Search Worlds Without End

Some things happen whether or not you clap your hands.

This short story is included in the anthologies The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Seven (2013), edited by Jonathan Strahan, and Worlds Seen in Passing: Ten Years of Tor.com Short Fiction (2018), edited by Irene Gallo.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

Hugo Award nominated novella. It originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, April 1993. The story can also be found in the anthology Isaac Asimov's Werewolves (1999) edited by Gardner Dozois and Sheila Williams.

World Fantasy Award winning and Hugo and Nebula Award nominated novella.

The Irish Giant -- that's what Londoners called Charlie Bryne, an enormous country lad standing 8 feet tall in his bare feet. He made his fortune by exhibiting himself, but Bryne was far more than a human oddity. He had the magical power of healing, a deep connection to the natural magic of the earth, and the blood of Irish kings in his veins. In 1782, he came to London with a single goal -- to bring the Irish home to the island they had left.

John Hunter was a man of science and insatiable curiosity -- a surgeon, a natural philosopher, and a tireless collector of natural oddities. With analysis and dissection, Hunter strove to understand the natural world -- and he wanted to add the bones of a giant to his collection.

This novella, winner of the 1990 World Fantasy Award, examines what happens when the quest for scientific knowledge meets ancient natural magic.

It originally appeared in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, May 1990. The story is included in the collection Points of Departure (1990).

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Bridging Infinity (2016), edited by Jonathan Strahan, and was reprinted in Clarkesworld, Issue 140, May 2018. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Fourth Annual Collection (2014), edited by Gardner Dozois.

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

This short story originally appeared in Lightspeed, June 2017.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

Nebula Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in the anthology Full Spectrum (1988), edited by Lou Aronica and Shawna McCarthy. It is also included in the collection Points of Departure (1990).

This novella originally appeared in the anthology Full Spectrum 3 (1991), edited by Lou Aronica, Amy Stout and Betsy Mitchell. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Ninth Annual Collection (1992), edited by Gardner Dozois.

This short story originally appeared in Amazing Science Fiction, March 1983. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: First Annual Collection (1984), edited by Gardner Dozois, Amazing Stories: 60 Years of the Best Science Fiction (1985), edited by Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg, and Mermaids! (1986), edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois. The story is included in the collection Points of Departure (1990).

This novelette originally appeared on Sci Fiction, February 11, 2004. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Second Annual Collection (2005), edited by Gardner Dozois.

Read or listen to the full story for free at Escapepod.

Nebula Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in the anthology Alien Sex (1990), edited by Ellen Datlow. It can also be found in The Year's Best Science Fiction: Eighth Annual Collection (1991), edited by Gardner Dozois, Nebula Awards 26 (1992), edited by James Morrow, and Sisters of the Revolution: A Feminist Speculative Fiction Anthology (2015), edited by Jeff and Ann Vandermeer.

Growing up on the edge of the Missouri wilderness in the 1830s, Nadya knew she was not like other girls. But when she became a woman and the Change came, she discovered just how different she was. For Nadya was a shapechanger, a werewolf like her mother and father before her.

Points of Departure is a collection of short stories tinged with barbed humor that won the 1991 Philip K. Dick Award. Alternating between hope and despair, Pat Murphy's stories range from "Rachel in Love," which portrays a chimpanzee whose brain is implanted with the personality of a young girl who has died to "His Vegetable Wife," the story of a farmer who grows a spouse from a packet of seed only to find that she is more quiet than docile. All but one of the 19 stories in this collection have been published previously in magazines and anthologies.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - (1990) - essay by Kate Wilhelm
• Dead Men on TV - (1988) - shortstory
• Women in the Trees - shortstory
• Don't Look Back - (1980) - shortstory
• Orange Blossom Time - (1981) - shortstory
• In the Islands - (1983) - shortstory
• Touch of the Bear - (1980) - shortstory
• On a Hot Summer Night in a Place Far Away - (1985) - shortstory
• Sweetly the Waves Call to Me - (1981) - shortstory
• His Vegetable Wife - (1986) - shortstory
• Good-bye, Cynthia - (1988) - shortstory
• Prescience - (1989) - shortstory
• Clay Devils - (1987) - shortstory
• A Falling Star Is a Rock From Outer Space - (1986) - shortstory
• With Four Lean Hounds - (1984) - novelette
• On the Dark Side of the Station Where the Train Never Stops - (1984) - shortstory
• In the Abode of the Snows - (1986) - novelette
• Rachel in Love - (1987) - novelette
• Recycling Strategies for the Inner City - shortstory
• Bones - (1990) - novella
• Afterword - Why I Write - essay

Locus, Sturgeon and Nebula Award winning and Hugo Award nominated novelette.

Rachel has the mind of a teenage girl, but the body and the innocent heart of a young chimp. Sometimes when she looks at her gnarled brown fingers, they seem alien, wrong, out of place. She remembers having small, pale, delicate hands with painted fingernails. Memories lie upon memories, layers upon layers, like the sedimentary rocks of the desert buttes.

Aaron Jacobs, the man Rachel calls father, was a neurologist who discovered how to capture the electrical pattern of a living brain's thoughts and memories. When his daughter died unexpectedly, the grieving father imposed the electrical pattern of the girl's brain on a young chimp, creating Rachel, a chimp he recognizes as his daughter.

Rachel knows that she is a real girl -- but when Aaron Jacobs dies, she must make her way in a world that treats her as nothing but an animal.

The story originally appeared in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, April 1987. It has been reprinted many times and can be found in the anthologies:

• The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fifth Annual Collection (1988), edited by Gardner Dozois
• The 1988 Annual World's Best SF, edited by Arthur W. Saha and Donald A. Wollheim
• Nebula Awards 23 (1989), edited by Michael Bishop
• Future on Fire (1991), edited by Orson Scott Card
• Women of Wonder: The Contemporary Years: SF by Women from the 1970s to the 1990s (1995), edited by Pamela Sargent
• A Woman's Liberation: A Choice of Futures by and About Women (2001), edited by Connie Willis and Sheila Williams
• Daughters of Earth: Feminist Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century (2006), edited by Justine Larbalestier
• The Apes of Wrath (2013), edited by Richard Klaw
• The Big Book of Science Fiction (2016), edited by Jeff and Ann VanderMeer

It is also included in the collection Points of Departure (1990).

Half a generation ago, a gesture in the name of peace turned out to spread plague and disaster. In San Francisco, the survivors are heir to a city transformed. It is a haunted, dreaming place peopled with memories, and in a strange way nearly alive itself. And although it is only beginning to recover from near-ultimate disaster, the city is at risk again. An army of power-hungry men are descending on San Francisco. Teenagers Jax and Danny-boy must lead the fight for freedom using the only weapons they have-art, magic, and the soul of the city itself.

An archaeologist sees the ghosts of ancient Mayans when she uncovers their relics in Mexico. When she discovers she can also communicate with two of them--a mother and her estranged daughter--she provides a link that brings the ancient pair closer together.

On the wrong end of history, a Neanderthal boy fights to get home

For generations, the people of the valley have hunted the bear, killing it to draw on its mystical power. On his first hunt, a young member of the tribe pursues the bear through the wilderness. Moments before their battle begins, the boy plunges into darkness--and awakes in a world beyond his wildest imagination, where nature is corrupted and the boundaries of time mean nothing at all.

The researchers who brought him into the future call the Neanderthal boy "Sam." The portal he fell through is the plaything of a billionaire intent on repopulating the world of its many extinct animals: birds, wolves, and bears. Sam was brought along by accident, but he will find a purpose in these alien surroundings. Guided by one woman who can see the past and another who can look into the future, the boy who hunted the bear will unlock the mysteries of time itself.

Written by Pat Murphy as her alter-ego Max Merriwell, a space opera retelling of The Hobbit. Bailey, an asteroid miner in the backwaters of the galactic civilization, is swept up in an adventure when he retrieves a message pod drifting in space, and notifies the Farr Clone that he has it. The Farrs are the oldest, richest clone family in the galaxy, and they made their fortune by mapping the wormholes that allow faster-than-light travel. Along with the legendary Gitana, the Farrs have discovered a piece of an ancient alien artifact that may be a map of the entire wormhole system. Bailey's message pod contains word of where the rest of the map may be.

When Sarah McKensie's parents are murdered, the young girl is saved by a mother wolf and raised in the pack. Part Mowgli, part Tarzan of the Apes, Sarah becomes the Wild Angel of the Sierras, rescuing those in need, while eluding her parents' killer, a man who still wants to see her dead.

An amazing young savage, Sarah lives with the wolves, hunts with the wolves, fights for dominance in the pack. She watches people from a distance, but she does not think of herself as one of them. She belongs to the pack. How can such a child be reclaimed for civilization?

Sarah's struggle for survival brings together a fascinating assortment of characters: Max Phillips, who found her parents' bodies and never gave up the search for the missing child; Audrey North, Sarah's aunt, who wants nothing more than to find her niece; and, ultimately, a young Temperance missionary, Professor Serunca's travelling circus, and a mysterious itinerant fortune-teller named Gitana.

Susan Galina and her friend Pat have escaped their normal lives into the elegant, isolated world of the Odyssey, a luxury cruise ship heading from New York to Europe via Bermuda. Pat is working on her doctoral thesis in quantum physics, and Susan is recovering from a recent and unhappy divorce.

To Susan's delight, she discovers that her favourite author, Max Merriwell, is also aboard ship, teaching a writers' workshop. Susan's life becomes even more interesting when she meets Tom Clayton, the handsome chief of security. This cruise looks very promising indeed.

But the pleasant shipboard vacation turns dark as the Odyssey passes into the Bermuda Triangle. Each year, Max Merriwell writes three novels: a science fiction novel under his own name, a fantasy novel under the pseudonym Mary Maxwell, and a mystery novel under the pseudonym Weldon Merrimax. The trouble begins when Max receives a threatening note that appears to come from Weldon Merrimax, Max's own pseudonym. Susan hears wolves howling in the night, the ship's passengers are seized with a dancing mania, and monsters lurk in the ship's corridors. An eyewitness reports a murder - but the victim of the crime is not on the passenger list and the body is nowhere to be found. While others struggle to understand these strange events, Pat seeks the explanation in quantum theory.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction I: First, Some Jokes - essay by Pat Murphy
• Introduction II: Transformations in Reading - essay by Karen Joy Fowler
• Birth Days - (2003) - short story by Geoff Ryman
• Everything But the Signature is Me - (1978) - essay by James Tiptree, Jr.
• The Ghost Girls of Rumney Mill - (2003) - short story by Sandra McDonald
• Boys - (2003) - short story by Carol Emshwiller
• Genre: A Word Only the French Could Love - essay by Ursula K. Le Guin
• excerpts from Set This House in Order: A Romance of Souls - (2003) - short fiction by Matt Ruff
• Judging the Tiptree - essay by Suzy McKee Charnas
• The Catgirl Manifesto: An Introduction - (2003) - short fiction by Richard Calder [as by Christina Flook]
• Looking Through Lace - (2003) - novella by Ruth Nestvold
• "Tiptree" and History - essay by Joanna Russ
• What I Didn't See - (2002) - short story by Karen Joy Fowler
• The Snow Queen - (1844) - novelette by Hans Christian Andersen
• The Lady of the Ice Garden - (2003) - novelette by Kara Dalkey
• Travels with the Snow Queen - (1996) - novelette by Kelly Link

Table of Contents:

• Introduction (The James Tiptree Award Anthology 2) - (2005) - essay by Debbie Notkin
• Talking Too Much: About James Tiptree, Jr. - (2005) - essay by Julie Phillips
• Letter to Rudolf Arnheim - (2005) - essay by James Tiptree, Jr.
• Congenital Agenesis of Gender Ideation - (2005) - short fiction by Raphael Carter
• The Gift - (2004) - novella by L. Timmel Duchamp
• excerpts from Camouflage - (2005) - short fiction by Joe Haldeman
• excerpts from Troll: A Love Story - (2005) - short fiction by Johanna Sinisalo
• Looking for Clues - (2005) - essay by Nalo Hopkinson
• Nirvana High - (2004) - novelette by Eileen Gunn and Leslie What
• Five Fucks - (1996) - novelette by Jonathan Lethem
• All of Us Can Almost... - (2004) - short story by Carol Emshwiller
• The Brains of Female Hyena Twins - (2005) - essay by Gwyneth Jones
• Another Story or a Fisherman of the Inland Sea - (1994) - short fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin
• Kissing Frogs - (2004) - short story by Jaye Lawrence

Table of Contents:

• Introduction (The James Tiptree Award Anthology 3) - essay by Jeffrey D. Smith
• Have Not Have - (2001) - novelette by Geoff Ryman
• The Glass Bottle Trick - (2000) - short story by Nalo Hopkinson
• Wooden Bride - (2004) - short story by Margo Lanagan
• Dearth - (2005) - short story by Aimee Bender
• Mountain Ways - (1996) - novelette by Ursula K. Le Guin
• Shame - (2006) - essay by Pam Noles
• The Future of Female: Octavia Butler's Mother Lode - (1990) - essay by Dorothy Allison
• Liking What You See: A Documentary - (2002) - novella by Ted Chiang
• The Girl Who Was Plugged In - (1973) - novelette by James Tiptree, Jr.
• Dear Alice Sheldon - (2006) - essay by L. Timmel Duchamp
• Little Faces - (2005) - novelette by Vonda N. McIntyre
• Knapsack Poems - (2002) - short story by Eleanor Arnason