affinities, this process is supercharged by new analytic technologies--genetic, brain-mapping, behavioral. To join one of the twenty-two Affinities is to change one's life. It's like family, and more than family. Your fellow members aren't just like you, and they aren't just people who are likely to like you. They're also the people with whom you can best cooperate in all areas of life--creative, interpersonal, even financial.

At loose ends both professional and personal, young Adam Fisk takes the suite of tests to see if he qualifies for any of the Affinities, and finds that he's a match for one of the largest, the one called Tau. It's utopian--at first. Problems in all areas of his life begin to simply sort themselves out, as he becomes part of a global network of people dedicated to helping one another--to helping him.

But as the differing Affinities put their new powers to the test, they begin to rapidly chip away at the power of governments, of global corporations, of all the institutions of the old world. Then, with dreadful inevitability, the different Affinities begin to go to war--with one another.

What happens next will change Adam, and his world, forever.

Sturgeon Award winning novelette. It originally appeared in the anthology Futureshocks (2006), editedd by Lou Anders. The story can also be found in Science Fiction: The Best of the Year, 2007 Edition, edited by Rich Horton, The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume One (2007), edited by Jonathan Strahan and Distant Early Warnings: Canada's Best Science Fiction (2009) edited by Robert J. Sawyer.

Scott Warden is a man haunted by the past-and soon to be haunted by the future.

In early twenty-first-century Thailand, Scott is an expatriate slacker. Then, one day, he inadvertently witnesses an impossible event: the violent appearance of a 200-foot stone pillar in the forested interior. Its arrival collapses trees for a quarter mile around its base, freezing ice out of the air and emitting a burst of ionizing radiation. It appears to be composed of an exotic form of matter. And the inscription chiseled into it commemorates a military victory--sixteen years in the future.

Shortly afterwards, another, larger pillar arrives in the center of Bangkok-obliterating the city and killing thousands. Over the next several years, human society is transformed by these mysterious arrivals from, seemingly, our own near future. Who is the warlord "Kuin" whose victories they note?

Scott wants only to rebuild his life. But some strange loop of causality keeps drawing him in, to the central mystery and a final battle with the future.

John Shaw is an ordinary human with a souped-up intellect, courtesy of hush-hush CIA experiments with intrauterine hormone injections. As John's hypertrophic cortical tissue succumbs to its faulty genetic structure and begins to die, his personality yields to an alter ego named Benjamin.

His condition touches Susan and Amelie, two strangers who share John's sense of orphaned isolation and profound betrayal. The women upend their lives to form a fragile family and see John through to the outcome of his unwilling transformation.

This novelette originally appeared in Star Colonies (2000), edited by Martin H. Greenberg and John Helfers. The story can also be found in the anthology Year's Best SF 6 (2001), edited by David G. Hartwell.

This short story originally appeared in Nature, Septenber 21, 2000, and was reprinted in Asimov's Science Fiction, August 2001. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Eighteenth Annual Collection (2001) and Supermen: Tales of the Posthuman Future (2002), both edited by Gardner Dozois.

Read the full story for free at Nature.

As he watches his friends and family transform into immortal beings after expressing to the Traveller their wish to live forever, Oregon physician Matt Wheeler begins to suspect that the Traveller and his kind are up to no good.

WFA nominated novelette. It originally appeared in the anthology Northern Frights 4 (1997), edited by Don Hutchison and was reprinted in Realms of Fantasy, October 1998. The story is included in the collection The Perseids and Other Stories (2000).

Prix Auroa winning and WFA and Nebula Award nominated novelette. It first appeared in Canada in the anthology Northern Frights 3 (1995) edited by Don Hutchison. The First US publication was in Realms of Fantasy, December 1995. The story can also be Eternal Lovecraft: The Persistence of H. P. Lovecraft in Popular Culture (1998) edited by Jim Turner and Aurora Awards: An Anthology of Prize-Winning Science Fiction & Fantasy (1999) edited by Edo van Belkom. It is included in the collection The Perseids and Other Stories (2000).

Robert Charles Wilson's time has come. His first novel from Tor, Darwinia, was a finalist for science fiction's Hugo award, and a #1 Locus bestseller in paperback. His next novel, Bios, is a critical and commercial success. Now Wilson's brilliant short science fiction is available in book form for the first time.

Beginning with "The Perseids," winner of Canada's national SF award, this collection showcases Wilson's suppleness and strength: bravura ideas, scientific rigor, and living, breathing human beings facing choices that matter. Also included among the several stories herein are the acclaimed Hugo Award finalist "Divided by Infinity" and three new stories written specifically for this collection.

Table of Contents:

• The Fields of Abraham - (2000) - shortfiction
• The Perseids - (1995) - novelette
• The Inner Inner City - (1997) - novelette
• The Observer - (1998) - novelette
• Protocols of Consumption - (1997) - novelette
• Ulysses Sees the Moon in the Bedroom Window - (2000) - shortfiction
• Plato's Mirror - (1999) - shortstory
• Divided by Infinity - (1998) - novelette
• Pearl Baby - (2000) - shortfiction
• Afterword - (2000) - essay

This novelette originally appeared in Other Earths (2009), edited by Jay Lake and Nick Gevers. It can also be found in the anthologies Year's Best SF 15 (2010), edtied by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer., and The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2010, edited by Rich Horton.

This novelette originally appeared in the anthology The New Space Opera 2 (2009), edited by Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan, and was reprinted in Clarkesworld Magazine, #88 January 2014. It can also be found in the anthologies The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Four (2010), edited by Jonathan Strahan, The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Seventh Annual Collection (2010), edited by Gardner Dozois, and Galactic Empires (2017), edited by Neil Clarke.

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

Hugo- and Sturgeon-nominated Novella

This dystopian speculative fiction novella is told from the perspective of teenager Adam Hazzard, who lives in the rural town of Williams Ford, in the state of Athabaska (today a region in Canada, but in the story, a part of the greater United States) in 2172, at a time when technology has regressed to 19th century levels. The story deals with his relationship with his friend Julian Comstock (later in life called Julian Conqueror or Julian the Agnostic), an aristocratic boy of his age with radical beliefs about God, science, and evolution, notably his beliefs in DNA and the Moon Landings, in defiance of the omnipresent and theocratic Church of the Dominion of Jesus Christ on Earth, which came about as a result of the end of oil in the 21st century, a time which was later interpreted as a Biblical Tribulation.

Julian is the nephew of the President, Deklan Comstock, and it is rumored that Deklan may send Julian to fight in the Labrador War against the European powers, in order to quiet dissent against him that his family does not care about the soldiers. The story centers on how Adam and Julian will avoid the coming draft and remain alive despite Julian's beliefs.

This novella was expanded into the novel Julian Comstock, A Story of the 22nd Century.

This novella is available online by permission of the author and publisher here (pdf) and here (html).

In the reign of President Deklan Comstock, a reborn United States is struggling back to prosperity. Over a century after the Efflorescence of Oil, after the Fall of the Cities, after the Plague of Infertility, after the False Tribulation, after the days of the Pious Presidents, the sixty stars and thirteen stripes wave from the plains of Athabaska to the national capital in New York City. In Colorado Springs, the Dominion sees to the nation's spiritual needs. In Labrador, the Army wages war on the Dutch. America, unified, is rising once again.

Then out of Labrador come tales of a new Ajax-Captain Commongold, the Youthful Hero of the Saguenay. The ordinary people follow his adventures in the popular press. The Army adores him. The President is... troubled. Especially when the dashing Captain turns out to be his nephew Julian, son of the falsely accused and executed Bryce.

Treachery and intrigue dog Julian's footsteps. Hairsbreadth escapes and daring rescues fill his days. Stern resolve and tender sentiment dice for Julian's soul, while his admiration for the works of the Secular Ancients, and his adherence to the evolutionary doctrines of the heretical Darwin, set him at fatal odds with the hierarchy of the Dominion. Plague and fire swirl around the Presidential palace when at last he arrives with the acclamation of the mob.

As told by Julian's best friend and faithful companion, a rustic yet observant lad from the west, this tale of the 22nd Century asks- and answers-the age-old question: "Do you want to tell the truth, or do you want to tell a story?"

This novel is a greatly-expanded version of the Hugo- and Sturgeon-nominated novella, Julian: A Christmas Story.

One night in October when he was ten years old, Tyler Dupree stood in his back yard and watched the stars go out. They all flared into brilliance at once, then disappeared, replaced by a flat, empty black barrier. He and his best friends, Jason and Diane Lawton, had seen what became known as the Big Blackout. It would shape their lives.

The effect is worldwide. The sun is now a featureless disk--a heat source, rather than an astronomical object. The moon is gone, but tides remain. Not only have the world's artificial satellites fallen out of orbit, their recovered remains are pitted and aged, as though they'd been in space far longer than their known lifespans. As Tyler, Jason, and Diane grow up, space probe reveals a bizarre truth: The barrier is artificial, generated by huge alien artifacts. Time is passing faster outside the barrier than inside--more than a hundred million years per day on Earth. At this rate, the death throes of the sun are only about forty years in our future.

Jason, now a promising young scientist, devotes his life to working against this slow-moving apocalypse. Diane throws herself into hedonism, marrying a sinister cult leader who's forged a new religion out of the fears of the masses.

Earth sends terraforming machines to Mars to let the onrush of time do its work, turning the planet green. Next they send humans...and immediately get back an emissary with thousands of years of stories to tell about the settling of Mars. Then Earth's probes reveal that an identical barrier has appeared around Mars. Jason, desperate, seeds near space with self-replicating machines that will scatter copies of themselves outward from the sun--and report back on what they find.

Life on Earth is about to get much, much stranger.

Wildly praised by readers and critics alike, Robert Charles Wilson’s Spin won science fiction’s highest honor, the Hugo Award for Best Novel.

Now, in Spin’s direct sequel, Wilson takes us to the "world next door"--the planet engineered by the mysterious Hypotheticals to support human life, and connected to Earth by way of the Arch that towers hundreds of miles over the Indian Ocean. Humans are colonizing this new world--and, predictably, fiercely exploiting its resources, chiefly large deposits of oil in the western deserts of the continent of Equatoria.

Lise Adams is a young woman attempting to uncover the mystery of her father's disappearance ten years earlier. Turk Findley is an ex-sailor and sometimes-drifter. They come together when an infall of cometary dust seeds the planet with tiny remnant Hypothetical machines. Soon, this seemingly hospitable world will become very alien indeed--as the nature of time is once again twisted, by entities unknown.

Vortex tells the story of Turk Findley, the protagonist introduced in Axis, who is transported ten thousand years into the future by the mysterious entities called "the Hypotheticals." In this future humanity exists on a chain of planets connected by Hypothetical gateways; but Earth itself is a dying world, effectively quarantined.

Turk and his young friend Isaac Dvali are taken up by a community of fanatics who use them to enable a passage to the dying Earth, where they believe a prophecy of human/Hypothetical contact will be fulfilled. The prophecy is only partly true, however, and Turk must unravel the truth about the nature and purpose of the Hypotheticals before they carry him on a journey through warped time to the end of the universe itself.