Search Worlds Without End

Butler’s acclaimed Xenogenesis trilogy about humanity’s struggle for survival after nuclear apocalypse, and the alien race that could save the world—or destroy it.

The newest stage in human evolution begins in outer space. Survivors of a cataclysmic nuclear war awake to find themselves being studied by the Oankali, tentacle-covered galactic travelers whose benevolent appearance hides their surprising plan for the future of mankind. The Oankali arrive not just to save humanity, but to bond with it—crossbreeding to form a hybrid species that can survive in the place of its human forebears, who were so intent on self-destruction. Some people resist, forming pocket communities of purebred rebellion, but many realize they have no choice. The human species inevitably expands into something stranger, stronger, and undeniably alien.

Hugo- and Nebula-winning Novella

In Tiptree's most famous and most reprinted story, a US spacecraft with an all-male crew is thrown forward in time to an Earth where all men have died from a plague.

This story was collected in Star Songs of an Old Primate (1978) and Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (1990), and anthologized in Aurora: Beyond Equality (1976), The 1977 Annual World's Best SF (1977), Nebula Winners Twelve (1978), The Arbor House Treasury of Great Science Fiction Short Novels (1980), The Hugo Winners, Volume 4 (1985), The Best of the Nebulas (1989), and as one half of Tor Double #11 (1989).

Listen to a radio play of this story at the Sci-Fi Radio archive (#17).

From David Mitchell, the Booker Prize nominee, award-winning writer and one of the featured authors in Granta's "Best of Young British Novelists 2003" issue, comes his highly anticipated third novel, a work of mind-bending imagination and scope.

A reluctant voyager crossing the Pacific in 1850; a disinherited composer blagging a precarious livelihood in between-the-wars Belgium; a high-minded journalist in Governor Reagan's California; a vanity publisher fleeing his gangland creditors; a genetically modified "dinery server" on death-row; and Zachry, a young Pacific Islander witnessing the nightfall of science and civilisation -- the narrators of Cloud Atlas hear each other's echoes down the corridor of history, and their destinies are changed in ways great and small.

In his captivating third novel, David Mitchell erases the boundaries of language, genre and time to offer a meditation on humanity's dangerous will to power, and where it may lead us.

A disease of unparalleled destructive force has sprung up almost simultaneously in every corner of the globe, all but destroying the human race. One survivor, strangely immune to the effects of the epidemic, ventures forward to experience a world without man. What he ultimately discovers will prove far more astonishing than anything he'd either dreaded or hoped for.

Y: THE LAST MAN, winner of three Eisner Awards and one of the most critically acclaimed, best-selling comic books series of the last decade, is that rare example of a page-turner that is at once humorous, socially relevant and endlessly surprising.

Written by Brian K. Vaughan (LOST, PRIDE OF BAGHDAD, EX MACHINA) and with art by Pia Guerra, this is the saga of Yorick Brown--the only human survivor of a planet-wide plague that instantly kills every mammal possessing a Y chromosome. Accompanied by a mysterious government agent, a brilliant young geneticist and his pet monkey, Ampersand, Yorick travels the world in search of his lost love and the answer to why he's the last man on earth.

The season of endings grows darker as civilization fades into the long cold night. Alabaster Tenring -- madman, world-crusher, savior -- has returned with a mission: to train his successor, Essun, and thus seal the fate of the Stillness forever.

It continues with a lost daughter, found by the enemy.

It continues with the obelisks, and an ancient mystery converging on answers at last.

The Stillness is the wall which stands against the flow of tradition, the spark of hope long buried under the thickening ashfall. And it will not be broken.

Malevil is a powerful, provocative story of a new world after a nuculear holocaust.

After touring the rural areas of Panga, Sibling Dex (a Tea Monk of some renown) and Mosscap (a robot sent on a quest to determine what humanity really needs) turn their attention to the villages and cities of the little moon they call home.

They hope to find the answers they seek, while making new friends, learning new concepts, and experiencing the entropic nature of the universe.

From the author of the Hugo-winning "Six Months, Three Days," a new wrinkle on the old story of three wishes, set after the end of the world.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

Before becoming one of today's most intriguing and innovative mystery writers, Kate Wilhelm was a leading writer of science fiction, acclaimed for classics like The Infinity Box and The Clewiston Test.

Now one of her most famous novels returns to print, the spellbinding story of an isolated post-holocaust community determined to preserve itself, through a perilous experiment in cloning. Sweeping, dramatic, rich with humanity, and rigorous in its science, Where Later the Sweet Birds Sang is widely regarded as a high point of both humanistic and "hard" SF, and won SF's Hugo Award and Locus Award on its first publication. It is as compelling today as it was then.

Classic fantasy from the amazing Sheri S. Tepper. Women rule in Women's Country. Women live apart from men, sheltering the remains of civilization They have cut themselves off with walls and by ordinance from marauding males. Waging war is all men are good for. Men are allowed to fight their barbaric battles! amongst themselves, garrison against garrison. For the sake of his pride, each boy child ritualistically rejects his mother when he comes of age to be a warrior. But all the secrets of civilization are strictly the possession of women. Naturally, there are men who want to know what the women know! And when Stavia meets Chernon, the battle of the sexes begins all over again. Foolishly, she provides books for Chernon to read. Before long, Chernon is hatching a plan of revenge against women!

Hugo Award-nominated Novelette

An explorer returns to gather information from a climate-ravaged Earth that his ancestors, and others among the planet's finest, fled centuries ago. The mission comes with a warning: a graveyard world awaits him. But so do those left behind -- hopeless and unbeautiful wastes of humanity who should have died out ages ago. After all this time, there's no telling how they've devolved. Steel yourself, soldier. Get in. Get out. And try not to stare.

The story of a detective investigating the murder of a Titan, one of society's most powerful, medically-enhanced elites...

Cal Sounder is a detective working for the police on certain very sensitive cases. So when he's called in to investigate a homicide at a local apartment, he's surprised by the routineness of it all. But when he arrives on scene, Cal soon learns that the victim--Roddy Tebbit, an otherwise milquetoast techie--is well over seven feet tall. And although he doesn't look a day over thirty, he is ninety-one years old. Tebbit is a Titan--one of this dystopian, near-future society's genetically altered elites. And this case is definitely Cal's thing.

There are only a few thousand Titans worldwide, thanks to Stefan Tonfamecasca's discovery of the controversial T7 genetic therapy, which elevated his family to godlike status. T7 turns average humans into near-immortal distortions of themselves--with immense physical proportions to match their ostentatious, unreachable lifestyles. A dead Titan is big news... a murdered Titan is unimaginable. But these modified magnates are Cal's specialty. In fact, his own ex-girlfriend, Athena, is a Titan. And not just any--she is Stefan's daughter, heir to the massive Tonfamecasca empire.

As the murder investigation intensifies, Cal begins to unravel the complicated threads of what should have been a straightforward case, and it becomes clear he's on the trail of a crime whose roots run deep into the dark heart of the world.

The aliens have arrived... they've landed their Embassy ship on a platform in New York Harbor, and will only speak with the United Nations. They say that their world is so different from Earth, in terms of gravity and atmosphere, that they cannot leave their ship. The population of Earth has erupted in fear and speculation.

One day Dr. Marianne Jenner, an obscure scientist working with the human genome, receives an invitation that she cannot refuse. The Secret Service arrives at her college to escort her to New York, for she has been invited, along with the Secretary General of the UN and a few other ambassadors, to visit the alien Embassy.

The truth is about to be revealed. Earth's most elite scientists have ten months to prevent a disaster--and not everyone is willing to wait.

In her new collection, Story Prize finalist Maureen F. McHugh delves into the dark heart of contemporary life and life five minutes from now and how easy it is to mix up one with the other. Her stories are post-bird flu, in the middle of medical trials, wondering if our computers are smarter than us, wondering when our jobs are going to be outsourced overseas, wondering if we are who we say we are, and not sure what we'd do to survive the coming zombie plague.

Contents:

• The Naturalist
• Special Economics
• Useless Things
• The Lost Boy: A Reporter at Large
• The Kingdom of the Blind
• Going to France
• Honeymoon
• The Effect of Centrifugal Forces
• After the Apocalypse

At first the virus wiping out grass and crops is of little concern to John Custance. It has decimated Asia, causing mass starvation and riots, but Europe is safe and a counter-virus is expected any day. Except, it turns out, the governments have been lying to their people. When the deadly disease hits Britain they are left alone, and society starts to descend into barbarism. As John and his family try to make it across country to the safety of his brother’s farm in a hidden valley, their humanity is tested to its very limits.

Published in the USA as: No Blade of Grass.

Secret service agent Ethan Burke arrives in Wayward Pines, Idaho, with a clear mission: locate and recover two federal agents who went missing in the bucolic town one month earlier. But within minutes of his arrival, Ethan is involved in a violent accident. He comes to in a hospital, with no ID, no cell phone, and no briefcase. The medical staff seems friendly enough, but something feels...off.

As the days pass, Ethan's investigation into the disappearance of his colleagues turns up more questions than answers. Why can't he get any phone calls through to his wife and son in the outside world? Why doesn't anyone believe he is who he says he is? And what is the purpose of the electrified fences surrounding the town? Are they meant to keep the residents in? Or something else out?

Each step closer to the truth takes Ethan further from the world he thought he knew, from the man he thought he was, until he must face a horrifying fact--he may never get out of Wayward Pines alive.

Long ago, the Tripods--huge, three-legged machines--descended upon Earth and took control. Now people unquestioningly accept the Tripods' power. They have no control over their thoughts or their lives. But for a brief time in each person's life--in childhood--he is not a slave. For Will, his time of freedom is about to end--unless he can escape to the White Mountains, where the possibility of freedom still exists. The Tripods trilogy follows the adventures of Will and his cohorts, as they try to evade the Tripods and maintian their freedom and ultimately do battle against them. The prequel, When the Tripods Came, explains how the Tripods first invaded and gained control of the planet.

The survivors live underground, as far from the Original World as possible and protected from the ultimate evil, Radiation. Then terrible monsters, who bring with them a screaming silence, are seen and people start to disappear. One young man realises he must question the nature of Darkness itself.

In an underpopulated future world of isolated and highly varied cultures, a young man sets out to intentionally become a saint...and finds that sainthood is nothing like what he had imagined!

A young man's odyssey of self discovery in a world eerily alien, yet hauntingly familiar. Set thirteen centuries in the future, A. A. Attanasio meticulously creates a brilliantly realized Earth, rich in detail and filled with beings brought to life with intense energy. In this strange and beautiful world, Sumner Kagan will change from an adolescent outcast to a warrior with god-like powers and in the process take us on an epic and transcendent journey.

This is the saga of Candy Smith-Foster, a brilliant, witty girl on the verge of womanhood, survivor of a bionuclear war that destroyed most of humanity, first of a new stage in human evolution--homo post hominem. EMERGENCE is the story of her turbulent odyssey across a scarred America seeking others of her kind and a new future for the people of Earth.

Outside the ruins of San Francisco, a former UC Berkeley professor recounts the chilling sequence of events -- a gruesome pandemic which killed nearly every living soul on the planet, in a matter of days -- which led to his current lowly state. Modern civilization has fallen, and a new race of barbarians, descended from the world's brutalized workers, has assumed power. Over the space of a few decades, all learning has been lost.

The catastrophe happens in 2013; 2012 marks the centennial of the novel's first publication as a serial in London Magazine.

In a glass-enclosed city of absolute straight lines, ruled over by the all-powerful 'Benefactor', the citizens of the totalitarian society of OneState live out lives devoid of passion and creativity - until D-503, a mathematician who dreams in numbers, makes a discovery: he has an individual soul.

Set in the twenty-sixth century AD, "We" is the classic dystopian novel and was the inspiration for George Orwell's 1984. It was suppressed for many years in Russia and remains a resounding cry for individual freedom, yet is also a powerful, exciting and vivid work of science fiction.

In the future, when the Sun has expanded and is ready to go nova, few animal species remain while plants have adapted to fill animal niches. One of the few species to survive are humans, but in much-altered forms. It is here where young tribal Gren finds himself captured by an intelligent fungus with plans to colonize humans to control the world! Hothouse tells the story of a remarkable journey of discovery that will alter your perceptions about the true nature of the world today... and the world to come!

The Mimicking of Known Successes presents a cozy Holmesian murder mystery and sapphic romance, set on Jupiter...

On a remote, gas-wreathed outpost of a human colony on Jupiter, a man goes missing. The enigmatic Investigator Mossa follows his trail to Valdegeld, home to the colony's erudite university and Mossa's former girlfriend, a scholar of Earth's pre-collapse ecosystems.

Pleiti has dedicated her research and her career to aiding the larger effort towards a possible return to Earth. When Mossa unexpectedly arrives and requests Pleiti's assistance in her latest investigation, the two of them embark on a twisting path in which the future of life on Earth is at stake and, perhaps, their futures, together.

The national bestselling alternate history epic continues...

Ten years after The Change rendered technology inoperable throughout the world, two brave leaders built two thriving communities in Oregon's Willamette Valley. But now the armies of the totalitarian Protectorate are preparing to wage war over the priceless farmland.

Decades after economic and environmental collapse destroys much of civilization in the United States, the Coast Road region isn't just surviving but thriving by some accounts, building something new on the ruins of what came before. A culture of population control has developed in which people, organized into households, must earn the children they bear by proving they can take care of them and are awarded symbolic banners to demonstrate this privilege. In the meantime, birth control is mandatory.

Enid of Haven is an Investigator, called on to mediate disputes and examine transgressions against the community. She's young for the job and hasn't yet handled a serious case. Now, though, a suspicious death requires her attention. The victim was an outcast, but might someone have taken dislike a step further and murdered him?

In a world defined by the disasters that happened a century before, the past is always present. But this investigation may reveal the cracks in Enid's world and make her question what she really stands for.

Set in the same universe as some of the author's short stories, which can be read here:

• "Amaryllis" (2010)
• "Astrophilia" (2012) read free online at Lightspeed Magazine
• "Bannerless" (2015) read free online at WIRED.com

A heart-stopping story of love, death, technology, and art set amid the tropics of a futuristic Brazil.

The lush city of Palmares Tres shimmers with tech and tradition, with screaming gossip casters and practiced politicians. In the midst of this vibrant metropolis, June Costa creates art that's sure to make her legendary. But her dreams of fame become something more when she meets Enki, the bold new Summer King. The whole city falls in love with him (including June's best friend, Gil). But June sees more to Enki than amber eyes and a lethal samba. She sees a fellow artist.

Together, June and Enki will stage explosive, dramatic projects that Palmares Tres will never forget. They will add fuel to a growing rebellion against the government's strict limits on new tech. And June will fall deeply, unfortunately in love with Enki. Because like all Summer Kings before him, Enki is destined to die.

Pulsing with the beat of futuristic Brazil, burning with the passions of its characters, and overflowing with ideas, this fiery novel will leave you eager for more from Alaya Dawn Johnson.

Slapstick presents an apocalyptic vision as seen through the eyes of the current King of Manhattan (and last President of the United States), a wickedly irreverent look at the all-too-possible results of today's follies. But even the end of life-as-we-know-it is transformed by Kurt Vonnegut's pen into hilarious farce--a final slapstick that may be the Almighty's joke on us all.

Britain in the 21st century is a Balkanized mess. Moh Kohn is a security mercenary unaware that he holds the key to information which could change the world. Janis Taine is a scientist who needs Mohs help. And a rogue computer program is guiding events to a breathtaking conclusion.

Galápagos takes the reader back one million years, to a.d. 1986. A simple vacation cruise suddenly becomes an evolutionary journey. Thanks to an apocalypse, a small group of survivors stranded on the Galápagos Islands are about to become the progenitors of a brave new, and totally different human race.

A century after environmental and economic collapse, the people of the Coast Road have rebuilt their own sort of civilization, striving not to make the mistakes their ancestors did. They strictly ration and manage resources, including the ability to have children.

Enid of Haven is an investigator, who with her new partner, Teeg, is called on to mediate a dispute over an old building in a far-flung settlement at the edge of Coast Road territory. The investigators' decision seems straightforward -- and then the body of a young woman turns up in the nearby marshland. Almost more shocking than that, she's not from the Coast Road, but from one of the outsider camps belonging to the nomads and wild folk who live outside the Coast Road communities. Now one of them is dead, and Enid wants to find out who killed her, even as Teeg argues that the murder isn't their problem.

In a dystopian future of isolated communities, can our moral sense survive the worst hard times?

Giant, technologically superior aliens have conquered Earth, but humankind survives - even flourishes in a way. Men and women live, like mice, in burrows in the massive walls of the huge homes of the aliens, and scurry about under their feet, stealing from them. A complex social and religious order has evolved, with women preserving knowledge and working as healers, and men serving as warriors and thieves. For the aliens, men and women are just a nuisance, nothing more than vermin. Which, ironically, may just be humankind's strength and point the way forward.

On the eve of Earth's destruction, a young scientist discovers something too precious to lose, in a story of cataclysm and hope by the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Divergent trilogy.

It's only two weeks before an asteroid turns home to dust. Though most of Earth has already been evacuated, it's Samantha's job to catalog plant samples for the survivors' unknowable journey beyond. Preparing to stay behind and watch the world end, she makes a final human connection.

As certain doom hurtles nearer, the unexpected and beautiful potential for the future begins to flower.

Jack Havig, a man born with the ability to move at will through the past and the future of mankind, must save the world from a doomed future of tyranny before his time runs out.

Kira, an orphan with a twisted leg, lives in a world where the weak are cast aside. When she is given a task that no other community member can carry out, Kira soon realizes that she is surrounded by many mysteries and secrets. No one must know of her plans to uncover the truth about her world-and to find out what exists beyond it.

Sharp-eyed Marianne lives in a white tower made of steel and concrete with her father and the other Professors. Outside, where the land is thickly wooded and wild beasts roam, live the Barbarians, who raid and pillage in order to survive. Marianne is strictly forbidden to leave her civilized world but, fascinated by these savage outsiders, decides to escape. There, beyond the wire fences, she will discover a decaying paradise, encounter the tattooed Barbarian boy Jewel and go beyond the darkest limits of her imagination.

Playful, sensuous, violent and gripping, "Heroes and Villains" is an ambiguous and deliriously rich blend of post-apocalyptic fiction, gothic fantasy, literary allusion and twisted romance.

Tiptree Award winning and Nebula-nominated Novella

This story follows a pregnant reporter writing an article about the social implications of a sexually transmitted infection that renders men sterile and women parthenogenetic.

Read this story online for free at Medium.com.

At the end of Frank Herbert's final novel, Chapterhouse: Dune, a ship carrying a crew of refugees escapes into the uncharted galaxy, fleeing from a terrifying, mysterious Enemy. The fugitives used genetic technology to revive key figures from Dune's past--including Paul Muad'Dib and Lady Jessica--to use their special talents to meet the challenges thrown at them.

Based directly on Frank Herbert's final outline, which lay hidden in two safe-deposit boxes for a decade, Sandworms of Dune will answer the urgent questions Dune fans have been debating for two decades: the origin of the Honored Matres, the tantalizing future of the planet Arrakis, the final revelation of the Kwisatz Haderach, and the resolution to the war between Man and Machine. This breathtaking new novel in Frank Herbert's Dune series has enough surprises and plot twists to please even the most demanding reader.

Nature or nurture? Neither. Discover a bold new way to raise a child in this unsettling story of the near future by the New York Times bestselling author of A Gentleman in Moscow.

When Sam's wife first tells him about Vitek, a twenty-first-century fertility lab, he sees it as the natural next step in trying to help their future child get a "leg up" in a competitive world. But the more Sam considers the lives that his child could lead, the more he begins to question his own relationships and the choices he has made in his life.

A decade in the future, humanity thrives in the absence of sickness and disease.

We owe our good health to a humble parasite - a genetically engineered tapeworm developed by the pioneering SymboGen Corporation. When implanted, the Intestinal Bodyguard worm protects us from illness, boosts our immune system - even secretes designer drugs. It's been successful beyond the scientists' wildest dreams. Now, years on, almost every human being has a SymboGen tapeworm living within them.

But these parasites are getting restless. They want their own lives... and will do anything to get them.

Celestial giants don't go peacefully. They tear themselves to pieces, unleashing a tsunami of ultra high-energy radiation. Eight years ago and eight light years away, a supermassive star died and tonight its supernova shockwave will finally reach Earth. Dark skies will shine bright as a new star blooms in the heavens and within a year everyone over the age of thirteen will be dead, their chromosomes irreversibly damaged.

And so the countdown begins.

Parents apprentice their children and try to pass on the knowledge they'll need to keep the world running.

But the last generation may not want to carry the legacy of their parents' world. And though they imagine a better, brighter future, they may not be able to escape humanity's darker instincts.

Thomas knows that Wicked can't be trusted. but they say the time for lies is over, that they've collected all they can from the trials and now must rely on the Gladers, with full memories restored, to help them with their ultimate mission. It's up to the Gladers to complete the blueprints for the cure to the Flare with a voluntary test. What Wicked doesn't know is that something's happened that no Trial or Variable could have forseen. Thomas has remembered far more than they think. And he knows that he can't believe a word of what the Wicked says. The time for lies is over. But the truth is more dangerous than Thomas could ever imagine. Will anyone survive to Death Cure?