Search Worlds Without End

This novelette originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, April-May 2016. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Fourth Annual Collection (2017), edited by Gardner Dozois.

This novelette originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, February 2014. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2015, edited by Rich Horton.

Asimov's Readers Award Finalist Novella

A young girl from a poor district of China grows up to be a savvy programmer and entrepreneur who pioneers sentient AIs programmed to help alleviate poverty, create equality and real justice, and institute a post-scarcity system which provides food, shelter, education, and healthcare to all.

This novella originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, July-August 2020. Read it for free at the publisher's website.

THE ULTIMATE HEIST

Belisarius is a Homo quantus, engineered with impossible insight. But his gift is also a curse--an uncontrollable, even suicidal drive to know, to understand. Genetically flawed, he leaves his people to find a different life, and ends up becoming the galaxy's greatest con man and thief.

But the jobs are getting too easy and his extraordinary brain is chafing at the neglect. When a client offers him untold wealth to move a squadron of secret warships across an enemy wormhole, Belisarius jumps at it. Now he must embrace his true nature to pull off the job, alongside a crew of extraordinary men and women.

If he succeeds, he could trigger an interstellar war... or the next step in human evolution.

THE ULTIMATE CHASE

Days ago, Belisarius pulled off the most audacious con job in history. He's rich, he's back with the love of his life, and he has the Time Gates, the most valuable things in existence. Nothing could spoil this...

...except the utter destruction of his people and their world. To save them, he has to make a new deal with the boss he just double-crossed, travel back in time and work his quantum magic once again.

If he can avoid detection, dodge paradox and stay ahead of the eerie, relentless Scarecrow, he might just get back to his own time alive.

The Union-Congregate war rages onward and the Union's premier fighter pilots, the Homo Eridanus, start encountering deadly resistance from strange pilots on the Congregate side. Among wreckage, they find that new Congregate pilots aren't human, but Homo quantus, with strange wiring and AI connections.

At the same time, the Puppets come to the Union with offers of an alliance for a dangerous price: the rescue of the geneticist Antonio Del Casal who is a captive at Venus, with over a hundred Homo quantus.

The only one who might be able to break through the Congregate defences at Venus is a con man who has given up his profession.

Major Chenesai Okonkwo is an Auditor for the Sub-Saharan Union. Her mission: to find out if the Sixth Expeditionary Force's newly discovered time gate has been compromised. Is the Union's revolutionary discovery already doomed, eleven years in the future?

Life can exist anywhere. And anywhere there is life, there is home.

In the swirling clouds of Venus, the families of la colonie live on floating plant-like trawlers, salvaging what they can in the fierce acid rain and crackling storms. Outside is dangerous, but humankind's hold on the planet is fragile and they spend most of their days simply surviving.

But Venus carries its own secrets, too. In the depths, there is a wind that shouldn't exist.

And the House of Styx wants to harness it.

This novel was originally serialized in Analog Science Fiction and Fact Magazine, in the March-April, May-June, and July-August issues of 2020.

George-Étienne and his children have formed The House of Styx, after finding a mysterious artefact on the surface of Venus herself. But with the discovery comes great risk, not only from a planet that kills with its very touch but also from the banks and powers of old Earth, who will stop at nothing to claim this new technology for themselves.

From humble origins, The House of Styx is determined to become one of the most powerful families in the known galaxy or die trying.