Search Worlds Without End

Simon Ings has written a surreal adventure probing the very fabric of existence, tearing it open to reveal a sometimes horrifying world within. It is a work that will delight any fan of China Mieville. Only a fool would question the strange magics that maintain the cool haven of the City of the Iron Fish in the middle of an inferno of scorching heat and splintered rock, for the well-watered streets of the city hide secrets in their shadows. Thomas Kemp is just such a fool...And embarks on a journey that will take him to the limits of reality. It may kill him, worse, that may not be enough. Especially as it is his only friend, Blythe, who may discover the secret of the city's isolation.

25 May, 1928: Over the frozen seas of the Arctic, an airship falls out the sky. Among the survivors is a young scientist on the verge of a discovery that will redefine physics.

3 October 1996: Through the dusty industrial towns of India's Great Trunk Road, a disgraced and disfigured female detective starts tracking a criminal syndicate whose tentacles spread from forgery to smuggling to piracy. Her life has been ruined, but she will have her revenge.

26 December 2004: On the island of Bali a tsunami washes up a rusting container. Locked within his aluminium tomb, the mummified remains of a shipping magnate missing for 29 years and a hand-written journal of his last days.

13 December 2011: Off the coast of Sri Lanka, a tramp steamer is seized by pirates. The captain has his wife and son aboard and their survival depends on following the pirates' every demand. But what can they possibly want with his worn-out ship and its cargo of junk?

We know what they want. We know the ship was carrying a Dead Water cargo. And We know Dead Water is the key to everything. We could spin a thousand stories from this toxic Cold War secret but there's only one of them can really make a difference.

And this is it.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Meeting Infinity (2015), edited by Jonathan Strahan. It can also be found in the anthologies The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Ten (2016), edited by Jonathan Strahan, and The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2016, edited by Rich Horton.

Surgically connected to their swarm of mechanical workers, architects Christopher and Joanne Yale were turning the moon into a paradise. Now, without warning, their machines have pulled the plug.

Christopher Yale is drowning in a sea of sensory deprivation and bootleg medicine. Joanne is dead, and neither the police nor their friends have any explanation. But Yale knows she was plugging pirated hardware into her head, to fight the same condition he has - Epistemic Appetite Imbalance.

Confronting his loss and his new, empty-headed world, Yale seeks out the truth of Joanne's death, all the while being drawn into a new, colder London which has no place for the Moon's failures. He hasn't got much time. The police are after him, so are his wife's killers -- and so is the condition which is slowly draining his life of meaning...

Artificial intelligence probes have been sent into the solar system to mine planets inaccessible to man. The operation has, on the whole, proved to be highly successful, until the AIs stop communicating with Earth. Instead they start to replicate and begin a war with Earth.

A fast-moving cyberpunk thriller set in a world of thinking cities, ruthless corporations and mad orbital AIs. A novel that links the groundbreaking works of William Gibson to the new generation of writers such as Charlie Stross and Hannu Rajaniemi. Ajay had a future once, birthing intelligent cities for the Haag Agency. First Delhi, then Milan. But then he is seduced into betraying his employers and finds himself working for a city that wishes to become human. Ajay must steal some rare technology from a long-dead wetware expert, a new Frankenstein called Snow, a man now alive in an AI. A man who wants a new toy for his manufactured daughter...

This short story originally appeared on Omni Online, April 1997. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fifteenth Annual Collection (1998). It was later expanded to the full novel Headlong (1999).

A mysterious box that he cannot open is all that might save Adam's autistic son as they are plunged into a world of old corruptions and new terrors. In PAINKILLERS, Simon Ings deftly teases out his knotted story that, with its many conventional elements, could have run a risk of overfamiliarity: sinister Oriental Triad gangsters, their even more sinister wives, a speedy Hong Kong with its ruthless Brit yuppies and its nightlife ridden with drugs, strange sex and violence. Shooting back and forth between a glamorous Hong Kong, in 1990, and a straitened London, in 1998, Ings sustains suspense by dropping hints but never telling enough. Adam Wyatt and his wife Eva run a small cafe near Southwark Market. They bicker a lot, Adam drinks and visits to their autistic son Justin tend to go awry. But underneath Adam's drinking are secrets from their previous life in Hong Kong, when he worked for the Independent Commission Against Corruption and got in with some very dubious local society types; one of whom includes 'Call me Jimmy' Yao Sau-Lan, 'a big nasty man, in a big nasty suit', whose father just happened to kill Eva's grandfather. When Jimmy's widow and sons come calling, Adam knows he's in trouble.

This short story originally appeared on Sci Fiction, June 6, 2001. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Nineteenth Annual Collection (2002), edited by Gardner Dozois, Year's Best SF 7 (2002), edited by David G. Hartwell, and Digital Domains: A Decade of Science Fiction & Fantasy (2010), edited Ellen Datlow.

Humanity has been split into three different species. Mutual incomprehension has fractured the globe. As humans race to be the first of their kind to reach the stars, another Great War looms.

For you that means returning to Yorkshire and the town of your birth, where factories churn out the parts for gigantic spaceships. You're done with the pretentions of the capital and its unfathomable architecture. You're done with the people of the Bund, their easy superiority and unstoppable spread throughout the city of London and beyond. You're done with Georgy Chernoy and his questionable defeat of death. You're done with his daughter, Fel, and losing all the time. You're done with love.

But soon enough you will find yourself in the Smoke again, drawn back to the life you thought you'd left behind.

You're done with love. But love's not done with you.

The Weight of Numbers describes the metamorphosis of three people: Anthony Burden, a mathematical genius destroyed by the beauty of numbers; Saul Cogan, transformed from prankster idealist to trafficker in the poor and dispossessed; and Stacey Chavez, ex-teenage celebrity and mediocre performance artist, hungry for fame and starved of love. All are haunted by Nick Jinks, a malevolent curse of a man who seems to be everywhere at once. As a grid of connections emerge between a dusty philosophical society in London and an African revolution, between international container shipping and celebrity-hosted exposés on the problems of the Third World—this novel sends the specters of the Baby Boom's liberal revolutions floating into the unreal estate of globalization and media overload—with a deadly payoff.

The Weight of Numbers is an artful and deadly novel that traces the secret histories and paranoid fantasies of our culture into a future globalized in ways both liberating and hideous, full of information and empty of meaning. Simon Ings has delivered a storytelling tour de force that will alter some of your most cherished beliefs.

The new novel from Simon Ings is a story that balances on the knife blade of a new technology. Augmented Reality uses computing power to overlay a digital imagined reality over the real world. Whether it be adverts or imagined buildings and imagined people with Augmented Reality the world is no longer as it appears to you, it is as it is imagined by someone else. Ings takes the satire and mordant satirical view of J.G. Ballard and propels it into the 21st century. Two friends are working at the cutting edge of this technology and when they are offered backing to take the idea and make it into the next global entertainment they realise that wolves hunt in this imagined world. And the wolves might be them. A story about technology becomes a personal quest into a changed world and the pursuit of a secret from the past. A secret about a missing mother, a secret that could hide a murder. This is no dry analysis of how a technology might change us, it is a terrifying thriller, a picture of a dark tomorrow that is just around the corner.