Search Worlds Without End

Nebula Award nominated short story. Originally published in Clarkesworld Magazine, #67 April 2012. It can also be found in the anthology Clarkesworld: Year Six (2014), edited by Neil Clarke and Sean Wallace.

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

In a place where no stars appear in the night sky, a group of strangers whose ancestries reach back to an earlier apocalyptic disaster are brought together to track down a resurrected corpse whose very existence portends the End of the World.

Fragments of a Broken Land: Valarl Undead is an epic tale of greed, dying magic, strange monsters, and a motley group of heroes, with a strange and breathless climax you won't easily forget.

This short story originally appeared in Lightspeed, March 2013. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-First Annual Collection (2014), edited by Gardner Dozois, and Wastelands 2: More Stories of the Apocalypse (2015), edited by John Joseph Adams.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

This novelette originally appreaed in the anthology Tales of the Wandering Jew (1991), edited by Brian Stableford. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Ninth Annual Collection (1992), edited by Gardner Dozois. The story is included in the collection Sacrifice of Fools (1992).

When avalanching glaciers thrust a massive Antarctic ice sheet into the open ocean, the captain of an atomic submarine must risk his vessel to rescue the survivors of a smashed polar research station; in Washington the President's top advisor scrambles to spin the disaster to suit his master's political aims; and meanwhile two intrepid newsmen sail south into the storm-lashed Drake Passage to discover the truth.

Onboard the submarine, as the colossal ice sheet begins its drift toward South America and the world begins to take notice, scientists uncover a secret that will threaten the future of America's military power and change the fate of humanity.

And beneath the human chaos one brave Blue Whale fights for the survival of his species.

Perdido, a fragment from a never completed longer work, is a rare and unexpected gift for Peter Straub's legion of fans. Even in this fragmentary form, it offers the sort of vivid, unexpected pleasures that only the finest imaginative fiction can provide.

On one level, Perdido tells the story of a troubled family: a discontented husband and wife and the teenaged son who was-but is no longer-a musical prodigy. On another, it is the story of the isolated Norwegian resort known as Perdido, and of the impossible, dreamlike things that happen there. Perdido is a place where the rules of ordinary life no longer apply, where reality is malleable and infinitely strange. It is a place where "you get what you didn't know you wanted" and where lives are altered forever. For the unhappy couple invited to attend-and for the teenaged son awaiting their return-it is the place where a marriage ends and a life filled with alternate possibilities begins.

Mysterious, evocative, and always superbly written, Perdido offers readers something genuinely special: a visit to an imaginary landscape that only Peter Straub could have created.

The time is now. The place is the Trident, a long-range research vessel hired by the reality TV show Sealife. Aboard is a cast of ambitious young scientists. With a director dying for drama, tiny Henders Island might be just what the show needs. Until the first scientist sets foot on Henders--and the ultimate test of survival begins...

For when they reach the island's shores, scientists are utterly unprepared for what they find--creatures unlike any ever recorded in natural history. This is not a lost world frozen in time, an island of mutants, or a lab where science has gone mad: this is the Earth as it might have looked after evolving on a separate path for half a billion years.

Soon the scientists will stumble on something more shocking than anything humanity has ever encountered: because among the terrors of Henders Island, one life form defies any scientific theory--and must be saved at any cost.

Deep beneath the Ural Mountains, in an underground city carved out by slave labor during the darkest hours of the Cold War, ancient caverns hold exotic and dangerous life-forms that have evolved in isolation for countless millennia. Cut off from the surface world, an entire ecosystem of bizarre subterranean species has survived undetected--until now.

Biologists Nell and Geoffrey Binswanger barely survived their last encounter with terrifying, invasive creatures that threatened to engulf the planet. They think the danger is over until a ruthless Russian tycoon lures them to his underground metropolis, where they find themselves confronted by a vicious menagerie of biological horrors from their past--and by entirely new breeds of voracious predators. Now they're rising up from the bowels of the Earth to consume the world as we know it.

In the last years of the 20th century, the United States of America no longer exists. California has been divided into two separate political entities. Southern California is controlled by the Chinese Commandos; various warring factions are struggling for control of northern California. The San Francisco Enclave controls the Bay Area. When a group of militant females led by the mysterious Lady Day begins assassinating prominent men, the S.F. Enclave Intelligence and Investigation Office calls in Jim Haley, an operative with the Private Inquiry Office, to put an end to the killings. Haley's investigation takes him from the city across what is left of the Golden Gate Bridge to wide-open Marin County, where he tracks down Penny Deacon, a former Lady Day member. The trail then leads down the Peninsula to Monterey County. Along the way, Haley meets a vast assortment of eccentric characters, some human and some not so human.

A new political map of America's west coast... Its dark wit bites through a brittle, phony, not-so-far-off world, exposing its hollow insides.

Science Fiction or Prophesy?

Werewolves in Connecticut? A liberal-conservative revolution? An underground "dirty tricks" squad who rob from the poor to give to the rich? Scandal in the highest political circles?

Almost before Reporter Noah Kraft knows what he's after - if he ever really learns - he's captured by the ultra-conservative Robin Hood Foundation, meets its superpatriot leader, George Washington II, has a run-in with the Jersey Mafia (which claims it doesn't exist), and finds out what the mystery is behind the name "Hawkshaw".

It's a wild and wacky satire on today's political climate - to its mind-boggling extreme in a radically different United States... thirty-odd years from now.

How did a well meaning decent spy get mixed up in a mechanical vendetta?...

Brinkman is street-wise, moving with assurance down the mean streets of the future, through an America where life in the slums is an unrelenting grind of parsimonious welfare and petty thievery. He is determined to make a better life for himself; Brinkman is a young man who will go far...

Too far, in fact. Fleeing the police, he sneaks into an off-limits complex seeking refuge and finds a secret enclave of wealth and privilege hidden carefully from the world of poverty outside. And he finds Beth, a girl he once loved in the slums... and who died there long before.

Possessed of this "puzzling" and "dangerous" bit of information, Brinkman sets out to discover more, and gradually a life begins to piece itself together... Brinkman's own.

Ron Goulart's latest vision of America lives up to the reputation for zany, unforgettable novels that has won him the title of "the Woody Allen of Science Fiction."

Author Dan Wells is back with the sequel to the sci-fi blockbuster Partials, which Pittacus Lore called a "thrilling sci-fi adrenaline rush, with one of the most compelling and frightening visions of Earth's future I've seen yet."

After discovering the cure for RM, Kira Walker sets off on a terrifying journey into the ruins of postapocalyptic America and the darkest desires of her heart in order to uncover the means--and a reason--for humanity's survival.

Dan Wells extends his richly imagined, gritty world and introduces new memorable characters in this second installment in the Partials Sequence.

Lynx is a mercenary with a sense of honour; a dying breed in the Riven Kingdom. Failed by the nation he served and weary of the skirmishes that plague the continent's principalities, he walks the land in search of purpose. He wants for little so bodyguard work keeps his belly full and his mage-gun loaded. It might never bring a man fame or wealth, but he's not forced to rely on others or kill without cause.

Little could compel Lynx to join a mercenary company, but he won't turn his back on a kidnapped girl. At least the job seems simple enough; the mercenaries less stupid and vicious than most he's met over the years.

So long as there are no surprises or hidden agendas along the way, it should work out fine.

There's a new Card in the Mercenary Deck - one Lynx isn't sure if he's happy to see or not. The assassin Toil now wears the Princess of Blood on her jacket and even Lynx would admit she's a woman cloaked in chaos and bloodshed.
Their new mission is to escort a dignitary to the pious and ancient city of Jarrazir - beneath which lies a fabled labyrinth. Having barely survived their last underground adventure the mercenaries aren't keen for another, but Toil has other plans.

Under threat of siege and horrors rising from the labyrinth, even the Mercenary Deck may have to accept that Jarrazir's prohibition laws aren't their biggest problem.

Lynx and the rest of the Cards are heading south. There's money in their pockets, beer in their hands and a simple job ahead - sun, sea and not getting shot at much. Throw in the prospect of a bar fight and it's almost a holiday.

But the volatile Mage Islands are a powder-keg, one just waiting for a spark. A bloody-handed exile perhaps, or the agent of a foreign power preparing for war. Maybe even a bunch of trigger-happy drunks who've upset the balance of magic across the Riven Kingdom.

Or all three together, that'd definitely work...