Search Worlds Without End

This short story originally appeared in Weird Tales, November-December 2007. It can also be found in the anthologies Best American Fantasy 2 (2008), edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, and Fantasy: The Best of the Year, 2008 Edition, edited by Rich Horton.

In the early years of the twentieth-century, the use of airships known as dirigibles - some as large as one thousand feet long - was being promulgated in Southern California by a semi-clandestine lighter-than-air movement. Groups like the East LA Balloon Club and the Bessie Coleman Aero Club were hard at work to revolutionize travel, with an aim to literally lift oppressed people out of racism and poverty.

ELADATL tells the story of this little-known period of American air travel in a series of overlapping narratives told by key figures, accompanied by a number of historic photographs and recently discovered artifacts, with appendices provided to fill in the missing links. The story of the rise and fall of this ill-fated airship movement investigates its long-buried history, replete with heroes, villains, and moments of astonishing derring-do and terrifying disaster.

Written and presented as an "actual history of a fictional company," this surrealist, experimental novel is a tour de force of politicized fantastic fiction, a work of hybrid art-making distilled into a truly original literary form. Developed over a ten-year period of collaborations, community interventions, and staged performances, ELADATL is a furiously hilarious send-up of academic histories, mainstream narratives, and any traditional notions of the time-space continuum.

Shigidi is a disgruntled and demotivated nightmare god in the Orisha spirit company, reluctantly answering prayers of his few remaining believers to maintain his existence long enough to find his next drink. When he meets Nneoma, a sort-of succubus with a long and secretive past, everything changes for him.

Together, they attempt to break free of his obligations and the restrictions that have bound him to his godhood and navigate the parameters of their new relationship in the shadow of her past. But the elder gods that run the Orisha spirit company have other plans for Shigidi, and they are not all aligned--or good.

From the boisterous streets of Lagos to the swanky rooftop bars of Singapore and the secret spaces of London, Shigidi and Nneoma will encounter old acquaintances, rival gods, strange creatures, and manipulative magicians as they are drawn into a web of revenge, spirit business, and a spectacular heist across two worlds that will change Shigidi's understanding of himself forever and determine the fate of the Orisha spirit company.

BLUE BOOK

Professional skeptic, advisor to Project Blue Book, superstar of the lecture and TV talk-show circuit, Dr. Everett Scarborough has devoted his life to demolishing the "myth" of the UFOs. But now somebody has changed his original reports. Somebody is about to stage a celectial kidnapping of his daughter. that somebody may be alien--or all too terrifyingly human. And Scarborough has nowhere on earth to hide.

UFOs are real. You may not know it but the government does. And they'll stop at nothing to keep you in the dark...

Keep running. Trust no one. the enemy is everywhere...

BLACK BOOK

The hour has come. The warring conspiracies, both in and out of the shadowy corners of the U.S. government, are about to come together in the deathly vastness of the American desert. Dr. Everett Scarborough is about to learn the mind-wrenching truth about his terrestrial -- or extraterrestrial -- origins. And at long last, everyone on Earth is about to discover the real aliens in their midst...

UFOs are real. You may not know it, but the government does. And they'll stop at nothing to keep you in the dark.

Code name SHADO. The most secret, sophisticated -- and important -- group on Earth. Only they know that mankind is under attack by a hostile intelligence from outer space.

A silent, invisible invasion by deadly aliens, bent on conquest and extermination. And SHADO's mission is to seek, find, and destroy the un-humans.

Why are the aliens kidnapping humans? SHADO has to know fast. They think they've scored when they capture an alien alive. But when he dies, the mission of the un-human invaders becomes horrifyingly clear...

Code name SHADO. The most secret, sophisticated -- and important -- group on Earth. Only they know that mankind is under attack by a hostile intelligence from outer space.

A silent, invisible invasion by deadly aliens, bent on conquest and extermination. And SHADO's mission is to seek, find, and destroy the un-humans.

Are the aliens un-human invaders, or new friends? Should humanity make welcome or war? SHADO can't afford to guess wrong -- the stakes are the survival of the human race.