Search Worlds Without End

Hartwell and acclaimed Australian anthologist Damien Broderick are bringing a higher profile to Australian SF with Centaurus, a showcase of some of the most original voices in SF. Included are stories from Peter Carey, Greg Egan, Terry Dowling, A. Bertram Chandler, Phillippa C. Maddern, Rosaleen Love, Sean McMullen, Lucy Sussex, and George Turner.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - (1999) - essay by Damien Broderick
• The Other Editor's Introduction - (1999) - essay by David G. Hartwell
• Flowering Mandrake - (1994) - novelette by George Turner
• The Mountain Movers - (1971) - novelette by A. Bertram Chandler
• Things Fall Apart - (1988) - novelette by Philippa C. Maddern
• Written in Blood - (1999) - short story by Chris Lawson
• Pie Row Joe - (1978) - short story by Kevin McKay
• A Map of the Mines of Barnath - (1995) - short story by Sean Williams
• My Lady Tongue - (1988) - novelette by Lucy Sussex
• Wang's Carpets - (1995) - novelette by Greg Egan
• The Dominant Style - (1991) - short story by Sean McMullen
• Borderline - (1996) - novella by Leanne Frahm
• Privateers' Moon - (1992) - novelette by Terry Dowling
• Re-deem the Time - (1978) - short story by David J. Lake
• Matters of Consequence - (1992) - short story by Shane Dix
• The Total Devotion Machine - (1989) - short story by Rosaleen Love
• The Colonel's Tiger - (1995) - novella by Hal Colebatch
• The Soldier in the Machine - (1998) - novelette by Russell Blackford
• From Whom All Blessings Flow - (1995) - novelette by Stephen Dedman
• Looking Forward to the Harvest - (1991) - novelette by Cherry Wilder
• The Magi - (1982) - novelette by Damien Broderick
• The Chance - (1979) - novelette by Peter Carey

This novella originally appeared in the Beyond the Doors of Death (2013), written with Robert Silverberg. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-First Annual Collection (2014), edited by Gardner Dozois.

This novelette originally appeared in Eidolon: The Journal of Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy, Spring 1996. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fourteenth Annual Collection (1997), edited by Gardner Dozois. The story is included in the collection The Qualia Engine (2011).

Inspired by David Pringle's landmark 1985 work Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels, this volume supplements the earlier selection with the present authors' choices for the best English-language science fiction novels during the past quarter century. Employing a critical slant, the book provides a discussion of the novels and the writers in the context of popular literature. Moreover, each entry features a cover image of the novel, a plot synopsis, and a mini review, making it an ideal go-to guide for anyone wanting to become reacquainted with an old favorite or to discover a previously unknown treasure.

With a foreword by David Pringle, this invaluable reference is sure to provoke conversation and debates among sci-fi fans and devotees.

The books and authors covered in this volume are the basis for our Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010 list.

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 Adrift in the Noösphere: Science Fiction Stories (2012).

My father is the Rev. Daimon Keith. At the age of twenty, he was abducted near a school playground by small gray aliens. Indeed, Daimon was taken up into UFOs not just that once, but from infancy, and over and again. It caused him to devote his middle years to the establishment of the Church of Jesus Christ, Time Traveler, and later Scionetics.

Rosa "Flake" Rosch is a postmodern orphan. She's forgotten her mother, and her notorious abductee father Deems has vanished - again. Dark Gray is Rosa's unreliable memoir of her father's zany life, from his hapless prankster youth in Australia to apotheosis as a UFO guru in the 21st century. It's the story of Rosa's indomitable mother, her weird quasi-brother Ben, Zelda the horsewife, and our whole tormented era, as we blast into hyperreality.

The Book of Revelation was republished as Dark Gray by Fantastic Books in 2010.

This novelette originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, August 2009. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2010, edited by Rich Horton. The story is included in the collection The Qualia Engine (2011).

A story for everyone who ever loved the work of the late, great SF writer Cordwainer Smith.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

THOUSANDS OF YEARS FROM NOW THE HUMAN ANIMAL IS STILL A BEAST

Now there are two sentient races inhabiting the known universe: one as human as Adam... the other of robotic mind.

They share the Earth in harmonious coexistence. But elsewhere, only those who age and war and die are permitted.

On earth, a young human prince has befriended a being far different from himself. But usurpation and fratricide are calling them both to the royal youths embattled home planet--drawing them into a nest of treacherous family conspiracy and cruel, naked ambition where the enemy owns the armies, the power, and the very soul of the world. But the prince will have his revenge, though only ally stands at his side: a peace-loving creature of augmented intelligence in a place where he is am unwelcome stranger--a barbarous world where he is forbidden... and feared.

Sturgeon Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, April-May 2009 and was reprinted in Clarkesworld Magazine, #100 January 2015. The story can also be found in the anthologies The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Four (2010), edited by Jonathan Strahan and The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Seventh Annual Collection (2010), edited by Gardner Dozois.

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

Time travel, changing history, forestalling atrocities: it's not a job for the weak. For one thing, the things people in the future wear...

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

Amanda is a brilliant violinist, a mathematical genius, and a rebel. Impatient for the adult status her society only grants at age thirty, but determined to have a real adventure first, she has repeatedly gotten into trouble and found herself in the courtroom of Magistrate Mohammed Abdel-Malik, the sole resurrectee from among those who were frozen in the early twenty-first century, the man whose mind was the seed for Aleph, the AI that rules this utopia.

Mathewmark is a real adolescent, living in the last place where they still exist, the reservation known as the Valley of the God of One's Choice, where those who have chosen faith over technology are allowed to live out their simpler lives. When Amanda determines that access to the valley is the key to the daring stunt she plans, it is Mathewmark she will have to lead into temptation.

But just as Amanda, Mathewmark, and Abdel-Malik are struggling to find themselves and achieve their potentials, so is Aleph, and the AI's success will be a challenge to them and all of humanity.

Sturgeon Award nominated short story. It originally appeared on Subterranean Online, Spring 2010. The story can also be found in the anthologies The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Five (2011), edited by Jonathan Strahan, The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2011, edited by Rich Horton, Year's Best SF 16 (2011), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer and The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Eighth Annual Collection (2011), edited by Gardner Dozois. It is included in the collection Adrift in the Noösphere: Science Fiction Stories (2012).

Read the full story for free at Subterranean.

Jenny Kane loves weird science - but it's gone way, WAY out of control. Her mother's moved out, her dad's still moping around, and she's not sure how to cope any longer. And she keeps getting these weird phone calls from a scientist named Rod who's... where?... when? - another time zone? Another time altogether? Another reality? But that'd be crazy, wouldn't it? Who was Rod Gianforte and why did his name disappear from the face of the earth, even though his invention was truly ground-breaking?

She also has the strangest feeling that she's done all this before. Who's this odd boy she just crashed into - this Tristan? How does she even know his name - or the fact that he can perform parlor-type "magic" tricks?

Hilarious, exciting, touching, ZONES is a classic adventure of time travel: a great SF adventure that grabs you with its opening lines - and then never lets you go!

August Seebeck is in his twenties, a man of average looks and intellect. Then comes the claim of his great-aunt Tansy that she has been finding corpses each Saturday night in her bath (they vanish by morning). August dismisses this tale as elderly fantasy until he stumbles upon a corpse being shoved into the second-floor bathroom window of his aunt's house. Even that wouldn't faze him, but then someone steps out of the mirror...

August suddenly discovers he is a Player in the multi-universe Contest of Worlds and that his true family is quarrelsome on a mythic scale. His search for understanding follows a classic quest pattern of the Parsifal kind, except that August is nobody's fool.

An epic quest that is funny and engrossing, Godplayers is in the best tradition of Zelazny, Van Vogt, and the Knights of the Round Table, from one of science fiction's hottest up-and-coming writers.

August Seebeck is a 20-something student from a world not quite the same as ours. In Godplayers, August tumbled into a vastly larger universe, and learned that he wasn't, after all, an orphaned only child. He and his turbulent siblings, and the breathtaking Lune and others still stranger, are Players in the Contest of Worlds. They are mysteriously transformed humans whose ancient task is enigmatic battle with the dread, passionate K-Machines. Now crisis deepens.

Empowered with a potent killing device of his own, an eerie gift from legend, August finds himself flung from world to world in a brutal and baffling game, with entire universes at stake and very little idea of the rules. Only two things are clear: his beloved Lune is not who she seems, and August's pivotal role is no chance accident. In this cosmos, survival of the gods themselves depends upon human victory over the K-Machines.

Roderick is a robot and this is his autobiography. Sladek conveys, with great sensitivity and insight the innocence of an artificial intelligence and asks profound questions about mankind's right to manipulate others. It also portrays how a numerological mind might structure a narrative.

Inventive, funny yet melancholy this is one of SF's greatest creative geniuses writing at his thought-provoking best.

This is an omnibus edition that includes Roderick and Roderick at Random.

Roderick is a robot and this is his autobiography. Sladek conveys, with great sensitivity and insight the innocence of an artificial intelligence and asks profound questions about mankind's right to manipulate others. It also portrays how a numerological mind might structure a narrative.

Here is the continuing and uproarious saga of Roderick, a robot and "learning machine" growing up in an America in the near future. The mild-mannered robot is confronted with an ever-widening cast of madcap characters who typify the artificial values endemic in modern America.

An anthropologist travels to the central Australian desert to search for the source of an aboriginal myth; he suspects the terrible "Rainbow Serpent" is connected to the sacred Uluru rock formations. The holographic "Gate" he discovers with his nephew explains not just the origin of a legend, but the origin of man, and the true fate of the dinosaurs.

Maggie Roche is an out-of-work poet and single mother. Spied on by a cyborged rat, attacked, drugged into panic and rapture, seduced, drawn into conspiracy, she's flung four thousand years into her own future. In the alien world of the Ull- Upload Lifeform Lords who are human-machine hybrids of overwhelming power-she learns that she is history's first true time traveler, hunted by friend and foe to the end of time. The entire future of the cosmos will be reset by these terrifying events. The Judas Mandala introduced the terms "virtual reality" and "virtual matrix," anticipating Frank Tipler's influential Omega Point Theory, William Gibson's cyberpunk fiction, and The Matrix...

Xaraf Firebridge tumbled a million years into the future - to find earth ruled by beings who could play with the fabric of space and time as if they were gods. Yet somewhere in the distant past, something they had done went terribly wrong...

Now in the shadow of Earth's dying sun, Xaraf is sent forth on a perilous quest to preserve the course of history. Accompanied by the wondrous sword Alamogordo and the woman warrior Glade, he seeks the Legendry City of Treet Hoowo. There he must confront the most destructive machines of a long dead civilisation... and a destiny undreamed by man or god.

Sopwith Hammil is a popular but rather stupid TV presenter when a time machine lands in his living room. To save his life and the human race (they're turning the Sun off!), he must find a wife inside three hours. Meanwhile, 197 years later, in a world that makes 1984 look like Brave New World, beautiful Hsia Shan-Yun is fighting the future--and losing. Meanwhile, on Alpha Grommett, two married robots find their love-life has become depressingly mechanical. Meanwhile, the wacky astrologer O'Flaherty Gribble has discovered the long-lost secret of the Callisto Effect. Meanwhile, in a pact with the devil...

On Shrirampur, Chakravalin Chakravatin is heir to a galactic empire being forged by his monstrous father, the dictator, Jagannatha, a man who has taken from him the woman he loves. Chakravalin has vowed to reclaim her and to stand against everything that Empire means... On Earth, young dayton Ellis struggles with approaching manhood--and with a larger mystery, alien beyond his comprehension... And watching over it all are the Kleth, immortal beings, withdrawn from human affairs, returned to their homeworld within the singularity at the galactic core....

Nebula- and Locus-winning Novella

"Born With the Dead" by Robert Silverberg tells the story of a man whose wife is among the rekindled dead now. He's heard that she is on a plane to Zanzibar with five other rekindled dead. As a "warm", he is not really allowed to make contact with her. The dead like to stay in their cold-cities. But he'd loved her so much when she was alive, he just has to try! This novella was nominated for every major science fiction award when it was originally published in 1974, winning the Nebula and Locus awards.

"Quicken", a novella by Australian author Damien Broderick, uses Robert Silverberg's original novella as a starting point for a brilliant leap into the far future, widening the scope and tenor of the original story by revisiting some of its subtler implications.