Search Worlds Without End

The heroes are eager to sail to Troy for war, but the wind is still. To fill their sails and set out, they must sacrifice Agamemnon's daughter Iphigenia--and how does a human girl become the wind?

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This short story originally appeared in Interzone, #226 January-February 2010. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Eighth Annual Collection (2011), edited by Gardner Dozois. The story is included in the collection How the World Became Quiet: Myths of the Past, Present, and Future (2013).

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Even death is no match for a trio of elderly, stubborn, ever-sparring sisters, who refuse to rest in peace while their grudges live on...

Originally published at Tor Reactor Mag on 10 January 2024, read it for free at Tor.com

This short story originally appeared on the author's Patreon site and was reprinted in Lightspeed, October 2017.

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This short story originally appeared in Uncanny Magazine, Issue 24, September - October 2018.

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This short story originally appeared in Weird Tales, March-April 2008 and was reprinted in Lightspeed, February 2014. It can also be found in the anthology Sisters of the Revolution: A Feminist Speculative Fiction Anthology (2015), edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer. The story is included in the collection Through the Drowsy Dark (2010).

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This short story originally appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine, #53 February 2011. It can also be found in the anthology Clarkesworld: Year Five (2013), edited by Sean Wallace and Neil Clarke. The story is included in the collection How the World Became Quiet: Myths of the Past, Present, and Future (2013).

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This short story originally appeared in Uncanny Magazine, Issue 19, November-December 2017.

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Originally published on Tor.com, Rachel Swirsky's contemporary tale of love in all its forms and of one robot's quest to know it, and himself, on his own terms is a finalist for the 2010 Hugo Award and the 2010 Locus Award.

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Hugo and Nebula nominated novelette by Rachel Swirsky. It was first published in Jonathan Strahan's Eclipse Four: New Science Fiction and Fantasy (2011) and can also be found in Rich Horton's The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2012 and the collection How the World Became Quiet: Myths of the Past, Present, and Future (2013).

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Nebula-nominated Novella

"Grand Jeté (The Great Leap)" explores three narratives, all bound together: a young girl dying of cancer, her father the tinkerer who has built an artificial version of her to continue her life, and the artificial version--the "new child"--Ruth. It's a complex story about loss and survival, thickly woven with Jewish cultural context and history; while the whole "brain-map AI to continue the life of a dying person (or replace them)" trope itself isn't fresh, the dynamics of this family and their handling of it are.
(synopsis by Brit Mandelo at Tor.com)

Read this story online for free at Subterranean Press.

This short story originally appeared in Interzone, #210 June 2007. It can also be found in the anthology Fantasy: The Best of the Year, 2008 Edition, edited by Rich Horton. The story is included in the collections Through the Drowsy Dark (2010) and How the World Became Quiet: Myths of the Past, Present, and Future (2013).

After a powerful sorceress is murdered, she's summoned over the centuries to witness devastating changes to the land where she was born. A woman who lives by scavenging corpses in the Japanese suicide forest is haunted by her dead lover. A man searches for the memory that will overwrite his childhood abuse. Helios is left at the altar. The world is made quiet by a series of apocalypses.

From the riveting emotion and politics of 'The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath the Queen's Window' (Nebula winner) to the melancholy family saga of 'Eros, Philia, Agape' (Hugo and Theodore Sturgeon finalist), Rachel Swirsky's critically acclaimed stories have quickly made her one of the field's rising stars. Her work is, by turns, clever and engaging, unflinching and quietly devastating--often in the space of the same story.

How the World Became Quiet: Myths of the Past, Present, and Future collects the body of Swirsky's short fiction to date for the first time. While these stories envision pasts, presents, and futures that never existed, they offer revealing examinations of humanity that readers will find undeniably true.

Table of Contents

• The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers Beneath the Queen's Window - (2010)
• A Memory of Wind - (2009)
• Monstrous Embrace - (2008)
• The Adventures of Captain Black Heart Wentworth: A Nautical Tail - (2008)
• Heartstrung - (2007)
• Marry the Sun - (2008)
• A Monkey Will Never Be Rid of Its Black Hands - (2008)
• The Sea of Trees - (2012)
• Fields of Gold - (2011)
• Eros, Philia, Agape - (2009)
• The Monster's Million Faces - (2010)
• Again and Again and Again - (2010)
• Diving After the Moon - (2011)
• Scene from a Dystopia - (2006)
• The Taste of Promises - (2011)
• With Singleness of Heart - (2013)
• Dispersed by the Sun, Melting in the Wind - (2007)
• How the World Became Quiet: A Post-Human Creation Myth - (2007)
• Speech Strata - (2013)

If you were a dinosaur, my love, then you would be a T-Rex. You'd be a small one, only five feet, ten inches, the same height as human-you. You'd be fragile-boned and you'd walk with as delicate and polite a gait as you could manage on massive talons. Your eyes would gaze gently from beneath your bony brow-ridge.

Read this story online for free at Apex Magazine.

January Fifteenth--the day all Americans receive their annual Universal Basic Income payment.

For Hannah, a middle-aged mother, today is the anniversary of the day she took her two children and fled her abusive ex-wife.

For Janelle, a young, broke journalist, today is another mind-numbing day interviewing passersby about the very policy she once opposed.

For Olivia, a wealthy college freshman, today is "Waste Day", when rich kids across the country compete to see who can most obscenely squander the government's money.

For Sarah, a pregnant teen, today is the day she'll journey alongside her sister-wives to pick up the payments that undergird their community--and perhaps embark on a new journey altogether.

In this near-future science fiction novella by Nebula Award-winning author Rachel Swirsky, the fifteenth of January is another day of the status quo, and another chance at making lasting change.

This novelette originally appeared in Uncanny Magazine, Issue 9, March-April 2016.

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This short story originally appeared in Realms of Fantasy, December 2010, and was reprinted in Lightspeed, January 2015.

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This short story origianlly appeared in Fantasy Magazine, June 2008. It can also be found in the anthology The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Three (2009), edited by Jonathan Strahan. The story is included in the collection How the World Became Quiet: Myths of the Past, Present, and Future (2013).

Read the full story for free at Fantasy Magazine.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Subterranean: Tales of Dark Fantasy (2008), edited by William Schafer, and was reprinted in Lightspeed, February 2016. It is included in the collection How the World Became Quiet: Myths of the Past, Present, and Future (2013).

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

From Sholom Aleichem to Avram Davidson, Isaac Bashevis Singer to Tony Kushner, the Jewish literary tradition has always been one rich in the supernatural and the fantastic. In these pages, gathered from the best short fiction of the last ten years, twenty authors prove that their heritage is alive and well - in the spaces between stars that an alphabet can bridge, folklore come to life and histories become stories, and all the places where old worlds and new collide and change.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - essay by Ann VanderMeer
• Burning Beard: The Dreams and Visions of Joseph Ben Jacob, Lord Viceroy of Egypt - (2007) - shortstory by Rachel Pollack
• How the Little Rabbi Grew - (2007) - shortstory by Eliot Fintushel
• Geddarien - (2008) - shortstory by Rose Lemberg
• The Wings of Meister Wilhelm - (2004) - novelette by Theodora Goss
• The Dybbuk in Love - (2005) - novelette by Sonya Taaffe
• Fidelity: A Primer - (2000) - shortstory by Michael Blumlein
• Niels Bohr and the Sleeping Dane - (2005) - shortstory by Jonathon Sullivan
• The Tsar's Dragons - (2009) - novelette by Jane Yolen and Adam Stemple
• Going East - shortfiction by Elana Gomel
• Dark Coffee, Bright Light and the Paradoxes of Omnipotence - shortfiction by Ben Burgis
• Biographical Notes to "A Discourse on the Nature of Causality, with Air-Planes" by Benjamin Rosenbaum - (2004) - novelette by Benjamin Rosenbaum
• Alienation and Love in the Hebrew Alphabet - (2005) - shortfiction by Lavie Tidhar
• The Problem of Susan - (2004) - shortstory by Neil Gaiman
• Uncle Chaim and Aunt Rifke and the Angel - (2008) - novelette by Peter S. Beagle
• Eliyahu ha-Navi - (2000) - shortstory by Max Sparber
• Reuben - shortfiction by Tamar Yellin
• The Muldoon - (2006) - novelette by Glen Hirshberg
• Semaphore - (2007) - shortstory by Alexander C. Irvine
• Golems I Have Known, or, Why My Elder Son's Middle Name is Napoleon - (2008) - essay by Michael Chabon
• The History Within Us - (2010) - shortstory by Matthew Kressel

Chris would rather be anywhere but here, cleaning out his deceased, hateful grandparents' house with his relatives. Each room he visits takes him back in time to another traumatic memory. To escape this house and his grandparents and his past, he'll need to take time travel into his own hands.

Read the full story for free at Tor Reactor

The line between art and magic is a treacherous thing.

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This shot story originally appeared in Lightspeed Magazine, December 2015. It can also be found in the anthology The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016, edited by Karen Joy Fowler and John Joseph Adams.

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This short story originally appeared on the author's Patreon site and was reprinted in Lightspeed, November 2017.

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This novelette originally appeared in the anthology Glorifying Terrorism (2007), edited by Farah Mendlesohn, and was reprinted in Lightspeed, March 2017. The story is included in the collection Through the Drowsy Dark (2010).

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Hugo-nominated and Nebula-winning Novella

This award-winning fantasy novella explores the conjunction of invocation, deep time, and culture shock. It was originally published in Subterranean Magazine, in the summer of 2010, and subsequently republished in Heiresses of Russ 2011: The Year's Best Lesbian Speculative Fiction, The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2011 and The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Vol. 5.

Naeva - the Lady of the story's title - is a sorceress in a matriarchy. After being fatally injured, she is persuaded to allow her spirit to be bound, so that she can be summoned and thus continue to advise her queen. However, after the queen has herself died, Naeva continues to be summoned... first by the queen's successor, and then by people from civilizations millenia later.

Read this story online for free at Subterranean Press.

The mind has an amazing ability to heal itself, especially given the newest therapies, but Aaron's mind just won't cooperate. And neither will... he.

Read this story online for free at Tor.com.

This story originally appeared in Nightmare Magazine, July 2016. It can also be found in the anthologies What the #@&% Is That?: The Saga Anthology of the Monstrous and the Macabre (2016), edited by John Joseph Adams, and The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2017, edited by Paula Guran.

Read the full story for free at Nightmare.

Through the Drowsy Dark collects ten stories and nine poems by Nebula- and Hugo-nominee Rachel Swirsky, "a terrific writer who's been making a name for herself with a string of intelligent, perceptive stories," as critic Jonathan Strahan characterizes her. In Through the Drowsy Dark, Swirsky's characters struggle with too much and too little emotional control, with heartbreak, with grief that has gone deep underground; they search for nothingness, for difference, for oneness. One commits a terrible crime because she believes it's the moral thing to do, while another digs up a dead dog because the very thought of kissing it on the lips makes her clitoris throb. Swirsky's explorations of the heart and mind are fearless--and dangerous fictions indeed.

Table of Contents:

• Those Who Wait Through the Drowsy Dark - (2010)
• Heartstrung - (2007)
• Mirror Images - (2008)
• Of Passage - (2010)
• Heat Engine - (2010)
• The Black Angel's Kiss - (2010)
• Detours on the Way to Nothing - (2008)
• Defiled Imagination - (2010)
• The Debt of the Innocent - (2007)
• No Longer You - (2009) by Katherine Sparrow and Rachel Swirsky
• A Season With the Geese - (2007)
• Pomegranate - (2010)
• Remembering the World - (2008)
• Insider Her Heart - (2010)
• The Dream Vacation - (2006)
• The Oracle on River Street - (2007)
• Dear Melody - (2007)
• Invitation to Emerald - (2007)
• The Fate of Hitler's Brain - (2006)