Search Worlds Without End

This novelette originally appeared in Jim Baen's Universe, August 2007. It can also be found in the anthologies Science Fiction: The Best of the Year, 2008 Edition, edited by Rich Horton, The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fifth Annual Collection (2008), edited by Gardner Dozois, and The Best of Jim Baen's Universe II (2008) edited by Eric Flint and Mike Resnick.

Read the full story for free at the Baen website.

Before novels like Mother of Storms, A Million Open Doors, and One for the Morning Glory brought him to the attention of book-buyers, John Barnes was known to science fiction fans for his quirky, powerful short stories, many published in SF magazines in the late 1980s. Most of them have been unavailable for more than a decade. Now the best of them are collected for the first time, along with several new SF stories that appear here for the first time ever.

Table of Contents:

• Foreword - (1998) - essay
• Two Cheers for Ned Ludd, One for Crazy Eddie - (1998) - essay
• Gentleman Pervert, Off on a Spree - (1998) - shortfiction
• How to Build a Future - (1990) - essay
• Stochasm - (1986) - shortstory
• Under the Covenant Stars - (1988) - novelette
• Finalities Besides the Grave - (1985) - shortstory
• Restricted to the Necessary - (1989) - shortstory
• Enrico Fermi and the Dead Cat - (1998) - shortstory
• Empty Sky - (1998) - shortfiction
• Why the Stars Are Always So Bright from Cousin Sid's Farm - (1998) - shortstory
• That Style Thingie - (1998) - essay
• Delicate Stuff - (1988) - shortstory
• Deep in the Heart of Genre - (1998) - essay
• Bang On! - (1998) - shortfiction
• Hope Against Hope - (1998) - essay
• Information and Unfictionable Science - (1996) - essay
• Between Shepherds and Kings - (1997) - shortstory
• That Kid Watching His Shoes - (1998) - essay
• Digressions from the Second-Person Future - (1987) - shortstory
• My Advice to the Civilized - (1990) - shortstory
• The Kids Are All Right - (1998) - essay

This novelette originally appeared in Jim Baen's Universe, October 2006. It can also be found in the anthologies The Best of Jim Baen's Universe (2007), edited by Eric Flint, The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fourth Annual Collection (2007), edited by Gardner Dozois, Space Opera (2007), edited by Rich Horton.

Shatter the line between fiction and fantasy...

The life of an award-winning novelist probably bears more resemblance to "normal" than most fans would want to believe. But every once in awhile, strange things are bound to erupt around those most equipped to document them... so imagine what renowned science fiction writer John Barnes might do when he finds himself in one of the wildest, most rollicking hard-SF adventures to hit print in years.

Barnes' college friend Travis Bismark always brought back plenty of great stories from his job as an industrial spy. This time, over a few beer- and coffee-fueled chat sessions, Travis unravels a tale about his current case too tall for even an SF author to believe: a Gaudeamus machine that bends physics in order to make possible both teleportation and time travel, and how it gets stolen--twice; a grad student-cum-prostitute who deals in telepathy-inducing drugs that let her "download" top-secret documents from her client's brains, a romp through Colorado and New Mexico during which each episode and character is more bizarre than the last; and the internet meme that seems to tie it all together.

This short story originally appeared in Life on Mars: Tales from the New Frontier (2011), edited by Jonathan Strahan, and was reprinted in Clarkesworld Magazine, #89 February 2014. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Ninth Annual Collection (2012), edited by Gardner Dozois, and The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2012, edited by Rich Horton.

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

In the middle of the Pacific, a gigantic hurricane accidentally triggered by nuclear explosions spawns dozens more in its wake.A world linked by a virtual-reality network experiences the devastation first hand, witnessing the death of civilization as we know it and the violent birth of an emerging global consciousness.

Vast in scope, yet intimate in personal detail, Mother of Storms is a visionary fusion of cutting-edge cyberspace fiction and heart-stopping storytelling in the grand tradition, filled with passion, tragedy, and the triumph of the human spirit.

Sturgeon Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, April 1990. The story is included in the collection Apostrophes and Apocalypses (1998).

This novelete originally appeared in the anthology Meeting Infinity (2015), edited by Jonathan Strahan. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2016, edited by Rich Horton.

As a child, Prince Amatus secretly sipped the forbidden Wine of the Gods, leaving him half the boy he'd once been--literally. His left side vanished entirely! Shortly thereafter, four mysterious Companions appeared to help the prince deal with this curious curse, and as he grew to manhood, guided him on a perilous quest to discover his true destiny.

This story originally appeared online in Light Reading, July-August 2015. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Third Annual Collection (2016), edited by Gardner Dozois.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Edge of Infinity (2012), and was reprinted in Clarkesworld, Issue 142, July 2018. It can also be found in the anthology Year's Best SF 18 (2013).

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

This novelette originally appeared in the anthology Engineering Infinity (2010), edited by Jonathan Strahan, and was reprinted in Lightspeed, April 2015. It can also be found in the anthology More Human Than Human: Stories of Androids, Robots, and Manufactured Humanity (2017), edited by Neil Clarke.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

Hugo Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared in Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, June 1979. The story can also be found in the anthology The 1980 Annual World's Best SF, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Arthur W. Saha. The story is included in the Niven collections Limits (1985) and N-Space (1990) and the Barnes collection Assassin and Other Stories (2010).

Sturgeonn Award nominated novella. It originally appeared in Jim Baen's Universe, December 2009 and was later reprinted in Lightspeed, March 2013. The story can also be found in The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Seventh Annual Collection (2010), edited by Gardner Dozois.

Read the full story for free at the Baen website.

A father and son go searching for the stars, but much more than gravity will hold them back.

Born the year of the Moon landing, Chris Terence spends his life fighting to return humanity to that pinnacle. An engineering student with dreams of spaceflight, he finds upon graduation that the United States no longer has need for astronauts. Years of bureaucratic meddling have reduced the space program to a shell of itself, and it will take the greatest scientific find in history to send humanity skyward once more.

After years battling budget hawks, Chris finally gets his chance to walk on the Moon. While there, he finds evidence of an ancient alien civilization, the Tiberians, who visited Earth's satellite eight thousand years before. Understanding what happened to those long-forgotten travelers will define the lives of Chris and his son, as they fight against all odds to unlock the secrets of the universe.

Lyle Peripart's world is coming apart. Up until just a few days ago he was a settled professor at the University of Auckland. The descendant of American expatriates, he's proud of his ancestry and privately doesn't care for the Reichs that have dominated the world since the Axis victory over a century ago. But he's the quiet type, not looking for a fight.

Then Lyle is recruited for private industry by the mysterious industrialist Geoffrey Iphwin--and that's when everything stops making sense.

His fiancee turns out to be a gun-toting weapons expert who saves him from assassination--and who, immediately afterwards, remembers nothing of what she did. But what she does remember is that she grew up in a world with an entirely different history, in which America surrendered to the Soviet Union in the 1970s.

Even stranger, several of their friends turn out to have each grown up in worlds with different histories still. Worse, they gradually realize that not one of them has ever talked to anyone inside the continental United States. In fact, just thinking about the United States is hard--as if something is trying to stop them.

It is the year 2129 . . . and fame is all that matters.

Susan and her friends are celebutantes. Their lives are powered by media awareness, fed by engineered meals, and underscored by cynicism. Everyone has a rating; the more viewers who ID you, the better. So Susan and her almost-boyfriend Derlock cook up a surefire plan: the nine of them will visit a Mars-bound spaceship and stow away. Their survival will be a media sensation, boosting their ratings across the globe. There's only one problem: Derlock is a sociopath. Breakneck narrative, pointed cultural commentary, warm heart, accurate science, a kickass heroine, and a ticking clock . . . who could ask for more?

The Aquinian Brothers and the Templar Soldiers are on an interplanetary mission to bring the word of God and civilization to alien worlds. Randall has three threatening species and Brother Hauskyld realizes that survival may be the problem.

Barnes's engaging debut is one of the first novels in the new Isaac Asimov Presents series published by Congdon & Weed with the cooperation of Davis Publications. The Orbital Republics may be the dominant power in the solar system but political and social forces are moving them toward a war on the Breakaway Confederation of moons and asteroids that barely maintains its independence. The Confederation sees its one slim chance against the OR's overwhelming military might in a diversionary tactic. It therefore sends several agents, including political historian Saul Pareto, down to the backwater colony that Earth has become. Among the harassed farmers of New York's Finger Lakes, Saul quickly foments a revolt but finds himself getting more involved with the people and their cause than he had anticipated. Patterned on the American Revolution complete with Swamp Fox tactics this is a clever novel of ideas in action and their dire consequences.

When a tragic Shuttle accident kills a world-famous basketball player on his trip into space, a trip that had been planned as a PR coup for the space program, former astronaut Scott Blackstone is out of a job. Worse, he and his "Citizen Observer" program are vilified in the media, and he's being sued for a billion dollars. His older brother, Nick, research chief for a major aerospace firm, persuades Scott's estranged ex-wife, Thalia-a top-ranked attorney-to take on Scott's defense. Gradually, it begins to appear that the "accident" might not have been an accident at all.

Meanwhile, as long feared, India and Pakistan go to war-and, worse, Pakistan deploys a nuclear device high in the upper atmosphere, putting the crew of the orbiting International Space Station in iminent danger of destruction by radiation exposure. While the world's space vehicles are grounded by the radiation storm set off by the detonation, only a few weeks remain to rescue the crew, and there's no known way to do it. Save, perhaps, for a secret project of Nick's...

The Return is a story of outsized characters, global crises, and big, daring ideas...and-as told by Buzz Aldrin-it carries a ring of truth. He's been there. He's done that. And he's already helped change the world.

Heather O'Grainne is the Assistant Secretary in the Office of Future Threat Assessment, investigating rumors surrounding something called "Daybreak." The group is diverse and radical, and its members have only one thing in common-their hatred for the "Big System" and their desire to take it down.

Now, seemingly random events simultaneously occurring around the world are in fact connected as part of Daybreak's plan to destroy modern civilization-a plan that will eliminate America's top government personnel, leaving the nation no choice but to implement its emergency contingency program... Directive 51.

What began as a technothriller continues as high adventure in the newly savage ruins of civilization.

In late 2024, Daybreak, a movement of post-apocalyptic eco-saboteurs, smashed modern civilization to its knees. In the losing, hopeless struggle against Daybreak, Heather O'Grainne, a one-time minor bureaucrat and former Federal agent, rose to become a vital leader in the struggle to restore civilization. That story was told in Directive 51.

Now Heather's story continues in Daybreak Zero. In the summer of 2025, she leads a tiny organization of scientists, spies, scouts, entrepreneurs, engineers, dreamers, and daredevils based in Pueblo, Colorado. Both of the almost-warring governments of the United States have charged them with an all but impossible mission: find a way to put the world back together.

But Daybreak's triumph has flung the world back centuries in technology, politics, and culture.

• Pro-Daybreak Tribals openly celebrate ending the world as we know it.
• Army regiments have to fight their way in and out of Pennsylvania.
• The Earth's environment is saturated with plastic-devouring biotes and electronics-corroding nanoswarm.
• A leftover Daybreak device drops atom bombs from the moon on any outpost of the old civilization it can spot.

Confined to her base in Pueblo to give birth to her first child, Heather recruits and monitors a coterie of tech wizards, tough guys, and modern-day frontier scouts: a handful of heroes to patrol a continent. All the news is bad:

• Tribals have overrun Indiana and Illinois
• The last working aircraft carrier sits helplessly out in the Indian Ocean, not daring to come closer to land
• The crash of one of the last working airplanes kills a vital industrialist
• Tribals try to force appeasement on the Provi government while the Temper government faces a rebellion of religious fanatics
• Seventeen states are lost to the Tribals as California drifts into secession and hereditary monarchy
• Everywhere, Provis and Tempers lurch toward civil war.

Heather's agents may be brave, smart, and daring, but can they be enough? For the sake of everything from her newborn son to her dying nation, can she forge them into a the weapon that can at last win the world back from the overwhelming, malevolent force of Daybreak?

Her success or failure may change everything for the next thousand years, beginning from Daybreak Zero.

For more than a year, Heather O'Grainne and her small band of heroes, operating out of Pueblo, Colorado, have struggled to pull the United States back together after it shattered under the impact of the event known as Daybreak. Now they are poised to bring the three or four biggest remaining pieces together, with a real President and Congress, under the full Constitution again. Heather is very close to fulfilling her oath, creating a safe haven for civilization to be reborn.

But other forces are rising too.

Some people like the new life better...

In a devastated, splintered, postapocalyptic United States, with technology thrown back to biplanes, black powder, and steam trains, a tiny band of visionaries struggles to re-create Constitutional government and civilization itself, as a new dark age takes shape around them.

Jak Jinnaka’s thirty-sixth-century teenage life has been nothing but fun—ignoring school, partying outrageously with his beautiful girlfriend, Sesh, and spending his uncle Sib’s huge fortune. But while they are out for a wild night of postgraduation clubbing, Sesh is kidnapped by the dangerous, enigmatic Duke of Uranium. Bruised and battered, Jak wakes up to a whole new reality: sweet, superficial Sesh is actually Princess Shyf of Greenworld, daughter of the rulers of a powerful faraway spaceport; kind and slightly dotty old Uncle Sib is a legendary spymaster; and Jak’s whole life has been preparation for the world of espionage. Now, his maiden mission is to rescue his girlfriend from one of the most powerful aristocrats in the solar system—or is it? The world Uncle Sib has plunged him into has wheels within every wheel and hidden forces in every shadow, and the only thing that is just what it seems is Jak himself: an amoral party animal looking out for number one!

When Jak gets word that his ex-girlfriend, Princess Shyf of Greenworld, is in danger, Jak and his panth buddy Dujuv join the Royal Palace Guard and race across the solar system to save her. But they quickly discover that they're the ones who need to be rescued--from Shyf, who has decided that she likes absolute power.

Jak Jinnaka parlayed his powerful family connections, unearned media fame, and consistent dumb luck into a cushy job as vice procurator of the Martian moon Deimos, an office he precariously maintains alongside his top-secret post as a station chief for Hive Intelligence—two soft jobs for an already rich, handsome, single young man in a fun-loving colonial outpost.

Sadly, when his boss takes a well-deserved vacation, it looks like Jak may actually have to do a little work—keep local trade humming, maintain the Hive's hegemony, prevent the boss's pretty teenage niece's internship from becoming front-page celebrity gossip, and make sure his rambunctious visiting uncle Sib doesn't cause international incidents among the thousands of prickly petty kingdoms on Mars.

Then, in one of the pettiest kingdoms of all, the lifelog of the man who wrote the Wager—a set of principles that guides all human life in the thirty-sixth century—is discovered, and the race is on for control of the holiest relic in a thousand years, with Jak in the lead and all of the devils and angels of his past howling at his heels.

For the last thirty years, the survivors of the collapse has tried to exist Earthside. Space colonies like the Flying Duthman offer the last and best hope for the mother planet's future; the adolescents on board the Dutchman really are humanity's last hope, but knowing is a heavy burden - especially for Mel who has plans of her own.

Joshua Ali Quare wakes in 2019 at the age of 140 in a strong youthful body with no memory of his past, to find he is at the center of a vast and deadly conspiracy. The only clues to his identity are the records he has left--messages from the man he once was...

As Quare journeys through his past, he discovers he has been a key figure in the history of a turbulent, violent century--soldier, criminal, assassin, spy. A century filled with killing plagues and warring cults, ruthless corporations and dying nations. A century where treachery is often the only way to survive.

Now someone is looking for him. Someone from his past. And Quare must learn the terrifying secret of his history before it unleashed devastating consequences for the future of the human race.

Currie Culver is about fifty-five years old, in good health, living in a comfortable retirement in the Rockies with his wife. In the wake of the Meme Wars that swept the planet two generations before, Currie, his wife, and almost everyone on Earth have in their minds a copy of One True, software that grants its hosts limited telepathy and instills a kind of general cooperation.

In his younger days, Currie hunted "comboys"--people who had unplugged from the global net in order to evade One True, and who hid in wilderness areas, surviving by raiding the outposts of civilization. Now Currie is called back into service to capture the last comboy still at large, a man who calls himself Lobo. With his high tech equipment, thoroughly plugged into the global net, Currie sets out to bring Lobo in.

Instead, Lobo captures Currie, and manages to deprogram him. Thrown back on the resources of his own intelligence, courage, and wisdom for the first time in twenty-five years, Currie finds himself in a battle of minds with his captor . . . with results that will change the lives of everyone on Earth.

Terpichore Murray is growing up on Mars. She wants to quit school and become an eco-prospector like her father. He has other ideas; not only does he want her to stay in school, he wants her along on his next long trip conducting a group of younger kids from the highlands at Mars's equator back to school in Wells City.

Early in the trip, disaster strikes-and it's up to Terry, without adult help, to get the survivors to safety, through several hundred miles of Martian wilderness. In the process, she will encounter the self-engineered "Mars-form" humans, usually shunned by the regular colonists-and One True, the collective intelligence that dominates Earth and from whom the Mars colonists are all separated. In the process she may well come of age and change the course of human history in the solar system . . . if Mars doesn't kill her first.

Nou Occitan is a place where duels are fought with equal passion over insults and artistic views alike. Giraut--swordsman, troubador, lover--is a creature of this swashbuckling world, the most isolated of humanity's Thousand Cultures.

But the winds of change have come to Nou Occitan. As the invention of the "springer"--instantaneous interstellar travel, at a price--spreads throughout the human galaxy, the stability and purity of no world, no matter how isolated, is safe. Nor can Giraut's life remain untouched. To his wonder, his is about to find himself made an ambassador to a different human world, a place strange beyond his wildest imaginings.

Welcome to the Thousand Cultures--in which humanity's hundreds of settled worlds are finally coming back together, via the recently invented technology of instantaneous travel. And in which Giraut and Margaret work as professional diplomats, helping to finesse the stresses and strains of so much abrupt new contact among wildly diverse cultures.

Now, however, their task is to bring in the terrifyingly hostile world of Briand, a planet of broiling acid oceans whose only habitable portions are Greenland-sized subcontinents that project out of the abyssal heat of the planetary surface into it stratosphere.

But Briand's physical hostility is nothing compared to the venom its two human cultures bear toward one another. Into this terrible world come Giraut and Margaret to try to do the right thing by the Cultures, by the inhabitants of Braind, and by one another.

The sequel to A Million Open Doors and Earth Made of Glass

Special agent Giraut Leones, betrayed by his superior and closest friend, swore he would never work for the Office of Special Projects again--but now he must. A new movement on Earth seeks to use the recorded personalities of the dead as helpless virtual reality playthings, and to the worlds of the Thousand Cultures--where the reborn are accepted as normal citizens--it's a monstrous crime. If Giraut cannot stop Earth from ratifying its plans, the tenuous structure of interstellar human civilization will collapse.

Complicating matters, Giraut's brain now hosts a second consciousness-the revived mind of his long-dead friend Raimbaut. Together, Giraut and Raimbaut must confront their shared past while struggling with a deadly present.

Giraut Leones, special agent for the human Thousand Cultures' shadowy Office of Special Plans, is turning fifty--and someone is trying to kill him.

Giraut's had a long career; the number of entities that might want him dead is effectively limitless. But recently Giraut was approached by the Lost Legion, an Occitan underground linked to an alliance of illegally human-settled worlds beyond the frontier. Also, it turns out that the Lost Legion colony has a "psypyx" --a consciousness-recording--of Shan, onetime boss of the Office of Special Plans. If they have that, they have literally thousands of devastating secrets.

Now, returning to his native Nou Occitan, Giraut will encounter violence and treachery from human and artificial consciousnesses alike. As bigotry and mob violence erupt throughout the rapidly destabilizing interstellar situation, Giraut will be called on the make the ultimate sacrifice, for the sake of civilization itself....

Combining the suspense of the detective thriller with the awesome wonder of space/time adventure, this novel begins an epic tale of a war across one million alternate Earths.

The second volume in the time travel/parallel universe series sends Pittsburgh private eye Mark Strang, trained with nightmarish weaponry and teamed with the woman of his dreams, to an alternative 1776, where he becomes his own worst enemy.

Mark Strang is asked to travel far back in time to the period of Caesar and the great Roman Triumvirate, in order to investigate the disappearance of a fellow time agent. What he discovers is that Caesar has been subverted by a Closer representative and that the Triumvirate has been undermined with civil war, mutual destruction, and the rewriting of history looming in the near future.

Don Sampson, a much-decorated Vietnam veteran, finds himself transported back to February 1944 and into the midst of the Allies' Italian campaign, where he is caught up in a desperate mission to foil the deployment of a last-resort German weapon.

Daniel Samson, a time-traveling Vietnam War veteran, is caught in the middle of the Mexican-American War and must journey a thousand miles to deliver vital orders to the U.S. cavalry.

Vietnam veteran Dan Samson travels back in time and discovers that he has become a deciding factor in the battles of the Civil War.