open
Upgrade to a better browser, please.

Search Worlds Without End

Advanced Search
Search Terms:
Award(s):
Hugo
Nebula
BSFA
Mythopoeic
Locus SF
Derleth
Campbell
WFA
Locus F
Prometheus
Locus FN
PKD
Clarke
Stoker
Aurealis SF
Aurealis F
Aurealis H
Locus YA
Norton
Jackson
Legend
Red Tentacle
Morningstar
Golden Tentacle
Holdstock
All Awards
Sub-Genre:
Date Range:  to 

Search Results Returned:  13


Sing Me to Sleep

Gabi Burton

Saoirse Sorkova survives on lies. As a soldier-in-training at the most prestigious barracks in the kingdom, she lies about being a siren to avoid execution. At night, working as an assassin for a dangerous group of mercenaries, Saoirse lies about her true identity. And to her family, Saoirse tells the biggest lie of all: that she can control her siren powers and doesn't struggle constantly against an impulse to kill.

As the top trainee in her class, Saoirse would be headed for a bright future if it weren't for the need to keep her secrets out of the spotlight. But when a mysterious blackmailer threatens her sister, Saoirse takes a dangerous job that will help her investigate: she becomes personal bodyguard to the crown prince.

Saoirse should hate Prince Hayes. After all, his father is the one who enforces the kingdom's brutal creature segregation laws. But when Hayes turns out to be kind, thoughtful, and charming, Saoirse finds herself increasingly drawn to him-especially when they're forced to work together to stop a deadly killer who's plaguing the city. There's only one problem: Saoirse is that deadly killer.

The Miniaturist

Jessie Burton

"There is nothing hidden that will not be revealed..."

On a brisk autumn day in 1686, eighteen-year-old Nella Oortman arrives in Amsterdam to begin a new life as the wife of illustrious merchant trader Johannes Brandt. But her new home, while splendorous, is not welcoming. Johannes is kind yet distant, always locked in his study or at his warehouse office--leaving Nella alone with his sister, the sharp-tongued and forbidding Marin.

But Nella's world changes when Johannes presents her with an extraordinary wedding gift: a cabinet-sized replica of their home. To furnish her gift, Nella engages the services of a miniaturist -- an elusive and enigmatic artist whose tiny creations mirror their real-life counterparts in eerie and unexpected ways...

Johannes' gift helps Nella to pierce the closed world of the Brandt household. But as she uncovers its unusual secrets, she begins to understand -- and fear -- the escalating dangers that await them all. In this repressively pious society where gold is worshipped second only to God, to be different is a threat to the moral fabric of society, and not even a man as rich as Johannes is safe. Only one person seems to see the fate that awaits them. Is the miniaturist the key to their salvation... or the architect of their destruction?

Aftermath

LeVar Burton

In 2012, the first African American president is assassinated by a white extremist - just four days after he is elected. The horrific tragedy leads to riots, financial collapse, and ultimately, a full-on civil war. In its aftermath, millions are left homeless as famine and disease spread throughout the country.

But from Chicago, a mysterious voice cries out...

To Leon Crane, a former NASA scientist now struggling to survive on the streets, the pleas he hears remind him of the wife he could not save - and offer him a chance at redemption.

To Jacob Fire Cloud, a revered Lakota medicine man, the voice is a sign that the White Buffalo Woman has returned to unite all the races in peace and prosperity.

And to little Amy Ladue, the cries are those of her mother, who disappeared during the devastating St. Louis earthquake - and who must still be alive.

These three strangers will be drawn together to rescue someone they have never met, a woman who holds the key to a new future for humanity - one remarkably brimming with hope.

Here In Avalon

Tara Isabella Burton

Rose has come a long way. Raised - and often neglected - by a wayward mother in New York City's chaotic bohemia, Rose has finally built the life she's always wanted: a good job at a self-help startup, a clean apartment, an engagement to a stable if self-satisfied tech CEO who shares her faith in human potential, hard work, and the sacrifice of childish dreams.

Rose's sister Cecilia, on the other hand, never grew up. Irresponsible and impetuous, prone to jetting off to a European monastery one month and a falcon rescue the next, Cecilia has spent her life in pursuit of fairy-tale narratives of transcendence and true love - grand ideas Rose knows never work out in the real world. When Cecilia declares she's come home to New York for good, following the ending of a whirlwind marriage, Rose hopes Cecilia might finally be ready to face adulthood: compromises and all.

But then Cecilia gets involved with the Avalon: a cultish-sounding cabaret troupe - one that appears only at night, on a mysterious red boat that travels New York's waterways - and soon vanishes: one of a growing number of suspicious disappearances among the city's lost and loneliest souls. The only way Rose can find Cecilia is by tracking down the Avalon herself.

But as Rose gets closer to solving the mystery of what happened to her sister, the Avalon works its magic on her, too. And the deeper she goes into the Avalon's underworld, she more she begins to question everything she knows about her own life, and whether she's willing to leave the real world behind.

Social Creature

Tara Isabella Burton

They go through both bottles of champagne right there on the High Line, with nothing but the stars over them... They drink and Lavinia tells Louise about all the places they will go together, when they finish their stories, when they are both great writers-to Paris and to Rome and to Trieste...

Lavinia will never go. She is going to die soon.

Louise has nothing. Lavinia has everything. After a chance encounter, the two spiral into an intimate, intense, and possibly toxic friendship.

The Destroyer

Tara Isabella Burton

In a futuristic, fascistic Rome, a brilliant, unstable scientist proves that she can transcend the human body's limitations. The test subject? Her own daughter. A mother-daughter mad scientist story, THE DESTROYER asks how far we'll go to secure our own legacies -- and how far we'll run to escape them.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

Beowulf

Burton Raffel

Beowulf is one of the earliest extant poems in a modern European language, composed in England before the Norman Conquest. As a social document this great epic poem is invaluable--reflecting a feudal world of heroes and monsters, blood and victory, life and death. As a work of art, it is unique. Beowulf rings with beauty, power, and artistry that have kept it alive for a thousand years. The noble simplicity of Beowulf's anonymous Anglo-Saxon singer is recaptured in this vivid translation by Burton Raffel.

The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack

Burton & Swinburne: Book 1

Mark Hodder

Sir Richard Francis Burton--explorer, linguist, scholar, and swordsman; his reputation tarnished; his career in tatters; his former partner missing and probably dead.

Algernon Charles Swinburne--unsuccessful poet and follower of de Sade; for whom pain is pleasure, and brandy is ruin!

They stand at a crossroads in their lives and are caught in the epicenter of an empire torn by conflicting forces: Engineers transform the landscape with bigger, faster, noisier, and dirtier technological wonders; Eugenicists develop specialist animals to provide unpaid labor; Libertines oppose repressive laws and demand a society based on beauty and creativity; while the Rakes push the boundaries of human behavior to the limits with magic, drugs, and anarchy.

The two men are sucked into the perilous depths of this moral and ethical vacuum when Lord Palmerston commissions Burton to investigate assaults on young women committed by a weird apparition known as Spring Heeled Jack, and to find out why werewolves are terrorizing London's East End.

Their investigations lead them to one of the defining events of the age, and the terrifying possibility that the world they inhabit shouldn t exist at all!

The Curious Case of the Clockwork Man

Burton & Swinburne: Book 2

Mark Hodder

It is 1862, though not the 1862 it should be...

Time has been altered, and Sir Richard Francis Burton, the king’s agent, is one of the few people who know that the world is now careening along a very different course from that which Destiny intended.

When a clockwork-powered man of brass is found abandoned in Trafalgar Square, Burton and his assistant, the wayward poet Algernon Swinburne, find themselves on the trail of the stolen Garnier Collection—black diamonds rumored to be fragments of the Lemurian Eye of Naga, a meteorite that fell to Earth in prehistoric times.

His investigation leads to involvement with the media sensation of the age: the Tichborne Claimant, a man who insists that he’s the long lost heir to the cursed Tichborne estate. Monstrous, bloated, and monosyllabic, he’s not the aristocratic Sir Roger Tichborne known to everyone, yet the working classes come out in force to support him. They are soon rioting through the streets of London, as mysterious steam wraiths incite all-out class warfare.

From a haunted mansion to the Bedlam madhouse, from South America to Australia, from séances to a secret labyrinth, Burton struggles with shadowy opponents and his own inner demons, meeting along the way the philosopher Herbert Spencer, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Florence Nightingale, and Charles Doyle (father of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle).

Can the king’s agent expose a plot that threatens to rip the British Empire apart, leading to an international conflict the like of which the world has never seen? And what part does the clockwork man have to play?

Burton and Swinburne’s second adventure—The Clockwork Man of Trafalgar Square—is filled with eccentric steam-driven technology, grotesque characters, and a deepening mystery that pushes forward the three-volume story arc begun in The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack.

Expedition to the Mountains of the Moon

Burton & Swinburne: Book 3

Mark Hodder

From the winner of the Philip K. Dick Award 2010

AFRICA, 1863.

SIR RICHARD FRANCIS BURTON - AN EXPLORER, A LINGUIST, A SCHOLAR, AND THE KING'S AGENT OR IS HE A PUPPET BEING MANIPULATED BY FORCES HE CANNOT UNDERSTAND?

A RACE TO FIND THE SOURCE OF THE NILE!

ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE - A FAMOUS YOUNG FLAME-HAIRED POET, THRILL-SEEKER, AND FOLLOWER OF THE MARQUIS DE SADE. FOR HIM PAIN IS PLEASURE, AND BRANDY IS RUIN!

BACK TO WHERE THE ADVENTURE BEGAN!

It is 1863, but not the one it should be. Time has veered wildly off course, and moves are being made that will lead to a devastating world war. Prime Minister Lord Palmerston believes that by possessing the three Eyes of Naga he'll be able to manipulate events and avoid the war. He already has two of the stones, but he needs Sir Richard Francis Burton to recover the third. For the king's agent, it's a chance to return to the Mountains of the Moon to make a second attempt at locating the source of the Nile. But a rival expedition led by John Hanning Speke stands in his way, threatening a confrontation that could ignite the very war that Palmerston is trying to avoid!

Caught in a tangled web of cause, effect, and inevitability, little does Burton realize that the stakes are far higher than even he suspects.

A final confrontation comes in London, where, in the year 1840, Burton must face the man responsible for altering time—Spring Heeled Jack!

Burton and Swinburne's third adventure completes the three-volume story arc begun in The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack and The Curious Case of the Clockwork Man.

The Secret of Abdu El Yezdi

Burton & Swinburne: Book 4

Mark Hodder

Burton & Swinburne return in a new series! The Beast is coming. History will be remade. Since the assassination of Queen Victoria in 1840, a cabal of prominent men-including King George V, HRH Prince Albert, Benjamin Disraeli, and Isambard Kingdom Brunel-has received guidance from the Afterlife. The spirit of a dead mystic, Abdu El Yezdi, has helped them to steer the empire into a period of unprecedented peace and creativity. But on the eve of a groundbreaking alliance with the newly formed Greater German Confederation, scientists, surgeons, and engineers are being abducted-including Brunel! The government, in search of answers, turns to the Afterlife, only to find that Abdu El Yezdi is now refusing to speak with the living. Enter the newly-knighted Sir Richard Francis Burton, fresh from his discovery of the source of the Nile. Appointed the king's agent, he must trace the missing luminaries and solve the mystery of Abdu El Yezdi's silence. But the Beast has been summoned. How can the famous explorer fulfill his mission when his friends and loved ones are being picked off, one by one, by what appears to be a supernatural entity-by, perhaps, Abdu El Yezdi himself?

The Return of the Discontinued Man

Burton & Swinburne: Book 5

Mark Hodder

It's 9 p.m. on February 15, 1860, and Charles Babbage, the British Empire's most brilliant scientist, performs an experiment. Within moments, blood red snow falls from the sky and Spring Heeled Jack pops out of thin air in London's Leicester Square. Though utterly disoriented and apparently insane, the strange creature is intent on one thing: hunting Sir Richard Francis Burton!

Spring Heeled Jack isn't alone in his mental confusion. Burton can hardly function; he's experiencing one hallucination after another--visions of parallel realities and future history. Someone, or something, is trying to tell him about ... what?

When the revelation comes, it sends Burton and his companions on an expedition even the great explorer could never have imagined--a voyage through time itself into a twisted future where steam technology has made a resurgence and a despotic intelligence rules over the British Empire!

The Rise of the Automated Aristocrats

Burton & Swinburne: Book 6

Mark Hodder

Sir Richard Francis Burton's expedition has returned from the future, bringing with it knowledge of technologies that must remain secret if history is to proceed as it should. However, when one of his colleagues turns rogue, the secret falls into the hands of the very people most likely to misuse it.

Betrayed, Burton and Swinburne watch in horror as the Empire's elite employ the technology to secure their positions of privilege. When London's parks are transformed into concentration camps, artists and philosophers are declared enemies of the State, and propaganda proliferates, the king's agent finds himself on the wrong side of—the king!

Can Burton and his band of hunted revolutionaries overthrow an apparently indestructible and immortal autocrat... and if so, at what personal cost?

The Spring Heeled Jack saga reaches its explosive conclusion!