Search Worlds Without End

This story can be found in the following collections and anthologies:

• The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fifteenth Annual Collection (1998)
• The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 11th Annual Collection
• Daughters of Earth: Feminist Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century (2006)
• Grazing the Long Acre

Big Cat and Other Stories gathers together the author's finest work from the past decade and features a brand new story, "Stella and the Adventurous Roots", which inspired the cover image. It includes tales that revisit the world of Bold as Love and also the Aleutian Universe (White Queen etc), as well as venturing into brand new possible tomorrows.

Full of passion, vivid imagination, and portent, this collection showcases a master storyteller at her best.

Table of Contents:

• Big Cat
• Stella And The Adventurous Roots
• The Flame Is Roses
• A Planet Called Desire
• The Old Schoolhouse
• The Kianna
• The Vicar Of Mars
• Bricks, Sticks, Straw
• Emergence
• The Seventh Gamer
• Cheats
• About the Author

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Edge of Infinity (2012), edited by Jonathan Strahan. It can also be foun din the anthologies The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Seven (2013), edited by Jonathan Strahan, and Year's Best SF 18 (2013), edited by David. G. Hartwell. The story is included in the collection Big Cat & Other Stories (2019).

Sturgeon Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared in the anthology Meeting Infinity (2015), edited by Jonathan Strahan. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Third Annual Collection (2016), edited by Gardner Dozois, and The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Ten (2016), edited by Jonathan Strahan. The story is included in the collection Big Cat & Other Stories (2019).

To VENTUR the Subs were a nuisance.

They were fed and housed under the stern but loving care of the great machine systems. They were housed in space-saving underground accommodation, designed to protect the surface of their planet, and perfectly functional if not luxurious. Their culture was respected, some even had employment. In reality, VENTUR saved them, and their planet, from their own thoughtless harm.

But some refuse to be appropriately grateful. Some refuse to know their place...

Visiting the homeworld, ALIC hoped to find a little old-fashioned excitement on the "Subcontinent". A retired games creator, however, ALIC can't resist when Millie invites her to play a game that is wholly unique. One from which she struggles to escape, as her life becomes entwined with the people around her as they strive for revolution.

First published in 1986, ESCAPE PLANS was lauded as an original feminist cyberpunk novel, one which pulls no punches in its exploration of humanity's relationships with computers, and our own flaws and follies.

Gwyneth Jones's novels have been acclaimed for three decades, and her modern fairytales Seven Tales And A Fable won two World Fantasy Awards in 1996. And now we have Grazing the Long Acre, the first UK collection of her short fiction. Some of the stories selected, including the BSFA award-winning "La Cenerentola", have been anthologised; several have never before been reprinted. The earliest here "The Eastern Succession" was written in 1985, the most recent "In The Forest Of The Queen" in 2007.

The settings range from a lyrical, Zelazny-influenced far-future South East Asia, to black comedy sci-fi in the New Space Opera style. There are ghosts and miracles, magical science and scientific magic; characters from novels, investigations of sexual difference, speculations on a future in which physics and neuroscience move into convergence, interrogations of our fascination with the other. Gwyneth Jones's capacity to move and astonish the reader is undimmed, when distilled into the shorter form.

Table of Contents:

• Gravegoods - (1989) - novelette
• The Eastern Succession - (1988) - novelette
• Blue Clay Blues - (1992) - novelette
• Identifying the Object - (1990) - novelette (variant of Forward Echoes)
• Balinese Dancer - (1997) - short story
• Grazing the Long Acre - (1998) - short story
• La Cenerentola - (1998) - short story
• Destroyer of Worlds - (2000) - short story
• The Fulcrum - [Buonarotti Transit] - (2005) - novelette
• The Voyage Out - [Buonarotti Transit] - (2007) - short story
• Saving Tiamaat - [Buonarotti Transit] - (2007) - short story
• The Tomb Wife - [Buonarotti Transit] - (2007) - short story
• In the Forest of the Queen - (2007) - short story

London in the first decade of the new century is the setting for this tale where RENEW reps in their preposterous angel fancy-dress stalk the dissidents, making many converts with their own brand of extremism. Kairos is the ruler of change, breaking down the barrier between mind and the world. An act of surreal terrorism is about to be set in motion and its about to go badly wrong.

This story can be found in the following anthologies and collections:

• The Mammoth Book of the Best New Science Fiction 12
• The Year's Best Science Fiction: Sixteenth Annual Collection
• Grazing the Long Acre
• The Universe of Things

"Life" is a richly textured fictional biography of the brilliant Anna Senoz, a scientist who makes a momentous discovery about the X and Y chromosomes. Anna's discovery provokes widespread sexual rage and impacts cruelly on her career, her marriage, and her child. Ultimately, Anna faces a challenge that the practice of science alone cannot meet.

On a desperately overcrowded future Earth, crippled by climate change, the most unlikely hope is better than none. Governments turn to Big Science to provide them with the dreams that will keep the masses compliant. The Needle is one such dream, an installation where the most abstruse theoretical science is being tested: science that might make human travel to a habitable exoplanet distantly feasible.

When the Needle's director offers her underground compound as a training base, Kir is thrilled to be invited to join the team, even though she knows it's only because her brain is host to a quantum artificial intelligence called Altair.

But Altair knows something he can't tell.

Kir, like all humans, is programmed to ignore future dangers. Between the artificial blocks in his mind, and the blocks evolution has built into his host, how is he going to convince her the sky is falling?

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Off Limits: Tales of Alien Sex (1996), edited by Ellen Datlow. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fourteenth Annual Collection (1997), edited by Gardner Dozois, Year's Best SF 2 (1997), edited by David G. Hartwell, Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology (2007), edited by James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel, and Dangerous Games (2007), edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois. The story is included in the collection The Universe of Things (2011).

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - (1995) - essay by Gwyneth Jones
• The Snow Apples - (1987) - short story
• Laiken Langstrand - (1988) - short story
• The Lovers - (1989) - short story
• The Princess, The Thief and the Cartesian Circle - (1993) - short story
• The Grass Princess - (1995) - short story
• Diamond Hand and the Rock Maid - (1995) - novelette
• Felicia - (1975) - novelette
• The Spider and the Fly - (1995) - short story

Bibi (it means princess) is the sole survivor of a massacre. Lady Nef, the General's wife, stops the General taking her as a concubine, winning Bibi's eternal and passionate devotion. Years later, a diplomatic mission to a supposedly friendly planet ends in disaster. Bibi, now a junior officer in Lady Nef's household, is incarcerated with her mistress in the notorious high-security prison on Fenmu.

Lady Nef, 150 years old when arrested, dies in prison; she bequeaths to Bibi her rank, her level of access to the AI systems that permeate the Diaspora of inhabited planets, and a highly secret set of 4-space co-ordinates. Bibi uses Lady Nef's death to escape from Fenmu, finds Spirit, an instantaneous-transit space pod, and follows Lady Nef's co-ordinates to a treasure beyond price: a virgin, perfect, uninhabited planet.

Soon after this, the mysterious, fantastically wealthy Princess of Bois Dormant makes her debut in the high society of Speranza, the Diaspora's capital city. Thus disguised, Bibi sets out to discover why she and her mistress were condemned to a living hell; and to punish the guilty. Twenty years have passed: Lady Nef's enemies now rule Speranza. As she uncovers a forgotten, ruthless and far-reaching conspiracy, Bibi's vengeance is transformed into a project of world-changing reparation.

World Fantasy Award winning short story. It originally appeared in the collection Seven Tales and a Fable (1995) and was reprinted in Interzone, #122 August 1997 and Lightspeed, August 2014. It can also be found in the anthology Myth-Understandings (2008), edited by Ian Whates.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Tales from the Forbidden Planet (1987), edited by Roz Kaveney. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Fantasy Stories: 14 (1988), edited by Arthur W. Saha, and The Year's Best Fantasy: First Annual Collection (1988), edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. The story is included in the collection Seven Tales and a Fable (1995).

The stories in The Universe of Things span Jones's career, from "The Eastern Succession," first published in 1988, to the just-published "Collision." Each opens a window into a richly depicted culture in which intelligent, resourceful characters struggle to make sense of the mysteries of their world.

In the introduction by Steven Shaviro, author of Doom Patrols and Connected, or What It Means to Live in the Network Society, Shaviro notes, "As a feminist writer, Jones refuses to accept compromises that leave gender inequities in place--and recognizes how they may well have staved off something worse. And as a science fiction writer, Jones shows deep awareness of how provisional, and fragile, all our acceptances and reconciliations can be, for there are always new potentials, new cultural or technological disruptions in the offing. Jones envisions a future that is different enough from the present that we are forced to recognize the contingency--and changeability--of the things we take most for granted."

Table of Contents:

• iii - Introduction (The Universe of Things) - essay by Steven Shaviro
• 1 - In the Forest of the Queen - (2007) - short story
• 25 - Total Internal Reflection - (2000) - short story
• 28 - Red Sonja and Lessingham in Dreamland - (1996) - short story
• 48 - The Universe of Things - (1993) - short story
• 62 - Blue Clay Blues - (1992) - novelette
• 90 - Grazing the Long Acre - (1998) - short story
• 106 - Collision - [Buonarotti Transit] - (2009) - short story
• 121 - One of Sandy's Dreams - (1988) - short story
• 122 - Gravegoods - (1989) - novelette
• 148 - La Cenerentola - (1998) - short story
• 170 - Grandmother's Footsteps - (1990) - novelette
• 194 - The Early Crossing - (1998) - short story
• 196 - The Eastern Succession - (1988) - novelette
• 225 - The Thief, the Princess, and the Cartesian Circle - (1993) - short story
• 243 - Identifying the Object - (1990) - novelette (variant of Forward Echoes)

This novelette originally appeared in the anthology Eclipse Four: New Science Fiction and Fantasy (2011), edited by Jonathan Strahan. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Ninth Annual Collection (2012), edited by Gardner Dozois. The story is included in the collection Big Cat & Other Stories (2019).

The subject matter of this collection is varied, but displays Jones' stance as a practicing SF writer and a feminist; the writing is characterized by both an incisive engagement with the texts and a refusal to dress that engagement in jargon. This very readable book provides insight into the work of one of the UK's most interesting writers and presents strong - sometimes even subversive - views of a range of modern SF and fantasy.

Contents:

• vii - Foreword (Deconstructing the Starships) - essay
• 3 - Introduction (Deconstructing the Starships) - (1988) - essay
• 9 - Getting Rid of the Brand Names - (1987) - essay
• 22 - The Lady and the Scientists - (1990) - essay
• 35 - Dreamer: An Exercise in Extrapolation 1989-2019 - (unknown) - essay
• 60 - My Crazy Uncles: C. S. Lewis and Tolkien as Writers for Children - (1995) - essay
• 77 - Fools: The Neuroscience of Cyberspace - (1997) - essay
• 91 - Trouble (Living in the Machine) - (1994) - essay
• 99 - Sex: The Brains of Female Hyena Twins - (1994) - essay
• 108 - Aliens in the Fourth Dimension - (1996) - essay
• 123 - Review: In the Chinks of the World Machine by Sarah LeFanu - (1988) - review
• 131 - Consider Her Ways: The Fiction of C. J. Cherryh - (unknown) - essay
• 141 - Review: Alien Sex by Ellen Datlow - (1990) - review
• 146 - Review: Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson - (1992) - review
• 153 - Review: Glory Season by David Brin - (1993) - review
• 156 - Review: Virtual Light by William Gibson - review
• 161 - Review: A Million Open Doors by John Barnes - review
• 168 - Review: Winterlong by Elizabeth Hand - review
• 178 - Review: Plague of Angels by Sheri S. Tepper - review
• 184 - Review: The Furies by Suzy McKee Charnas - (1994) - review
• 192 - Review: Alien Influences by Kristine Kathryn Rusch - review
• 199 - No Man's Land: Feminised Landscapes in the Utopian Fiction of Ursula Le Guin - (1996) - essay
• 209 - Notes (Deconstructing the Starships) - essay

The man who'd given his handle as Drummer raised heavy eyes and spoke, sonorous as a prophet, from out of a full black beard. "We will be ordered to the transit chamber as we were ordered to this room, or drugged and carried by robots in our sleep. We will lie down in the Buonarotti capsules, and a code-self, the complex pattern of each human body and soul, will be split into two like a cell dividing. The copies will be sent flying around the torus, at half-light speed. You will collide with yourself and cease utterly to exist at these coordinates of space-time. The body and soul in the capsule will be annihilated, and know GOD no longer."

In Gwyneth Jones's White Queen Trilogy, the reclusive female genius called Peenemunde Buonarotti invented the instantaneous transit device of the same name. In The Buonaraotti Quartet, Gwyneth Jones shows us humans traveling via the device to alien worlds and situations. Some are diplomats, some are extreme travelers, some are prisoners. All are in for a rough, wild ride.

Table of Contents:

• Saving Tiamaat - (2007) - short story
• The Fulcrum - (2005) - novelette
• The Voyage Out - (2007) - short story
• The Tomb Wife - (2007) - short story

Three extraordinary people in some most extraordinary times:

It's Dissolution Summer and as the United Kingdom prepares to break up into separate nations, the Counterculturals have gathered for a festival where everything's allowed. Among them is a talented little brat called Fiorinda, rock and roll princess by birth, searching for her father, the legendary Rufus O'Niall.

Instead, she finds Ax Preston, the softly spoken guitarman with bizarre delusions about saving the country from the dark ages. Together with Sage Pender, techno-wizard king of the lads, they join the pop-icon team that's supposed to make the government look cool.

Rock Legends. True Romance. A stunning fantasy about England.

Ax Preston, Sage Pender and Fiorinda, charismatic leaders of the Rock 'n' Roll Reich, have beaten the cascade of disasters that followed the collapse of the former United Kingdom. Now they have to find some resolution to the impossible dynamics of their own relationship, while the world keeps getting stranger. There are fearsome things going on in England's rural hinterland, and in Continental Europe the green nazis are planning a final solution to desperate environmental damage.

But there's nothing the Triumvirate can't handle - until Fiorinda's father, secret master of powers that are very old and very new, reaches out to reclaim his magical child, the flower-bride. And that's when darkness falls over Ax's England . . .

Harrowing . . . enchanting -- a dark fairy tale with an epic sweep, set in a world very like our own.

Rufus O'Niall is dead and the green nazi occupation has been defeated: but at a huge cost to the three extraordinary people who saved England from the dark. Shattered and deeply changed by the sacrifices each of them had to make, Fiorinda, Axe and Sage are in hiding from their friends and fans on the Pacific coast of Mexico when they're tracked down by an emissary of Fred Eiffrich, President of the United States. He's got an offer they can't refuse. It's about a movie, allegedly... Sage finds himself drawn to an old flame. Ax has to fight dirty, for the future and against the might of a collapsing superpower. And Fiorinda, the magical daughter of the monster, whose memories of utter horror are threatening her sanity, struggles with a deadly addiction. The Bold As Love adventure continues, spinning a web of daring, dread and enchantment, in a world that could almost be ours.

The riveting new instalment in Gwyneth Jones's award-winning 'Bold As Love' saga.

Ax Preston, former dictator, returns to England; he's agreed to take up the job of Green President. At close quarters he finds some outrageous details in the contract, so the Triumvirate decamps for Paris, to sit out the first hard winter after the A team destroyed crude oil in ostentatious poverty. He's quite certain he can negotiate a better deal.

But while Ax and Sage and Fiorinda are embarassing the English government over conditions in the new slavery labour camps, bad things are happening for the President of the USA. Fred Eiffrich's enemies in Washington are about to drop a bombshell, one that will shatter any hope of a return to former realities, former certainties. What happened at Lavoisier is not over. It's coming back, it's never going to end. At least not while Fiorinda lives ...or her child.

It's the final curtain call for flame-haired rock princess Fiorinda and her comrades Ax Preston and Sage Pender - a 21st century Guinevere, King Arthur, and Sir Lancelot. Together, the Triumvirate have fought to save their Britain, and America - indeed, the whole world - from the depredations of a collapsed economy and environmental meltdown. Together they have fought the evil magic of Fiorinda's wizard father; they have explored the depths and heights of ultimate consciousness, the fusion between mind and the world. And they have discovered a love that goes back centuries, and lives. But is all this enough to save a world that has fallen apart at the seams, a world that has given itself over to the dark side?

This short story originally appeared in the anthology When It Changed: Science Into Fiction (2009), edited by Geoff Ryman. It can also be found in the anthology Year's Best SF 15 (2010), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. The story is included in the collection The Universe of Things (2011).

This short story originally appeared in the anthology The New Space Opera (2007), edited by Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fifth Annual Collection (2008), edited by Gardner Dozois, and Space Opera (2014), edited by Rich Horton. The story is included in the collections The Buonarotti Quartet (2009) and Grazing the Long Acre (2009).

This novelette originally appeared in the anthology Constellations: The Best of New British SF (2005), edited by Peter Crowther. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Third Annual Collection (2006), edited by Gardner Dozois, and Science Fiction: The Very Best of 2005, edited by Jonathan Strahan. The story is included in the collections The Buonarotti Quartet (2009) and Grazing the Long Acre (2009).

This novelette originally appeared in the anthology Engineering Infinity (2010), edited by Jonathan Strahan, and was reprinted in Clarkesworld Magazine, #85 October 2013. It can also be found in the anthology Year's Best SF 17 (2012), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer.

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

Sturgeon and Nebula Award nominated short story. It was originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, August 2007. It can also be found in the anthology Year's Best SF 13 (2008), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer, and the collections The Buonarotti Quartet (2009) and Grazing the Long Acre (2009).

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Periphery: Erotic Lesbian Futures (2008), edited by Lynne Jamneck. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Sixth Annual Collection (2009), edited by Gardner Dozois, and The Final Frontier (2018), edited by Neil Clarke. The story is included in the collections The Buonarotti Quartet (2009) and Grazing the Long Acre (2009).

Chosen Among The Beautiful - Cho, for short - has been alone her whole life. Orphaned, she was raised by machines, with her cat, Divine Endurance, for company.

When an earthquake destroys her isolated shelter, Cho leaves to find her long lost brother, cat in tow. She finds herself in a land torn apart by warring gangs, clans and princes, revolutionaries and outcasts, all under the thumb of the distance Rulers, reduced to petty in-fighting to try and gain any power at all.

Divine Endurance seeks out the Rulers; Cho instead finds Derveet, a rebel leader. She finds love.

Can there be a future for them in this brutal world? What does Cho really know about humanity after being separated from it all her life? What does she even know about herself?

Experimental, strange, and unabashedly feminist, Joanna Russ's groundbreaking science fiction grew out of a belief that the genre was ideal for expressing radical thought. Her essays and criticism, meanwhile, helped shape the field and still exercise a powerful influence in both SF and feminist literary studies.

Award-winning author and critic Gwyneth Jones offers a new appraisal of Russ's work and ideas. After years working in male-dominated SF, Russ emerged in the late 1960s with Alyx, the uber-capable can-do heroine at the heart of Picnic on Paradise and other popular stories and books. Soon, Russ's fearless embrace of gender politics and life as an out lesbian made her a target for male outrage while feminist classics like The Female Man and The Two of Them took SF in innovative new directions. Jones also delves into Russ's longtime work as a critic of figures as diverse as Lovecraft and Cather, her foundational place in feminist fandom, important essays like "Amor Vincit Foeminam," and her career in academia.

In the year 2038, the earth has been ravaged by earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Retroviruses run rampant through humanity. Economic disaster has destabilised the world, the US has undergone a socialist revolution, and the balance of power has changed.

Then the aliens arrive.

With no clear understanding of the visitors' intent, factions form, including the anti-alien group White Queen, working to turn humans against these extra-terrestrial tourists. Caught in the middle is Johnny Guglio, an American exile whose only fault was living near the landing site, and Braemar Wilson, a cutthroat reporter who will do whatever she needs to get ahead of the story. And for better or for worse, it seems being caught in the middle is the best place for them to uncover the truth.

The earth changed forever when the Aleutians landed. A hundred years after the invasion, the planet is firmly under extra-terrestrial rule. While the aliens pursue a form of immortality, small bands of human rebels still try to fight back.

Bella is an Aleutian, with a limited understanding of human cultures and gender. Their expectations of society and life are shaped by their own upbringing. But then they meet Sidney Carton, a human. Bella learns quickly as the pair scour the war-ravaged ruins of Europe to find the last vestige of human technology that could be the only hope for saving civilisation as it still exists.

After two hundred years colonising earth, the Aleutians prepare to return to space, leaving behind humanity and an earth that have been shaped by their presence, their care, and their cruelty.

In the dying days of Aleutian rule, Catherine has altered her body to appear more alien, and soaks herself in the decadence of their culture. Misha idolises the Aleutians, and begins a love affair with Catherine, both desperate to forget their humanity and embrace the alien.

What will be left for the humans when the Aleutians leave? What will the Aleutians take with them from their time on earth? Could humanity have changed them as much as they changed it?