Search Worlds Without End

This short story originally appeared in Lighspeed, September 2017.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed Magazine.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Fast Forward 1 (2007), edited by Lou Anders. It can also be found in the anthology Year's Best SF 13 (2008), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer.

In Dream London the city changes a little every night and the people change a little every day. Captain Jim Wedderburn has looks, style and courage by the bucketful. He’s adored by women, respected by men and feared by his enemies. He’s the man to find out who has twisted London into this strange new world, and he knows it. But the towers are growing taller, the parks have hidden themselves away and the streets form themselves into strange new patterns. There are people sailing in from new lands down the river, new criminals emerging in the East End and a path spiralling down to another world. Everyone is changing, no one is who they seem to be, and Captain Jim Wedderburn is beginning to understand that he’s not the man he thought he was...

This short story originally appeared in Nature, September 6, 2012. It can also be found in the anthology Year's Best SF 18 (2013), edited by David G. Hartwell.

Read the full story for free at Nature.

This short story originally appeared in Lightspeed, Issue 104, January 2019.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Further Conflicts (2011), edited by Ian Whates. It can also be found in the anthologies The Mammoth Book of SF Wars (2012), edited by Ian Whates and Ian Watson, and Year's Best SF 17 (2012), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer.

This short story originally appeared in Interzone, #189 May-June 2003. It can also be found in the anthologies Year's Best SF 9 (2004), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer, and Twenty-First Century Science Fiction (2013), edited by David G. Hartwell and Patrick Nielsen Hayden.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction (2007), edited by George Mann. It can also be found in the anthology Year's Best SF 13 (2008), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer.

The first ever collection from one of the UK's finest SF authors: Tony Ballantyne, who has been a finalist for the Philip K Dick award and whose short fiction has featured regularly in Years Best SF anthologies. The book features a quartet of brand new stories set on the world of Penrose (introduced in the novels Twisted Metal and Blood and Iron); these tales combine to provide Penrose's robot denizens with their very own creation myth. They are joined by five stories set in the Recursion universe, one of which is wholly original to the collection. Stories from the Northern Road: Tony Ballantyne at his very best.

Table of Contents:

• 3 - Stories from the Northern Road - interior artwork by Fangorn
• 9 - Introduction (Stories from the Northern Road) - (2012) - essay by Ian Whates
• 13 - A Note from the Author (Stories from the Northern Road) - (2012) - essay
• 15 - Four Blind Horses - [Penrose Universe] - (2012) - short fiction
• 31 - Janet Verdigris - [Penrose Universe] - (2012) - short fiction
• 49 - Isabel and the Outlandish Robots - [Penrose Universe] - (2012) - short fiction
• 67 - The Robot Behind Me - [Penrose Universe] - (2012) - short fiction
• 87 - LDA ADD STA JMP JIZ END - [Recursion] - (2012) - short fiction
• 107 - Restoring the Balance 1 - [Recursion] - (2012) - short fiction (variant of Restoring the Balance 2001)
• 125 - Restoring the Balance 2 - [Recursion] - (2012) - short fiction (variant of Restoring the Balance, 2 2001)
• 144 - Seeds - [Recursion] - (2009) - novelette
• 164 - The Sixth VNM - [Recursion] - (1998) - short story

It is the twenty-third century. Herb, a young entrepreneur, returns to the isolated planet on which he has illegally been trying to build a city and finds it destroyed by a swarming nightmare of self-replicating machinery. Worse, the all-seeing Environment Agency has been watching him the entire time. His punishment? A nearly hopeless battle in the farthest reaches of the universe against enemy machines twice as fast, and twice as deadly, as his ownin the company of a disarmingly confident AI who may not be exactly what he claims

Little does Herb know that this war of machines was set in motion nearly two hundred years agoby mankind itself. For it was then that a not-quite-chance encounter brought a confused young girl and a nearly omnipotent AI together in one fateful moment that may have changed the course of humanity forever.

Welcome to the year 2252--and congratulations! You’re now a personality construct. We know that can be a daunting stage of personal development, especially if you don’t remember making this life-changing decision. But we’re here to help….

Helen is waking to a dark new reality—one that she’s certain she didn’t choose. In this borrowed existence, she finds an unexpected guide in Judy, a geisha-faced virgin who’s on a mission of her own. Together, the two of them begin a dangerous run through dozens of imagined worlds in an attempt to trap a psychopath haunting the shadowed areas of virtual space—a killer who brutally murdered an earlier version of Helen and who plans to kill again. Meanwhile, Justinian is investigating a peculiar rash of AI suicides on far-off planets—and finds that not only is there more to these “deaths” than he thought, but that they may be linked to his wife Anya’s mysterious coma.

In a future where AIs have taken over human life and the Environment Agency runs everything for our own good, the fact that we can live on after physical death as sentient digital beings should have been a good thing. Instead, as Helen and Justinian are about to discover, it just means there are more ways to die.

After a tumultuous beginning, mid-23rd-century Earth now peacefully operates under the constant surveillance of the Watcher, an all-seeing AI who has seized control of the planet—and of the minds and bodies of its people. But is the radical evolution that the Watcher has in mind a step forward or the beginning of a mighty split that will cast aside everything that truly makes us human?

It is 2252, and Judy is traveling on a passenger ship in deep space when disaster strikes. Almost too conveniently, strange machines appear onboard just in time to help. They are owned by DIANA, a commercial organization headquartered on Earth. But as the machines arrange for the humans to be taken to safety, Judy is held back. They have detected something in her genetic code—something shocking: Judy is not human. And she too is the property of DIANA.

Now Judy must return to Earth to find out what DIANA expects of her…how she was grown…and why she was destined to destroy the Watcher. But is this Judy even the same person? And does the new Judy have a reason to destroy—or is she just a pawn in someone else’s murderous game?

On a world of intelligent robots who seem to have forgotten their own distant past, it is a time of war as the soldiers of Artemis City set out to conquer everything within range on the continent of Shull, killing or converting every robot they capture to their philosophy, while viewing their own wire-based minds as nothing but metal to be used or recycled for the cause.

Elsewhere, the more individualistic robots of Turing City believe they are something more than metal, but when the Artemisian robot Kavan sets out on a determined crusade to prove himself, even Turing City can’t stand against him. Increasingly tied up with Kavan’s destiny is Karel, a Turing robot with elements of Artemis’s philosophy already woven into his mind … as well as Karel’s wife Susan, and their recently created child..

Following the inevitable violence and destruction, Artemisian ambition focuses elsewhere and a journey begins towards the frozen kingdoms of the north … and towards the truth about the legendary ‘Book of Robots’, a text which may finally explain the real history of this strange world …

In a completely alien but brilliantly realized landscape, here is a powerful story of superb action, barbaric cruelty and intense emotional impact.

Appointed Commander of the Emperor's Army of Sangrel, Wa-Ka-Mo-Do of Ko tries to establish relations between the existing robot population and the humans who have recently arrived on Yukawa. On the continent of Shull, Kavan forms the Uncertain Army and is marching to Artemis City. Upon discovery that the city's generals have made an alliance with the humans, he retreats to Stark where he plans the eventual overthrow of Artemis and the humans. Meanwhile, Karel is heading South, hoping to be reunited with Susan, his wife. As he walks, he hears more of the stories of the robots, and begins to understand something about his place on the world of Penrose. But with limited resources and tensions growing between robot and human it's only a matter of time before problems arise. And it's becoming more and more apparent that the humans are a lot more powerful than the robots first expected...