Search Worlds Without End

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Bending the Landscape: Fantasy (1997), edited by Stephen Pagel and Nicola Griffith, and was reprinted in Lightspeed, June 2011. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fifteenth Annual Collection (1998), edited by Gardner Dozois. The story is included in the collection Aliens of the Heart (2007).

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This novelette originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, August 2006. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fourth Annual Collection (2007), edited by Gardner Dozois, and Science Fiction: The Best of the Year, 2007 Edition, edited by Rich Horton. The story is included in the collection Aliens of the Heart (2007).

This short story originally appeared in Chinese translation in 2019. The first English publication can be found in Lightspeed, Issue 106, March 2019.

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This short story originally appeared in Interzone, #172 October 2001, and was reprinted in Lightspeed, April 2015.

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This novelette originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, July 2001. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Nineteenth Annual Collection (2002), edited by Gardner Dozois.

This novella was first published in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, March/April 2023.

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Sturgeon and Hugo Award-nominated Novelette

This story originally appeared in Clarkesworld, Issue 115, April 2016. It can also be found in the anthologies:

• The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume 11 (2017), edited by Jonathan Strahan
• The Best Science Fiction of the Year Volume 2 (2017), edited by Neil Clarke
• The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Fourth Annual Collection (2017), edited by Gardner Dozois
• Not One of Us: Stories of Aliens on Earth (2018), edited by Neil Clarke

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

This novella originally appeared in Clarkesworld, Issue 137, February 2018. It can also be found in the anthology The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume Four (2019), edited by Neil Clarke.

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld Magazine.

This short story originally appeared in Lightspeed, May 2018.

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In these stories, Betty Lindstrom imagines leaving her husband in the town of Lost Road and turning east instead of west and never coming back, but when she does drive west with her husband, alone with the prairie and the wind, she can't get home; Susan Abernathy undertakes to humanize Captain Groton, the alien charged with removing the residents of Okanoggan Falls, WI, with consequences she could not have imagined; Galena Pittman seeks to recover her lover, Thea, from the mountains of Montana, where she devotes herself to literally painting the landscape under the direction of the mysterious Dirigo; and the Conservator, charged with preserving the many layers of the map of the great river "on whose surface the past was written in cipher," discovers that the relationship between map and landscape is more complicated than she had thought.

Table of Contents:

• Lost Road - (1992) - short story
• Frost Painting - (1997) - short story
• Okanoggan Falls - (2006) - novelette
• The Conservator - (2007) - short story

The savants of Institut Sorel, the world center of information mechanics, compute the governing algorithms that give all things their shape and structure. The voyants receive and sort enormous amounts of information. And now the savants say that the whole world, on the brink of a phase transition, is about to change, such that the long-term equilibrium that has locked the world into an "order crisis" will give way to a period of chaos.

Dominique, a new, ignorant acolyte voyant, is asked to watch for the random factor that will trigger the phase transition. But the Institut itself is in chaos. Drawn into political intrigue and the savants' and voyants' struggle over his world's very future, Dominique cares for individuals, rather than abstractions and principles. But even so, he's not sure what it is he should be doing...

The Forsaken Isles are on the brink of revolution. Three individuals are about to push it over the edge and trigger events that will lead to a final showdown between ancient forces and the new overlords of the land. Spaeth Dobrin is destined to life as a ritual healer - but as the dhotamar of the tiny, isolated island of Yora, she will be caught in a perpetual bond between herself and the people she has cured. Is it slavery, or is it love? Meanwhile, Harg, the troubled and rebellious veteran, returns to find his home transformed by conquest. And Nathaway, the well-intentioned imperialist, arrives to teach Spaeth's people "civilization," only to become an explorer in the strange realm of the Forsakens. These two men will propel Spaeth into a vortex of war, temptation, and - just possibly - freedom.

Revolution has broken out in the Forsaken Isles. The islanders have risen up to drive out the Inning Empire, but still they have no one to unite them. Only an Ison can do that—a leader whose heart has been cleansed by the curing of dhota-nur. The power to create an Ison lies in the hands of three people, and none of them are heroes. Spaeth has the ancient Lashnura heritage, but does she have the stature? Harg has the military genius, but he utterly rejects the price of dhota-nur. And Nathaway, the Inning outsider, finds himself unexpectedly holding the key to the future of the Isles. Perilously poised between Inning conquest and the savage powers of ancient forces, the Forsakens need them to decide. But for an Ison to rise, each of them must betray one of the others.

Ison of the Isles continues the story started in Isles of the Forsaken.

Nebula-nominated Novella

Humans live deep within an apparently lifeless planet covered by massive ice sheets. Having to survive in confined spaces has bred a unique culture where deference and non-confrontation make co-existence possible.

Osaji's opportunities are limited by the need to care for her aging grandmother. But all that is about to change as circumstances push her toward a journey like no other.

Reports of a strange, new habitable planet have reached the Twenty Planets of human civilization. When a team of scientists is assembled to investigate this world, exoethnologist Sara Callicot is recruited to keep an eye on an unstable crewmate. Thora was once a member of the interplanetary elite, but since her prophetic delusions helped mobilize a revolt on Orem, she's been banished to the farthest reaches of space, because of the risk that her very presence could revive unrest.

Upon arrival, the team finds an extraordinary crystalline planet, laden with dark matter. Then a crew member is murdered and Thora mysteriously disappears. Thought to be uninhabited, the planet is in fact home to a blind, sentient species whose members navigate their world with a bizarre vocabulary and extrasensory perceptions.

Lost in the deep crevasses of the planet among these people, Thora must battle her demons and learn to comprehend the native inhabitants in order to find her crewmates and warn them of an impending danger. But her most difficult task may lie in persuading the crew that some powers lie beyond the boundaries of science.

Tedla is a 'bland,' an asexual class of people that exist only to serve their fellow beings.

Val is an expert on alien cultures but has never seen a bland before. They come together after Tedla is found light-years away from its home planet-alone, isolated and suicidal. Val's mission is to help Tedla recover. But the more she learns about the beautiful alien being, the more she discovers about the torment Tedla and its kind suffer on their planet.

Little does the rest of the universe know of the hidden world of the blands, a world that hides shocking secrets and unspeakable crimes.

Halfway Human is a mesmerizing look at an intricately created alien world which is strange and distant, yet hauntingly familiar.

Nebula Award nominated novelette in Gilman's Twenty Planets universe. It originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, October-November 1991. The story can also be found in the anthology The Best from Fantasy & Science Fiction: A 45th Anniversary Anthology (1994), edited by Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Edward L. Ferman.

Hugo- and Nebula-nominated Novella

Set in the same universe as Arkfall (although a totally independent story), The Ice Owl tells a tale capturing that moment when we start to lose our childhood...when we start to realize that our parents and the "grown-ups" are just as flawed as we are... everyone struggling to deal with their own demons.

It is also a story about past crimes and the haunting echo of ghosts long dead, of a life-long quest for redemption and, for some, the final revenge for crimes lost in the stellar dust...