Search Worlds Without End

Sturgeon Award nominated novella.

In the novella Gypsy, a few visionary scientists, chosen and nurtured by an eccentric billionaire undertake humankind's most expansive adventure--a generations-long voyage to a distant planet.

The story originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, November-December 2015. It can also be found in the anthologies The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume 1 (2016), edited by Neil Clarke, The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Third Annual Collection (2016), edited by Gardner Dozois, The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Novellas 2016, edited by Paula Guran, and The Final Frontier (2018), edited by Neil Clarke. It is included in the colledtion Gypsy Plus (2015).

Genetic engineering, sex changes, arcane pleasures, computer technology, and communication beyond the five senses are among the topics treated in nine stories by an acclaimed new science-fiction writer.

Contents:

• Introduction - essay by Algis Budrys
• The Phantom of Kansas - (1976) - novelette
• Air Raid - (1977) - shortstory
• Retrograde Summer - (1975) - novelette
• The Black Hole Passes - (1975) - novelette
• In the Hall of the Martian Kings - (1976) - novella
• In the Bowl - (1975) - novelette
• Gotta Sing, Gotta Dance - (1976) - novelette
• Overdrawn at the Memory Bank - (1976) - novelette
• The Persistence of Vision - (1978) - novella

AURORA tells the incredible story of our first voyage beyond the solar system.

Our voyage from Earth began generations ago.

Now, we approach our destination.

A new home.

AURORA.

Bob Johansson didn't believe in an afterlife, so waking up after being killed in a car accident was a shock. To add to the surprise, he is now a sentient computer and the controlling intelligence for a Von Neumann probe.

Bob and his copies have been spreading out from Earth for 40 years now, looking for habitable planets. But that's the only part of the plan that's still in one piece. A system-wide war has killed off 99.9% of the human race; nuclear winter is slowly making the Earth uninhabitable; a radical group wants to finish the job on the remnants of humanity; the Brazilian space probes are still out there, still trying to blow up the competition; And the Bobs have discovered a spacefaring species that sees all other life as food.

Bob left Earth anticipating a life of exploration and blissful solitude. Instead he's become a sky god to a primitive native species, the only hope for getting humanity to a new home, and possibly the only thing that can prevent every living thing in the local sphere from ending up as dinner.

The Enginemen once pushed the Bigships through the Nada Continuum, using the power of their minds to propel the ships at faster-than-light speeds. Now the Kielor Vincicoff gates, which twist space and bring distant planets closer, have made both the men and their ships redundant.

Contains the novel and the following stories (other editions may vary):

• The Girl Who Died for Art and Lived
• The Phoenix Experiment
• Big Trouble Upstairs
• The Star of Epsilon
• The Time-Lapsed Man
• The Pineal Zen Equation
• The Art of Acceptance
• Elegy Perpetuum

A space adventure set on a lone ship where the clones of a murdered crew must find their murderer -- before they kill again.

It was not common to awaken in a cloning vat streaked with drying blood.

At least, Maria Arena had never experienced it. She had no memory of how she died. That was also new; before, when she had awakened as a new clone, her first memory was of how she died.

Maria's vat was in the front of six vats, each one holding the clone of a crew member of the starship Dormire, each clone waiting for its previous incarnation to die so it could awaken. And Maria wasn't the only one to die recently...

Table of Contents:

• Through Darkest Adolescence with Lois McMaster Bujold, or, Thank You, But I Already Have a Life - (1996) - essay by Lillian Stewart Carl
• Adventure of the Lady on the Embankment - (1996) - novelette
• Barter - (1985) - shortstory
• Garage Sale - (1987) - shortstory
• The Hole Truth - (1986) - shortstory
• Dreamweaver's Dilemma - (1996) - novelette
• The Mountains of Mourning - (1989) - novella
• My First Novel - (1996) - essay
• Beyond Genre Barriers - (1996) - essay
• The Unsung Collaborator - (1996) - essay
• Allegories of Change: The "New" Biotech in the Eye of Science Fiction - (1989) - essay
• Biolog - (1996) - essay
• Awards - (1996) - essay
• American Bibliography - (1996) - essay
• Answers - (1996) - essay
• Miles Naismith Vorkosigan: His Universe and Times - (1996) - essay with Michael Bernardi
• Timelines (Dreamweaver's Dilemma) - (1996) - interior artwork by Suford Lewis
• Towards a Genealogy of Lord Miles Vorkosigan and Other Persons of Interest - (1996) - essay by Suford Lewis
• A Pronunciation Guide to Names and Places - (1996) - essay by Suford Lewis

Long out of print, the science fiction masterpiece by Hugo Award winning writer James Blish

Originally published as four volumes nearly fifty years ago, Cities in Flight brings together the famed "Okie novels" of science fiction master James Blish. Named after the migrant workers of America's Dust Bowl, these novels convey Blish's "history of the future," a brilliant and bleak look at a world where cities roam the Galaxy looking for work and a sustainable way of life.

In the first novel, They Shall Have Stars, man has thoroughly explored the Solar System, yet the dream of going even further seems to have died in all but one man. His battle to realize his dream results in two momentous discoveries -- anti-gravity and the secret of immortality. In A Life for the Stars, it is centuries later and antigravity generations have enabled whole cities to lift off the surface of the earth to become galactic wanderers. In Earthman, Come Home, the nomadic cities revert to barbarism and marauding rogue cities begin to pose a threat to all civilized worlds. An armada of renegade cities attempts to destroy Earth, their ancient birthplace. In the final novel, A Clash of Cymbols (The Triumph of Time), history repeats itself as the cities once again journey back in to space making a terrifying discovery which could destroy the entire Universe. A serious and haunting vision of our world and its limits, Cities in Flight marks the return to print of one of science fiction's masterpieces.

A starship hurtles through the emptiness of space. Its destination-unknown. Its purpose-a mystery.

Now, one man wakes up. Ripped from a dream of a new home-a new planet and the woman he was meant to love in his arms-he finds himself wet, naked, and freezing to death. The dark halls are full of monsters but trusting other survivors he meets might be the greater danger.

All he has are questions-- Who is he? Where are they going? What happened to the dream of a new life? What happened to Hull 03?

All will be answered, if he can survive the ship.

HULL ZERO THREE is an edge-of-your-seat thrill ride through the darkest reaches of space.

In this first collaboration by science fiction masters Larry Niven (Ringworld) and Gregory Benford (Timescape), the limits of wonder are redrawn once again as a human expedition to another star system is jeopardized by an encounter with an astonishingly immense artifact in interstellar space: a bowl-shaped structure half-englobing a star, with a habitable area equivalent to many millions of Earths...and it's on a direct path heading for the same system as the human ship.

A landing party is sent to investigate the Bowl, but when the explorers are separated--one group captured by the gigantic structure's alien inhabitants, the other pursued across its strange and dangerous landscape--the mystery of the Bowl's origins and purpose propel the human voyagers toward discoveries that will transform their understanding of their place in the universe.