Search Worlds Without End

Phyllis Gotlieb's short fiction explores issues and passions that are deeply human, even when her characters are not. Gotlieb writes in the American SF tradition from a decidedly Canadian perspective.

Table of Contents:

• 7 - Among You
• 26 - Tauf Aleph
• 53 - The Other Eye
• 59 - Mother Lode
• 86 - The Military Hospital
• 105 - Body English
• 110 - Monkey Wrench
• 145 - Sunday's Child
• 198 - We Can't Go On Meeting Like This
• 202 - The Newest Profession
• 226 - Blue Apes

Nebula Award nominated novella. It originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, June 1972. The story can also be found in the collection Son of the Morning and Other Stories (1983).

Table of Contents:

• Tauf Aleph - (1981) - novelette
• Sunday's Child - (1977) - novella
• The Military Hospital - (1971) - shortstory
• Gingerbread Boy - (1961) - shortstory
• Blue Apes - (1981) - novelette
• Phantom Foot - (1959) - shortstory
• A Grain of Manhood - (1959) - shortstory
• ms & mr frankenstein - (1975) - poem
• was/man - (1978) - poem
• Son of the Morning - (1972) - novella

In the hideous aftermath of the Atomic Sunburst the people of Sorrel Park had been written off. Now they were nothing but a kind of human garbage, festering and hopeless. In the center of town lived the worst of the human garbage - and by far the most dangerous. They were a breed of terrible children, possessed of terrifying supernormal powers. They were a new race of monster bred out of the Sunburst, and if they ever broke loose they could destroy the world.

A mature alien woman judge sees an amphibious human woman, obviously a slave, displayed in a tank in front of a sex palace. And so an interstellar plot of murderous proportions involving many races and planets, galactic corporations, exploitive sex and horrible slavery is revealed.

An interstellar alien corporation run by aliens was thwarted in its plans to exploit genetically altered slaves. Now, in an attempt to keep it's case from ever coming to court, a judge is murdered on Khagodis--the planet where the amphibious human slaves were first bred--and the man who first broke the slave ring must find a way to bring these villains to justice.

How can you stop a conspiracy of telepaths? The alien Lyhhrt are powerful enough to read the human mind; if they find you know too much, they can erase your memory, or simply stop your heart. The normally peaceful Lyhhrt society has been splintered by technological change, the bitter legacy of their exploitation by the Zamos crime family. Now a few renegade Lyhhrt, driven mad by isolation from their group mind, seem to be planning terrible crimes--or are they again being used as deadly tools in someone else's scheme?

This novel consists of four novellas: "Son of the Morning", "The King's Dogs", "Nebuchadnezzar", and "A Judgment of Dragons".

The main characters are Khreng and Prandra, members of a race called the Ungrukh, who are leopard-like creatures with reddish fur, paws better adapted for manipulating objects (though no opposable thumbs), sentience, and a high incidence of ESP ability. The latter makes them valuable to the Galactic Federation. Khreng & Prandra, a mated pair, are among the first Ungrunkh to work for GalFed.

In the first story, they run afoul of a time vortex set up by an alien Qumedni in a 19th-century Polish village, and have to defeat it. In the second, while Prandra is getting her ESP-ability tested at GalFed HQ, they are framed for murder. In the third, they attempt to break drug-runners' hold on a planet whose inhabitants are not capable of successfully opposing them. In the fourth, they confront the Qumedni responsible for creating their race (from Earth leopards), and the Qumedni intent on stealing the secret of how sentience is bestowed.

Despite the title, there are no dragons in this book.

The young and beloved Emperor Spinel-alpha of the planet Qsaprinel has been taken captive by the allies of his jealous twin brother, whose deformities of birth have left him jealous and scheming for the throne. The Emperor and all his subjects are large crustaceans of a philosophical bent, and there is more to the situation than meets the Emperor's compound eye. A conspiracy revolving around an enigmatic enzyme found in the bodies of the Qsaprinli and the rumors of an illegal human colony hidden somewhere on the world's single continent has entangled the planet; on the Emperor's request, it falls to Dun Kinnear, Sector Co-ordinator and class-two ESP and Khreng and Prandra's daughter Emerald and her lover Raanung, to untangle the mystery and defend Qsaprinel from its attackers.

This is not a direct sequel to A Judgement of Dragons, as it can be read without any prior knowledge of Gotlieb's world, but fans of the earlier novel will enjoy the reappearance of familiar characters and races.

In the last of the GalFed-commissioned chronicles of the Ungrukh, Emerald and Raanung's daughter Bren faces murder and terrorism in the most unlikely of places: Sol Three's Grand Canyon. A group of Ungrukh had agreed to come to Earth, where their mental abilities and physical structure could be studied by resident scientists, but while they were prepared for hostility, they did not expect a massacre.

There were only four survivors: Bren; her twin siblings Tugrik and Orenda; and a shy loner named Etrem whose panther-black pelt had made him an outcast among his tribe. While Emerald and Raanung continue to realize Khreng's dream of a unified Ungruwarkh, no longer split up into warring tribes and hereditary feuds, Bren and Etrem struggle to avenge the murder of their kin. With the help of a GalFed telepath and a Pueblo shaman, they are successful in finding the killer -- but things become suddenly uncertain when Qumedni, the mischievous energy being who created the Ungrukh from Terran leopards and regards them as his own, decides to step in and lend a hand.