Search Worlds Without End

Shirley Jackson Award winning and World Fantasy Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, July-August 2012. The story can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2013, edited by Paula Guran, and The Best Horror of the Year: Volume Five (2013), edited by Ellen Datlow. It is included in the collection A Natural History of Hell (2016).

World Fantasy Award-winning Collection

Emily Dickinson takes a carriage ride with Death. A couple are invited over to a neighbor's daughter's exorcism. A country witch with a sea-captain's head in a glass globe intercedes on behalf of abused and abandoned children. In July of 1915, in Hardin County, Ohio, a boy sees ghosts. Explore contemporary natural history in a baker's dozen of exhilarating visions.

Table of Contents:

• The Blameless
• Word Doll
• The Angel Seems
• Mount Chary Galore
• A Natural History of Autumn
• The Fairy Enterprise
• The Thyme Fiend
• The Last Triangle
• Hibbler's Minions
• Rocket Ship to Hell
• The Prelate's Commission
• A Terror
• Blood Drive

The Doctor regenerated in San Francisco at the turn of the millennium. When he returns there a few years later, it seems the catastrophic events that nearly sent the whole of Earth into cosmic oblivion have taken their toll. San Francisco was the anchor point, and a breach between dimensions has sprung up. All sorts of weird and wonderful creatures have turned up -- griffins, unicorns -- and things more sinister.

The Doctor's companion Sam is exposed and becomes a changed person -- literally. Her hair is dark, she has never met the Doctor in her life. With Fitz, he is able to convince her to help them put things right -- to sacrifice herself so that the old Sam may return. For stalking the turbulent streets is the sinister Unnaturalist -- a collector of genetic curios whose private collection will be much enriched by the Time Travelers.

You, dear reader, continue at your own risk. It is not for the faint of heart - no more so than the study of dragons itself. But such study offers rewards beyond compare: to stand in a dragon's presence, even for the briefest of moments - even at the risk of one's life - is a delight that, once experienced, can never be forgotten. . . .

All the world, from Scirland to the farthest reaches of Eriga, know Isabella, Lady Trent, to be the world's preeminent dragon naturalist. She is the remarkable woman who brought the study of dragons out of the misty shadows of myth and misunderstanding into the clear light of modern science. But before she became the illustrious figure we know today, there was a bookish young woman whose passion for learning, natural history, and, yes, dragons defied the stifling conventions of her day.

Here at last, in her own words, is the true story of a pioneering spirit who risked her reputation, her prospects, and her fragile flesh and bone to satisfy her scientific curiosity; of how she sought true love and happiness despite her lamentable eccentricities; and of her thrilling expedition to the perilous mountains of Vystrana, where she made the first of many historic discoveries that would change the world forever.

Marie Brennan introduces an enchanting new world in A Natural History of Dragons.

IMAGINE A WORLD...

Half-human, half-machine, Voyager Isol was as beautiful as a coiled scorpionand just as dangerous. Her claim that shed found a distant but habitable earthlike planet was welcome news to the rest of the Forged. But it could mean the end of what was left of the humanity whod created and once enslaved them.

IMAGINE A FATE...

It was on behalf of the "unevolved" humans that Professor Zephyr Duquesne, cultural archaeologist and historian of Earths lost worlds, was chosen by the Gaiasol military authority to uncover the truth about this second "earth." And her voyage, traveling inside the body of Isol, will take her to the center of a storm exploding across a spectrum of space and time, dimension and consciousness.

IMAGINE THE IMPOSSIBLE...

On an abandoned planet, in a wrinkle of time, Isol and Zephyr will find a gift and a curse: a power so vast that once unlocked, it will change the universe forever. With civil war looming, Zephyrs perilous journey will lead her to a past where one civilization mysteriously vanished...and another may soon follow.

Where do you run when a world is out to get you?

AIs, Forged beings, superheroes, angels, and worlds that change in the blink of an eye - here is a richly imagined tale of ordinary redemption in an extraordinary world from one of the most provocative writers working today.

Francine is a young runaway looking to find a definition of love she can trust. In Sankhara, she finds a palace where rooms are made of bone, flowers, and the hearts of heroes. She finds a scientist mapping the territory of the human mind. She finds a boyfriend. And she finds Eros itself–incarnated in the androgynously irresistible form of Jalaeka.

But not everyone is in love with the god of love. Unity, for one, wants to assimilate Jalaeka along with every other soul in the universe. And contrary to what everyone always believes, love alone can't save the day. It will take something both more and less powerful than the human heart to save the worlds upon worlds at risk when gods collide.

"For Robson, world-building is a literary device like any other, useful for exposing buried fears and desires to the light of day, no matter how strange the sun." –New York Times Book Review