Search Worlds Without End

While the use of genetically engineered dolls in combat games in near-future Holland poses profound ethical questions, their liberated cousins threaten to alter the nature of human existence; on an artificial world beyond the edge of the Milky Way, one of the last humans triggers a revolution amongst alien races abandoned there by her ancestors; in the ocean of Europa, a hunter confronts a monster with its own agenda; in The Two Dicks , bestselling author Philip K. Dick has a life-changing meeting with President Nixon; while in Cross Road Blues the fate of American history hinges on the career of an itinerant blues musician; and in the Sturgeon Award-winning novella The Choice , two young men make very different decisions about how they will come to terms with a world transformed by climate change and alien interference. Selected by the author himself from his output across over a quarter of a century, this landmark collection contains the very finest science fiction stories by one of Britain s foremost masters of the genre. From sharply satirical alternate histories to explorations of the outer edges of biotechnology, from tales of extravagant far futures to visions of the transformative challenges of deep space, they showcase the reach and restless intelligence of a writer Publishers Weekly has praised as being one of the field s finest practitioners.

Table of Contents:

• Little Ilya and Spider and Box - (1985) - novelette
• The Temporary King - (1987) - novelette
• Cross Roads Blues - (1991) - novelette
• Gene Wars - (1991) - short story
• Prison Dreams - (1992) - novelette
• Children of the Revolution - (1993) - novelette
• Recording Angel - (1995) - novelette
• Second Skin - (1997) - short story
• All Tomorrow's Parties - (1997) - short story
• 17 - (1998) - short story
• Sea Change, with Monsters - (1998) - novella
• How We Lost the Moon, a True Story by Frank W. Allen - (1999) - short story
• A Very British History - (2000) - short story
• The Two Dicks - (2001) - novelette
• Meat - (2005) - short story
• Rocket Boy - (2007) - novelette
• The Thought War - (2008) - short story
• City of the Dead - (2008) - novelette
• Little Lost Robot - (2008) - short story
• Shadow Life - (2009) - short fiction
• The Choice - (2011) - novella
• Story Notes - essay

This short story originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, October-November 2012. It can also be found in the anthology Year's Best SF 18 (2013), edited by David G. Hartwell.

The great geoengineering projects have failed.

The world is still warming, sea levels are still rising, and the Antarctic Peninsula is home to Earth's newest nation, with life quickened by ecopoets spreading across valleys and fjords exposed by the retreat of the ice.

Austral Morales Ferrado, a child of the last generation of ecopoets, is a husky: an edited person adapted to the unforgiving climate of the far south, feared and despised by most of its population. She's been a convict, a corrections officer in a labour camp, and consort to a criminal, and now, out of desperation, she has committed the kidnapping of the century. But before she can collect the ransom and make a new life elsewhere, she must find a place of safety amongst the peninsula's forests and icy plateaus, and evade a criminal gang that has its own plans for the teenage girl she's taken hostage.

Blending the story of Austral's flight with the fractured history of her family and its role in the colonisation of Antarctica, Austral is a vivid portrayal of a treacherous new world created by climate change, and shaped by the betrayals and mistakes of the past.

It's two hundred thousand years in the future. Humanity is extinct, the ruins of its cities fossilised beneath sediments deposited by rising oceans. After a civilisation of intelligent bears collapsed when a plague turned them into crazed killers, their former slaves, descendants of racoons who call themselves the people and worship Mother Earth, have driven the last of the former masters northward and built a new civilisation.

Peaceful and emphasising harmony with nature and cooperation between its tribes, but with strict divisions between the roles of men and women, it spans the American continent and is beginning to explore the rest of the world. But now, sightings of mysterious visitors are being reported. Are they bears which escaped the plague, a remnant population of human beings, or an unknown intelligent species? Where are they from, and what do they want?

This novella was first published in Asimov's Science Fiction, November/December 2023.

Read this story for free at the publisher's website.

America, 1984 - not our version of America, but an America that calls itself the Real, an America in which the invention of Turing Gates has allowed it access to sheaves of alternate histories.

For ten years, in the name of democracy, the Real has been waging clandestine wars and fomenting revolution, freeing versions of America from communist or fascist rule, and extending its influence across a wide variety of alternate realities. But the human and political costs have proven too high, and new President Jimmy Carter has called an end to war, and is bringing troops and secret agents home.

Adam Stone is called out of retirement when his former comrade, Tom Waverly, begins to murder different versions of the same person, mathematician Eileen Barrie. Aided by Waverly's daughter, Linda, Adam hunts for his old friend across different sheaves, but when they finally catch up with Waverly, they discover that they have stumbled into the middle of an audicious conspiracy that plans to exploite a new property of the Turing Gates: it will change not only the history of the Real, but that of every other sheaf, including our own.

COWBOY ANGELS combines the high-octane action and convoluted plots of the TV series 24 in a satirical, multi-layered alternate reality thriller.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Drowned Worlds (2016), edited by Jonathan Strahan. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Fourth Annual Collection (2017), edited by Gardner Dozois, and The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Eleven (2017), edited by Jonathan Strahan.

Before he met the brilliant, hypnotic child Milena, Alex Sharkey had never played with "dolls"--blue-skinned, gengineered lifeforms designed for work, amusement, or destruction. But the underground gene-hacker is seduced by a megalomaniacal little girl's dream of providing the soulless genetic constructs with free thought and a future-and he unwittingly unleashes a plague of madness on the world. Now there's a void in his life and memory that must be refilled, but it means pursuing the dangerous sentient species he helped sire from the ruins of a Magic Kingdom through a wasted Europe. It is Alex Sharkey's last chance and the last hope remaining for a once-dominant human race.

This short story appeared in the magazines Interzone, #48 June 1991, Aboriginal Science Fiction, July-August 1991 and Lightspeed, January 2012. The story can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Ninth Annual Collection (1992), edited by Gardner Dozois, Hackers (1996), edited by Gardner Dozois and Jack Dann, and The Hard SF Renaissance (2002), edited by Kathryn Cramer and David G. Hartwell. It is incuded in the collections The Invisible Country (1996) and A Very British History (2013).

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

Gravesend, or, Everyday Life in the Anthropocene by Paul McAuley was first published in Asimov's Science Fiction, March-April 2023.

Rose is discharged from the army after an encounter with a psych bomb leaves her with lasting trauma and occasional intrusive hallucinations. She washes up in a commune of almost hippie-ish "oldsters," who are making a living in a hot and humid marsh near the mouth of the now-flooded River Thames. Rose is attracted by rumors of "soul chips" and a man who inherited his séance-giving aunt's house who might be looking for them. She meets him and that sets off an unexpected path of investigation -- he doesn't particularly care about them, but someone does, enough to steal ones from his house whenever his aunt's projection system for the housed AI "souls" is turned on. Rose dreams of finding someone to buy the remaining stash and get enough money for treatment at a clinic in the Czech Republic rumored to be able to actually cure people with her kind of trauma. But is that the way of life in the Anthropocene?

Read the full story for free here.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Moon Shots (1999), edited by Peter Crowther. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Seventeenth Annual Collection (2000), edited by Gardner Dozois, and The Eagle Has Landed: 50 Years of Lunar Science Fiction, edited by Neil Clarke. The story is included in the collections Little Machines (2005) and A Very British History (2013).

Monsters! Alien invasions! Lost Worlds! Mad Scientists! Secret Histories!

In the seventeen stories collected here, multiple award-winning author Paul McAuley takes a fresh look at staple themes spanning science fiction, horror, and alternate history. A hero who once helped repel an alien invasion, ruined by self-doubt after his bruising experiences in the eye of the media, must try to save the world all over again. Best-selling author Philip K. Dick confronts Richard Nixon and a conspiracy that has taken control of America. A book dealer discovers strange and dangerous rivals on the far side of the internet. A science-fiction fan explains why he became a serial killer. And in 'Cross Roads Blues', the course of American history hangs on the decision of an itinerant musician.

Table of Contents:

• vii - Introduction (Little Machines) - (2005) - essay by Greg Bear
• 1 - The Two Dicks - (2001) - novelette
• 23 - Residuals - (1997) - novelette by Paul J. McAuley and Kim Newman
• 51 - 17 - (1998) - short story
• 67 - All Tomorrow's Parties - [The Book of Confluence] - (1997) - short story
• 89 - Interstitial - (2000) - short story
• 111 - How We Lost the Moon, a True Story by Frank W. Allen - (1999) - short story
• 129 - Under Mars - (2002) - short story
• 149 - Danger: Hard Hack Area - short story (variant of Danger - Hard Hack Area 2000)
• 153 - The Madness of Crowds - (2003) - short story
• 163 - The Secret of My Success - (1998) - short story
• 183 - The Proxy - (2000) - novelette
• 203 - I Spy - (1999) - short story
• 221 - The Rift - (2000) - novelette
• 253 - Alien TV - [Alien TV] - (1999) - short story
• 263 - Before the Flood - [Alien TV] - (1998) - short story
• 279 - A Very British History - (2000) - short story
• 289 - Cross Roads Blues - (1991) - novelette (variant of Crossroads)
• 321 - Afterword (Little Machines) - (2005) - essay

When he chances upon a strange piece of graffiti daubed on the walls of a north London restaurant, the violence of his reaction takes Alfie Flowers by surprise. The thorny circle of dashes and zigzags seems to reach right inside his brain - and provokes a flashback to a terrifying childhood incident. The incident Alfie has spent his life trying to forget. Convinced the graffiti artist possesses the clues to his past, Alfie sets out to track down the elusive 'Morph'. His search will lead him to the mysterious Nomads' Club and a secret history of espionage, culminating in the disappearance of Alfie's father over twenty years before. But the real secret of the graffiti patterns - or 'glyphs' - is to be found amidst the chaos of post-war Iraq. There, within the shadowy depths of an ancient network of caves, Alfie will uncover the powerful and disturbing truth behind the rituals of a strange, prehistoric society. But there are others seeking the source of the glyphs. People with sinister and dangerous motives - and if they were to succeed in their aims, the consequences would be too horrible to contemplate...

WFA nominated novelette. It originally appeared in Interzone, #149 November 1999. The story can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Thirteenth Annual Collection (2000), edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, and The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 11 (2000), edited by Stephen Jones.

In a grim and wondrous industrial age of artists, princes, and philosophers, a struggling painter follows his elusive angel through the twisting, soot-stained streets of Florence... and into a world of deceits, dark magics, and murder.

On the eve of the Medici Pope's visit, an assassin has struck down an assistant to the immortal Raphael, the great Florentine Republic's most renowned personage. It is a crime that draws a young artist named Pasquale and the brilliant, alcoholic investigative reporter Niccolo Machiavegli into the deepest shadows of their gray, steam-driven city-where there are fouler deaths to follow... and grave intrigues of war, witchcraft, and science that could lead the world-weary journalist and his unwitting companion heavenward or to Hell.

This novelette originally appeared in the anthology Old Venus (2015), edited by Gardner Dozois and George R. R. Martin. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Third Annual Collection (2016), edited by Gardner Dozois.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Constellations: The Best of New British SF, edited by Peter Crowther. It can also be found in the anthologies Year's Best SF 11 (2005), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer, and War & Space: Recent Combat (2012), edited by Rich Horton and Sean Wallace.

Mars, 600 years in the future, is dying. Five hundred years after the Chinese conquered the Red Planet, the great work of terraforming is failing. The human-machine Consensus of Earth had persuaded the AI Emperor to follow the Golden Path into a vast virtual reality universe, leaving behind an ungoverned planet swept by hunger riots and the beginnings of civil war. Enter Wei Lee, a lowly itinerant agricultural technician: rock 'n' roll fan, dupe, holy fool - and unlikely Messiah. After stumbling on an anarchist pilot hiding near the wreckage of her spacecraft, he's drawn into a revolutionary plot that has been spinning for decades.

With the help of a ghost, the broadcasts of the King of the Cats, a Yankee yak herder, and a little Girl God, Lee travels across the badlands, swampy waterways and vast dust seas to a showdown at the summit of the biggest volcano in the Solar System. Not even the God-like Consensus can predict the outcome of his struggle to define his own destiny...

Epic in scope, Red Dust's spectacular, fast-paced story brilliantly brings to life the planet that has captured our imagination like no other.

Something Happened Here, But We're Not Quite Sure What It Was by Paul McAuley is a complex sf story about politics and xenophobia when human colonists on an Earth-like planet are faced with the possibility of reaching out to alien cultures, especially when a big organization that has previously done harm is in charge of the operation.

This story is included in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2017, edited by Rich Horton.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

This short story originally appeared in Clarkesworld, Issue 113, February 2016.

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

In these nine exraordinary tales, acclaimed author PAUL J. MCAULEY--winner of the Philip K. Dick, British Fantasy Society, John W. Campbell Memorial, and Aruthur C. Clarke Awards--explores the wonders and dangers of biotechnology and its creations in stories whose settings careen from a distant alternate past to a breathtaking far-flung future. In a sixteenth-century Venice, transformed by a premature Industrial Revolution, a physian mourning his daughter's passing meets a mountebank with the power to raise the dead. In a tomorrow of raw and terrible beauty, revolutionaries struggle to free genetically engineered creatrues fated to die in combat games and violent sexual encounters. And ten million years in the future, on an artificial world orbiting an immense black hole, a civilization of awesome strangeness and complexity created--and abandoned--by the Godlike Preservers is about to meet the human ancestors of its makers.

2026: Something is growing in the Pacific Ocean, a strange fungus-like organism that may threaten our entire food chain. Christened "the slick," the bizarre phenomenon is quickly the subject of intense, top-secret analysis-which rapidly reveals that it contains DNA unlike that of any other life on the planet.

Where is it from? A Chinese mission to Mars is rumored to have discovered life beneath the Martian icecap, but the Chinese aren't talking. Dr. Mariella Anders is recruited by NASA to join an urgent mission to the Red Planet to find out. Brilliant and committed to science, Mariella wants only the truth, but others' motives are less noble. Faced with corporations, activist groups, and superpowers, each with their own secret agendas, Mariella is on a perilous quest for knowledge... and she's about the discover the high price of truth.

This novelette originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, January 1987. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fifth Annual Collection (1988), edited by Gardner Dozois. The story is included in the collections The King of the Hill and Other Stories (1991) and A Very British History (2013).

This short story originally appeared in Postscripts, Summer 2008. It can also be found in the anthologies The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Three (2009), edited by Jonathan Strahan, The Living Dead 2 (2010), edited by John Joseph Adams, and Alien Contact (2011), edited by Marty Halpern. The story is included in the collection A Very British History (2013).

This novelette originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, August 2001. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Nineteenth Annual Collection (2002), edited by Gardner Dozois, The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 13 (2002), edited by Stephen Jones, and One Lamp: Alternate History Stories from The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (2003), edited by Gordon Van Gelder. The story is included in the collections Little Machines (2005) and A Very British History (2013).

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Twelve Tomorrows (2013), edited by Stephen Cass, and was reprinted in Lightspeed, February 2016. It can also be found in the anhtology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-First Annual Collection (2014), edited by Gardner Dozois.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

On a giant artificial world surrounding an artificial sun, one man - a lucidor, a keeper of the peace, a policeman - is on the hunt. His target was responsible for an atrocity, but is too valuable to the government to be truly punished. Instead he has been sent to the frontlines of the war, to use his unique talents on the enemy. So the lucidor has ignored orders, deserted from his job, left his home and thrown his life away, in order to finally claim justice.

Separated by massive seas, the various maps dotted on the surface of this world rarely contact each other. But something has begun to infiltrate the edges of the lucidor's map, something that genetically alters animals and plants and turns them into killers. Only the lucidor knows the depths to which his quarry will sink in order to survive, only the lucidor can capture him. The way is long and dangerous. The lucidor's government has set hunters after him. He has no friends, no resources, no plan.

But he does have a mission.

Plague, civil war, and uncontrolled experiments in genetic engineering have caused widespread chaos and devastation throughout Africa. Nicholas Hyde is part of a team of forensic pathologists investigating a massacre in the swamp forest of the northern Congo when an armed band of ferocious ape-like creatures attack. Nick survives, but finds that he's at the center of a massive cover-up.

For although the "white devils" that killed Nick's friends were almost certainly the result of illegal genetic manipulation, Obligate, the environmentally conscious transnational now controlling this part of the Congo, denies that they exist, and ruthlessly suppresses all evidence to the contrary. Although he has secrets of his own to conceal, Nick becomes determined to uncover the origin of the mysterious creatures -- and why certain individuals are prepared to resort to murder to bury the truth.

But even the atrocities he has already witnessed cannot prepare him for the terrifying secrets he uncovers on his journey into the wrecked heart of Africa, and the birthplace of the white devils.

Winner of both the Arthur C. Clarke and Philip K. Dick Awards, Paul McAuley has emerged as one of the most thrilling new talents in science fiction, acclaimed for his richly imagined future worlds as well as for his engrossing stories and vivid, all-too- human characters. Now he gives us a gripping and unforgettable thriller of the day after tomorrow--when the world and the Web are one.

London, in the aftermath of the Infowar. Surveillance cameras on every street corner, their tireless gaze linked to a cutting-edge artificial intelligence system. Censors zealously patrolling the Internet. A talented, young woman murdered before the cybernetic gaze of eager voyeurs.

A policeman sidelined to a backwater computer-crimes unit seizes on the chance to contribute to this high-profile murder case, but soon finds himself entangled in a web of high-tech intrigue. Why was Sophie Booth's murder broadcast over the Internet? What is the link between her brutal killing and London's new surveillance system? Who is the self-styled Avenger, and why does he communicate only by e-mail?

Whole Wide World is a compelling cyber-conspiracy thriller set in a world where information is the universal currency, and some people will do anything to be able to control it....

This short story originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, August 2015. It can also be found in the anthology The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume 1 (2016), edited by Neil Clarke.

Dorothy Yoshida, an astronomer and telepath, joins the archaelogical team exploring the mysterious ruins of a nearly dead planet that shows some signs of returning to life.

On Elysium, a colony of settlers is slowly expanding through the annual arrival of a colony boat from Earth. Conflict between the city of Port of Plenty and the outlying settlements begins to build when things do not proceed as planned on one Landing Day; a split-perspective narrative supplies observations from both within and outside the main civilisation as the established way of life begins to fall apart. Elysium's aboriginees form the mysterious counterpoint to the human and AI politics responsible for the civil war.

Also published in the UK as Secret Harmonies.

In the aftermath of an interstellar war an enigmatic star is discovered, travelling towards the Solar System from the galactic core. Its appearance adds a new and dangerous factor in the turbulent politics of the inhabited worlds as the rival factions - the power-holders of the ReUnited Nations, the rebels who secretly oppose their power, and the Religious Witnesses - all see advantages to be gained. But what awesome technology started the star on its journey half a million years ago - and why?

This short story originally appeared in Postscripts, Summer 2008. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Sixth Annual Collection (2009), edited by Gardner Dozois. The story is included in the collection A Very British History (2013).

This novella originally appeared in Subterranean Online, Spring 2009. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2010, edited by Rich Horton, and The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Seventh Annual Collection (2010), edited by Gardner Dozois.

Read the full story for free at Subterranean.

Sturgeon Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, February 2011 and was reprinted in Lightspeed, January 2015. The story can also be found in the anthologies:

• The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Six (2012), edited by Jonathan Strahan
• The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Ninth Annual Collection (2012), edited by Gardner Dozois
• The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2012, edited by Rich Horton
• Not One of Us: Stories of Aliens on Earth (2018), edited by Neil Clarke

It is included in the collections A Very British History (2013).

This short story originally appeared in Arc 1.2: Post Human Conditions. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirtieth Annual Collection (2013), edited by Gardner Dozois, Aliens: Recent Encounters (2013), edited by Alex Dally MacFarlane, and More Human Than Human: Stories of Androids, Robots, and Manufactured Humanity (2017), edited by Neil Clarke.

The aliens are here. And they want to help. The extraordinary new project from one of the country's most acclaimed and consistently brilliant SF novelists of the last 30 years.

The Jackaroo have given humanity 15 worlds and the means to reach them. They're a chance to start over, but they're also littered with ruins and artifacts left by the Jackaroo's previous clients.

Miracles that could reverse the damage caused by war, climate change, and rising sea levels. Nightmares that could for ever alter humanity - or even destroy it.

Chloe Millar works in London, mapping changes caused by imported scraps of alien technology. When she stumbles across a pair of orphaned kids possessed by an ancient ghost, she must decide whether to help them or to hand them over to the authorities. Authorities who believe that their visions point towards a new kind of danger.

And on one of the Jackaroo's gift-worlds, the murder of a man who has just arrived from Earth leads policeman Vic Gayle to a war between rival gangs over possession of a remote excavation site.

Something is coming through. Something linked to the visions of Chloe's orphans, and Vic Gayle's murder investigation. Something that will challenge the limits of the Jackaroo's benevolence...

The Jackaroo, those enigmatic aliens who claim to have come to help, gave humanity access to worlds littered with ruins and scraps of technology left by long-dead client races. But although people have found new uses for alien technology, that technology may have found its own uses for people. The dissolute scion of a powerful merchant family, and a woman living in seclusion with only her dog and her demons for company, have become infected by a copies of a powerful chunk of alien code. Driven to discover what it wants from them, they become caught up in a conflict between a policeman allied to the Jackaroo and the laminated brain of a scientific wizard, and a mystery that spans light years and centuries. Humanity is about to discover why the Jackaroo came to help us, and how that help is shaping the end of human history.

Inhabiting a colony spaceship in the thirty second century are members of a religious cult that leftEarth to find a world of their own. Their leader,Seraph, has downloaded his mind into the ship's computers, but now he has gone silent, enticed and serenaded by a siren song coming from inside a black hole. Trapped in orbit around the void, Seraph's followers are confused by his silence, and when the Eighth Doctor arrives with his friend Fyneseeking a cure to a raging Tyger-fever which has infected his companion, he finds a world on the brink of chaos.

This novelette originally appeared in the anthology New Legends (1995), edited by Greg Bear and Martin H. Greenberg, and was reprinted on infinity plus, Februari 2000. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirteenth Annual Collection (1996), edited by Gardner Dozois, The Furthest Horizon: SF Adventures to the Far Future (2000), also edited by Dozois, and The Space Opera Renaissance (2006), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Kramer. The story is included in the collections The Invisible Country (1996) and A Very British History (2013).

Read the full story for free at Infinity Plus.

An Arthur C. Clarke and John W. Campbell Memorial Award-winner for his novel Fairyland, Paul J. McAuley designs and fabricates remarkably intricate worlds. He builds some out of solid bricks of science, some from granite carved from the rich quarry of human history and experience. All are marvelous constructs of invention and thought; enthralling landscapes to wander, explore and lose oneself in.

He offers now a world that stands distinctly apart: a place of savagery, secrets and war; the home of ten thousand extraordinary bloodlines ruled by universal devotion to absent gods; a realm of merchants, mercenaries, ghouls, heretics, bureaucrats and feral machines; a world called Confluence.

Child Of The River is the first book of the end times; the beginning chapter in the final great epic of a mysterious civilization. In it, a singular young man named Yama makes his way from a ghostly city of the dead to a metropolis of living wonders, and through the labyrinthine country of Confluence.

On an artificial world created and seeded with ten thousand bloodlines by the long-vanished Preservers, young Yama's ancestry is unique, for he appears to be the last remaining scion of the Builders, closest of all races to the worshipped architects of Confluence. And on a day near the end of the world, Yama must finally acknowledge the power he neither anticipated nor desires. In the dust of many crumbling bureaucracies, Yama searches for an identity and a history - awed and fearful of his ever-growing capacity to awaken the terrible machines of destruction that his world's absent gods left slumbering.

To the common folk - the unshaped and aboriginal - he is the fulfillment of age-old prophecies. To the functionaries of the Department of Indigenous Affairs, he is a weapon to be molded and used in the bloody civil war raging at the planet's midpoint - a seemingly endless battle that pits those who revere the Preservers' laws against the dangerous Heretics who would obliterate all antiquated values and codes of conduct. But there are still others who have taken notice of Yama as he pursues the hidden secrets of his past. Intelligent powers older than the Builders - as old, perhaps, as the Preservers themselves - are pursuing Yama in turn. And they will stop at nothing to control his present-and, as a result, the future of everything that lives-in anticipation of the ultimate triumph of the Ancients of Days.

Who would lay time to rest, or raise it up from its tomb?

The Ancients of Days -- humans returned from a long exile in the depths of time and space and history -- brought heresy and doubt to the artificial world of Confluence, and ignited a terrible civil war, of all the varied creatures of Confluence's ten thousand genetically manipulated bloodlines, only young Yama holds the power to end the conflict, for who ever controls him controls the myriad machines of the world. Though now a helpless captive being forged into a weapon of horrific consequence, Yama must win the struggle to reclaim his soul, and complete his search for the true story of his origin -- a story mapped eons before his birth.

This short story originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, March 2006, and was reprinted in Clarkesworld Magazine, June 2013. It can also be found in the anthologies Year's Best SF 12 (2007), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Kramer, The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fourth Annual Collection (2007), edited by Gardner Dozois, and Space Opera (2007), edited by Rich Horton.

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology The Starry Rift: Tales of New Tomorrows (2008), edited by Jonathan Strahan. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Sixth Annual Collection (2009).

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Edge of Infinity (2012), edited by Jonathan Strahan. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirtieth Annual Collection (2013), edited by Gardner Dozois, and The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Seven (2013).

'Making History', is chronologically the first of a brief series of stories ('Sea Change, With Monsters', 'Second Skin', and 'The Gardens of Saturn' have already appeared elsewhere) dealing with the aftermath of the Quiet War, and, more importantly, with the biotechnology bubbling underfoot which is rapidly transforming the Solar System.

Sturgeon Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared in the antholgoy Skylife: Space Habitats in Story and Science, ed. Gregory Benford & George Zebrowski. The story can also be found in the anthologies Year's Best SF 6 (2001), edited by David G. Hartwell, The Year's Best Science Fiction: Eighteenth Annual Collection (2001), edited by Gardner Dozois, The Hard SF Renaissance (2002), edited by Kathryn Cramer and David G. Hartwell and Beyond Flesh (2002), edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois. It is included in teh collection Stories from the Quiet War (2012).

This novella originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, September 1998. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Sixteenth Annual Collection (1999), editd by Gardner Dozois. The story is included in the collection A Very British History (2013).

This short story originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, April 1997. It can also be found in the anthologies:

• The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fifteenth Annual Collection (1998), edited by Gardner Dozois
• Future War (1999), edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois
• Isaac Asimov's Solar System (1999), edited by Gardner Dozois and Sheila Williams
• Best of the Best: 20 Years of the Year's Best Science Fiction (2005), edited by Gardner Dozois

The story is included in the collection A Very British History (2013).

This novelette originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, March 2002. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twentieth Annual Collection (2003), edited by Gardner Dozois.

Twenty-third century Earth, ravaged by climate change, looks backwards to the holy ideal of a pre-industrial Eden. Political power has been grabbed by a few powerful families and their green saints. Millions of people are imprisoned in teeming cities; millions more labour on Pharaonic projects to rebuild ruined ecosystems.

On the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, the Outers, descendants of refugees from Earth's repressive regimes, have constructed a wild variety of self-sufficient cities and settlements: scientific utopias crammed with exuberant creations of the genetic arts; the last outposts of every kind of democratic tradition. The fragile detente between the Outer cities and the dynasties of Earth is threatened by the ambitions of the rising generation of Outers, who want to break free of their cosy, inward-looking pocket paradises, colonise the rest of the Solar System, and drive human evolution in a hundred new directions.

On Earth, many demand pre-emptive action against the Outers before it's too late; others want to exploit the talents of their scientists and gene wizards. Amid campaigns for peace and reconciliation, political machinations, crude displays of military might, and espionage by cunningly wrought agents, the two branches of humanity edge towards war...

The Quiet War is over. The city states of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn have fallen to the Three Powers Alliance of Greater Brazil, the European Union and the Pacific Community. A century of enlightenment, rational utopianism and exploration of new ways of being human has fallen dark. Outers are herded into prison camps and forced to collaborate in the systematic plundering of their great archives of scientific and technical knowledge, while Earth's forces loot their cities, settlements and ships, and plan a final solution to the 'Outer problem'.

But Earth's victory is fragile, and riven by vicious internal politics. While seeking out and trying to anatomise the strange gardens abandoned in place by Avernus, the Outers' greatest genius, the gene wizard Sri Hong-Owen is embroiled in the plots and counterplots of the family that employs her. The diplomat Loc Ifrahim soon discovers that profiting from victory isn't as easy as he thought.

And in Greater Brazil, the Outers' democratic traditions have infected a population eager to escape the tyranny of the great families who rule them. After a conflict fought to contain the expansionist, posthuman ambitions of the Outers, the future is as uncertain as ever. Only one thing is clear. No one can escape the consequences of war - especially the victors.

Fomalhaut was first colonised by the posthuman Quick, who established an archipelago of thistledown cities and edenic worldlets within the star's vast dust belt. Their peaceful, decadent civilisation was swiftly conquered by a band of ruthless, aggressive, unreconstructed humans who call themselves the True, then, a century before, the True beat back an advance party of Ghosts, a posthuman cult which colonised the nearby system of Beta Hydri after being driven from the Solar System a thousand years ago. Now the Ghosts have returned to Fomalhaut, to begin their end game: the conquest of its single gas giant planet, a captured interstellar wanderer far older than the rest of Fomalhaut's system. At its core is a sphere of hot metallic hydrogen with strange and powerful properties based on exotic quantum physics. The Quick believe it is inhabited by an ancient alien Mind; the True believe it can be developed into a weapon, and the Ghosts believe it can be transformed into a computational system so powerful it can reach into their past, collapse timelines, and fulfil the ancient prophecies of their founder.

In the far future, a young man stands on a barren asteroid. His ship has been stolen, his family kidnapped or worse, and all he has on his side is a semi-intelligent spacesuit. The only member of the crew to escape, Hari has barely been off his ship before. It was his birthplace, his home and his future. He's going to get it back. McAuley's latest novel is set in the same far-flung future as his last few novels, but this time he takes on a much more personal story. This is a tale of revenge, of murder and morality, of growing up and discovering the world around you. Throughout the novel we follow Hari's viewpoint, and as he unravels the mysteries that led to his stranding, we discover them alongside him. But throughout his journeys, Hari must always bear one thing in mind. Nobody is to be trusted.