Search Worlds Without End

Hugo, Sidewise and Sturgeon Award nominated novelette.

Imagine you're a little boy, living a life straight out of "Leave It to Beaver," back in October 1962. That would be a good description of a boy named Alan Burke, usually called Burke the Jerk by his friends. Alan likes to play in the woods and hang out with those friends, drink Cokes at the drugstore and read paperback fantasy novels. Sometimes young Alan wonders what life will be like, when he grows up, wonders if he'll manage to become a paleontologist, or whether he'll grow up like most men in early 1960s America, grow up to sell cars, or maybe life insurance. But it's October 1962, and in Alan Burke's version of that familiar old world, things are about to go horribly wrong.

It originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, May 1996.

The word in the year 2239 is that the human race is doomed. With the Earth groaning beneath the weight of 200 billion people and with the limit of derivable scientific knowledge frighteningly close at hand, scientists believe the human race will crash, burn and vanish by the end of the twenty-third century.

The last hope of humanity travels with Captain Virginia Vonzell Qing-an, her androgynous lover, and eleven other crew members aboard Earth's first starship, Mother Night, on a colonizing mission to Alpha Centauri--the closest, most likely place to find worlds suitable for human habitation. It is the adventure of a lifetime, but plagued from the onset by programming errors, structural damage and irresponsible death.

But a different kind of plague could doom the assignment and, ultimately, the civilization that conceived it. A terrorist group, Indigo, has infiltrated the ship--single-minded true believers convinced that the only cure for their world's population problems is rampant, viral-induced, sexually transmitted sterilization.

And the stakes are about to reach astronomical proportions. Because an artifact exists on a rocky moon called Atalanta, an impossibly ancient remnant of an alien race that offers possible solutions to humanity's gravest dilemma--and a hope and knowledge beyond present mortal comprehension--but only if Mother Night's besieged mission can somehow, miraculously, be salvaged.

Changes follows the Severn family as they move from the past into a species of present, departing the early 1990s at an odd tangent whose history is not quite our own, winding up in the future of an old, old man who will never quite die.

This short story originally appeared in Aboriginal Science Fiction, Summer 1996. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fourteenth Annual Collection (1997), edited by Gardner Dozois.

Maaron Denthurion is a Televox, a legate deputed with the authority and power of the Metastable Order, a human empire that has ruled over a quarter of the galaxy for fifty thousand years, despite the fact that neither faster than light travel nor communication are possible. Televoxes are agents of anti-change, traveling the Metastable Order in starships, making sure that everything is in proper order, that everything stays exactly as it was, forever.

Now, Denthurion comes to the ancient colony world of Olam, ruled by an all-powerful theorcracy that dominates both humans and the downtrodden Hodai natives, warning them with a single word: Prepare! The Televox can do anything he wants with their world, up to and including its complete and utter destruction. It all depends on what he finds on the ground.

This novelette originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, December 1998. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Sixteenth Annual Collection (1999), edited by Gardner Dozois, and Armageddons (1999), edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois.

Sturgeon Award nominated novella. It originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, January 2000. There are no other known publications available at this time.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Amazing Stories: The Anthology (1995), edited by Kim Mohan. It can also be found in the anthology Year's Best SF (1996), edited by David G. Hartwell.

Sturgeon Award nominated novella.

There are dreams we all have as fantasy-reading children. Dreams from the books we've read. Dreams from the stories we've been told. Dreams about the bad things that might happen, to us, to everybody. So... flying saucers, alien abductions, those things the aliens might do... the stuff of adventure and comedy, and even a radiotelescope joke every one of us knows. But what if, when you were a child, the flying saucers did come and take you away? Take you away from your parents and your brothers and sisters. Take you away from school and all your friends. And teachers. And bullies. And homework. Away from everything and everyone you ever knew. Suppose the aliens came and took youto a place where no human being had ever been? And then just left you there, all alone? What would you do? If you're a teenage boy named Wally, you'll come up with something spectacular. "Off on a Starship" is a tale of grand adventure, and a love story that's... unusual.

The story originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, September 2003. It can also be foind in the anthologies Best Short Novels: 2004, edited by Jonathan Strahan, and The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-First Annual Collection (2004), edited by Gardner Dozois.

In the twenty-first century, American explorers discover alien teleportation and time-travel equipment on the moon, which leads them into a multi-dimensional struggle with a maleficent entity who plans to obliterate the universe.

Decades ago, the Earth was attacked by dinosaur-like Kkhruhhufft mercenaries in the employ of the cybernetic intelligences known as the Master Race. Humans fought back as best they could, killing a few hundred thousand of the deadly warriors, but went down to defeat in the face of almost eight billion casualties. Still, it was impressive they could kill so many Kkhruhhuft, and human survivors were recruited to the mercenary corps. Now, Athol Morrison, soldiering for twenty years in the service of the Master Race is coming home...

Violet is an optimod space-pilot--a beautiful, purple-furred, human-fox hybrid. Darius Murphy has escaped an oppressive religious matriarchy for a new life in the stars. As mercenaries crewing ships for the corporation that rules the galaxy from the Glow-Ice Worlds to Centauri Jet, Darius and Violet share a love that transcends wars, centuries, even death. But in the face of a ruthless power that annihilates inhabited worlds for profit, is love enough? And can even immortals dare to seek happiness in a galaxy without peace, a universe with no freedom?

When Gaetan's forgotten investments turn him into the sole owner of a faster-than-light spaceship, he flees his pathetic life and heads to planet Green Heaven to seek out the adventure and excitement he's craved. Instead, his journey reveals only the intergalactic depredations of men just like himself--brutal rapes, senseless killing, eradication of cultures and ecologies. He also discovers an ancient alien civilization contemplating the eradication of humanity. What's an honest antihero to do?

Life with Lancelot

He was pieced together from his own remains and returned to Earth a hero, but was he human?

Hunting on Kunderer

When the hunting party came to Kunderer all they thought of was the game they would be collecting. But the creatures they would be collecting had other thoughts on this. And not all those who had come to Kunderer were interested in hunting the locals...

A Plague of All Cowards sends space mercenary (and former war criminal) Zoltan Tharkie on a galactic quest to capture a dangerous assassin and unmask his hidden masters.