Search Worlds Without End

This novelette originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, December 1996. It can also be found in the anthology Year's Best SF 2 (1997), edited by David G. Hartwell. The story is included in the collection The Guild of Xenolinguists (2007).

Nebula Award winning novella. It originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, January 1998. The story can aslo be found in the anthology Nebula Awards Showcase 2000, edited by Gregory Benford. It is included in the collection The Guild of Xenolinguists (2007) and was expanded into the full novel Reading the Bones (2003).

A struggling linguist, a sheltered debutante, and a strangely silent child are running for their lives, trapped in the violent confluence of three species, only one of which is human.

The Xenolinguist stories are fast-paced, gripping explorations of cross-cultural communication as well as perennial fan favorites. The Nebula Award-winning novella Reading the Bones has now been expanded to novel length, following xenolinguist Ries Danyo and sisters Lita and Jilan Patel to their pivotal roles in shaping the future of the Frehti.

The galaxy-wide Guild of Xenolinguists handles all cross-cultural communications by sending agents abroad to learn new languages and program translation computers. The travails of novice linguists animate these 11 stories as they face much more than simple translation work, taking on alien parasites and viruses, a mysterious and violent star-faring race, dolphin instructors, and large tyrant ants. As cultures and languages collide, first contact quickly becomes a matter of morality, galactic politics, death, and war.

Table of Contents:

• Foreword - (2007) - essay by Ian Watson
• First Was the Word - (2007) - novelette
• A Flight of Words - (1997) - shortstory
• A World Waiting - (1989) - novelette
• The Roaring Ground - (1997) - shortstory
• No Brighter Glory - (1999) - novelette
• Out of the Mouths - (1996) - novelette
• Stranger Than Imagination Can - (2007) - shortstory
• Babel Interface - (1988) - shortstory
• The Naked Face of God - (1998) - shortstory
• Communion of Minds - (1996) - novelette
• Reading the Bones - (1998) - novella
• Afterword: Berlitz in Outer Space - (1988) - essay by Sheila Finch