Search Worlds Without End

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.

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

Twenty-one-year-old Chimal wants desperately to escape his native valley, home to an ancient Aztec civilization sealed off from the outside world. The valley is ruled by priests who enforce despotic laws and perpetuate a life of fear. Chimal escapes and discovers that his world is in fact a vast space ship on a journey from Earth to Proxima Centauri.

Hugh Hoyland must convince a starship civilization that can't remember or conceive of life outside the ship they inhabit that a universe does exist. With the help of the outcast mutants from the upper decks of the ship, Hugh sets out to expose the truth and thus change their civilization forever...

Somewhere on the outer rim of the universe, a mass of decaying world-ships known as the Legion is traveling in the seams between the stars. For generations, a war for control of the Legion has been waged, with no clear resolution. As worlds continue to die, a desperate plan is put into motion.

Zan wakes with no memory, prisoner of a people who say they are her family. She is told she is their salvation - the only person capable of boarding the Mokshi, a world-ship with the power to leave the Legion. But Zan's new family is not the only one desperate to gain control of the prized ship. Zan finds that she must choose sides in a genocidal campaign that will take her from the edges of the Legion's gravity well to the very belly of the world.

Zan will soon learn that she carries the seeds of the Legion's destruction - and its possible salvation. But can she and her ragtag band of followers survive the horrors of the Legion and its people long enough to deliver it?

It is humanity's most ambitious endeavor-and its most controversial: the Diaspora Project. A city-sized starship that will carry ten thousand men and women, chosen among Earth's billions, to a new life beyond our solar system. For those who are to go, the cost is their families, their loved ones, and the lives they have known. For those who are left behind, there is disappointment, despair, and anger. And for the Homeworld movement, led by the enigmatic Jeremiah, the Project is an abomination that must be stopped at any cost. The theft of Earth's best and brightest children? Or the ultimate destiny of the human race?

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...

In the futuristic world in which he lives, Dante McCall, the only person not genetically identical to everyone else, is branded a freak, banished from Earth, and stranded among a strange starfaring culture.

Humanity has spread to every star within 500 light-years of its half-forgotten origin, coloring the sky with a haze of habitats. Societies rise and fall. Incautious experiments burn fast and fade. On the fringes, less modified humans get on with the job of settling a universe that has, so far, been empty of intelligent life.

The ancient starship But the Sky, My Lady! The Sky! is entering orbit around a promising new system after a four hundred year journey. For its long-lived inhabitants, the centuries have been busy. Now a younger generation is eager to settle the system. The ship is a seed-pod ready to burst.

Then they detect curious electromagnetic emissions from the system's Earth-like world. As the nature of the signals becomes clear, the choices facing the humans become stark.

On Ground, second world from the sun, a young astronomer searches for his system's outermost planet. A moving point of light thrills, then disappoints him. It's only a comet. His physicist colleague Orro takes time off from trying to invent a flying-machine to calculate the comet's trajectory. Something is very odd about that comet's path.

They are not the only ones for whom the world has changed.

"We are not living in the universe we thought we lived in yesterday. We have to start learning the world all over again."

On a generation ship bound for a distant star, one engineer-in-training must discover the secrets at the heart of the voyage in this new sci-fi novel.

It's been over a century since three generation ships escaped an Earth dominated by artificial intelligence in pursuit of a life on a distant planet orbiting Tau Ceti. Now, it's nearly Braking Day, when the ships will begin their long-awaited descent to their new home.

Born on the lower decks of the Archimedes, Ravi Macleod is an engineer-in-training, set to be the first of his family to become an officer in the stratified hierarchy aboard the ship. While on a routine inspection, Ravi sees the impossible: a young woman floating, helmetless, out in space. And he's the only one who can see her.

As his visions of the girl grow more frequent, Ravi is faced with a choice: secure his family's place among the elite members of Archimedes' crew or risk it all by pursuing the mystery of the floating girl. With the help of his cousin, Boz, and her illegally constructed AI, Ravi must investigate the source of these strange visions and uncovers the truth of the Archimedes' departure from Earth before Braking Day arrives and changes everything about life as they know it.

This Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Award nominated novelette originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, September-October 2017. It can also be found in the anthologies The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume 3 (2018), edited by Neil Clarke and Nebula Awards Showcase 2019, edited by Silvia Moreno-Garcia.

Read the story at the author's website here. (.pdf file)

All that is left of humanity is on a thousand-year journey to a new planet aboard one ship, the Noah, which is also carrying a dangerous serial killer...

As a city planner on the Noah, Hana Dempsey is a gifted psychic, economist, hacker, and bureaucrat, and is considered "mission critical". She is nonreplaceable, important, essential - but after serving her mandatory Breeding Duty, the impregnation and birthing that all women are obligated to undergo - her life loses purpose, as she privately mourns the child she will never be permitted to know.

When policeman Leonard Barrens enlists her and her hacking skills in the unofficial investigation of this mentor's death, Dempsey finds herself increasingly captivated by both the case and Barrens himself. According to Information Security, the missing man has simply "retired" - nothing unusual is cited, such as the mutilated remains Barrens found in the old man's apartment. Unraveling this cover-up reveals a growing list of mutilated victims and suspicious deaths - evidence to suggest a serial killer is operating onboard the ship. As Barrens and Dempsey delve through lost dataspaces and plunge deep into the uninhabited regions of the ship, they discover that the answer could be far worse.

What they do with that answer will determine the fate of all humanity in this thrilling page-turner.

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.

Home to generations of humans, the starship Argonos has wandered aimlessly throughout the galaxy for hundreds of years, desperately searching for other signs of life. Now, a steady, unidentified transmission lures them toward a nearby planet, where the grisly remains of a former colony await the crew. Haunted by what they have seen, the crew has no choice but to follow when another signal beckons the Argonos into deep space and into the dark heart of an alien mystery...

Published in the UK as Unto Leviathan

The boy was raised as one of the Chained, condemned to toil in the bowels of a mining ship out among the stars. His whole world changes -- literally -- when he is yanked "upstairs" and informed he has been given an opportunity to be educated at the ship's university alongside the elite.

Overwhelmed and alone, the boy forms a bond with the woman he comes to know as "the professor," a weary idealist and descendent of the Chained who has spent her career striving for validation from her more senior colleagues, only to fall short at every turn.

Together, the boy and the woman will embark on a transformative journey to grasp the design of the chains that fetter them both -- and are the key to breaking free.

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).

Odd-mannered, obsessive, withdrawn, Aster has little to offer folks in the way of rebuttal when they call her ogre and freak. She's used to the names; she only wishes there was more truth to them. If she were truly a monster, as they accuse, she'd be powerful enough to tear down the walls around her until nothing remained of her world, save for stories told around the cookfire.

Aster lives in the low-deck slums of the HSS Matilda, a space vessel organized much like the antebellum South. For generations the Matilda has ferried the last of humanity to a mythical Promised Land. On its way the ship's leaders have imposed harsh moral restrictions and deep indignities on dark-skinned sharecroppers like Aster, whom they consider to be less than human.

When the autopsy of Matilda's sovereign reveals a surprising link between his death and her mother's suicide some quarter century before, Aster retraces her mother's footsteps. Embroiled in a grudge with a brutal overseer and sowing the seeds of civil war, Aster learns there may be a way off the ship if she's willing to fight for it.

The colony ship Ragtime docks in the Lagos system, having traveled light-years to bring one thousand sleeping souls to a new home among the stars. But when first mate Michelle Campion rouses, she discovers some of the sleepers will never wake.

Answering Campion's distress call, investigator Rasheed Fin is tasked with finding out who is responsible for these deaths. Soon a sinister mystery unfolds aboard the gigantic vessel, one that will have repercussions for the entire system--from the scheming politicians of Lagos station, to the colony planet Bloodroot, to other far-flung systems, and indeed to Earth itself.

Centaurus is the destination of the space ship, The Hope of Man. It has been traveling through space for almost twenty years, and still has nine years of flight remaining before Centaurus will be reached. For many on board the craft, Earth has become a vague memory, while for others it is a mere dot in the vast starry reaches of space. Restlessness is evident everywhere; the people want to return to a place they know is inhabited - not continue to an unknown where life is uncertain. Mutiny seems inevitable. Captain Lesbee (the ship's main officer) knows that mutiny breeds mutiny, but what is more significant is his knowledge of Earth's possible obliteration. The one hope is Centaurus. Now more than ever, there can be no turning back. Order has to be maintained even at the price of human life.

After reaching Centaurus and finding it unsuitable to live on, The Hope of Man heads towards the next destination, the Alta system; because the ship at this time is unable to attain light speed it takes decades to travel there. Upon arriving in the system, after mutiny and treachery, The Hope of Man is now captained by Browne, a descendant of the ship's original First Officer. The Hope of Man starts to orbit Alta III in search of a new planet to settle on, but again they find it already inhabited and come under attack from the occupants. During this time we see a struggle for power by various groups. Control changes quickly from one character to another until the arrival of the ship's owner, Avil Hewitt. The novel concludes with Hewitt in charge and the ship finding many planets to inhabit.

Created and adapted from 3 short stories to form a novel. The 3 short stores used were:

• Centaurus II 1947
• Rogue Ship 1950
• The Expendables 1963

Van Vogt's was first to coin the term fixup for this approach.

Humanity's last hope of survival lies in space... but will a random death doom the venture?

Our planet is dying and the world's remaining nations have pooled their resources to build a seed ship that will carry colonists on a multi-generational journey to a distant planet.

Everything is set for a bright adventure... and then someone is found hanging dead just weeks before the launch. Fear and paranoia spread as the death begins to look more and more like a murder. The authorities want the case settled quickly and quietly so as not to cause panic... and to prevent a murderer from sabotaging the entire mission.

A captured human officer leads his fellows in an escape from an alien-dominated prison planet.

In The Watch Below, two narrative lines dovetail cleverly. In one a World War Two merchant vessel sinks, leaving three men and two women to survive in a large air pocket, work out life-maintenance systems and eventually breed there Under the Sea while 100 years pass. In the other, water-dwelling Aliens, who have long been seeking a wet world like Earth to inhabit peacefully, land their Generation Starship in the sea in time to save the descendants of the five twentieth-century survivors.

High Crimes Call for High Punishment

It is the twenty-first century. Convicts are sentenced to asteroids that move in ever-widening solar orbits, timed to return when their terms run out. But a few ambitious administrators discover that small "errors" in velocity can rid them of selected groups altogether: the hardcore violent, the mentally defective, and especially the political dissidents. Enduring the black vise of interstellar space-time, these human rejects--men and women mixed together--create their own Darwinian societies, struggling to survive.

Back on Earth, a handful of sympathetic and curious scientists have not forgotten these lost citizens. When a technological breakthrough makes it possible to overtake these scattered asteroids, a courageous team sets out to go where none has willingly gone before. What they discover in these "brute orbits" is both provocative and moving--a startling vision of humanity you will never forget.

Centuries ago, the Star Folk had left Earth on twelve spaceships on a generations-long mission to colonize the distant stars. Ten of the ships had reached their destinations. Two had failed-and nobody, in the hundreds of years since the disaster, had the slightest inkling of what had happened.

Joneny, a student of galactic anthropology, was assigned the problem. It had seemed routine to him. Just some faster-than-light travel to the two wrecked ships, a bit of poking around, and then writing up his findings.

But he was ill-prepared for what he found in space at the site of the two ancient wrecks. One, the Sigma-9, was not subject to the laws of time-stasis (the only exception to a universal law), and it was covered entirely with a mysterious green fire that shimmered so much that it seemed alive! And the other ship, the Beta-2, was nowhere to be found. Only a fragment of a mysterious poem could possibly provide a clue.

Zoya Kundara has lived on the space vessel Star Road for two hundred fifty years. As its Ship Mother, kept alive in a state of pseudoimmortality, she has provided wisdom and counsel to succeeding generations of its crew, self-exiled survivors of earth’s great plague.

But now, to escape the ravages of space radiation, the giant starship has returned to earth, only to discover a world on the verge of extinction, its barren surface blanketed in a crystalline substance that resembles ice and that is slowly, inexorably encapsulating the planet. Zoya is chosen as emissary to this strange new earth, and now she must approach its denizens and find a suitable home for her desperate crew among the shrinking lands.

But what she finds shakes Zoya to her core: groups of humans huddled like moles in underground techno-warrens called preserves, and a pseudospiritual order known as the Ice Nuns, who seek control of the physics-defying crystals and enslave their disciples in their crazed quest for truth. For on this once green land, Ice and the science behind it are now the only God–and mastering this grand ecology of information the only higher calling. Allies are few and far between, but somehow Zoya must uncover the secrets of Ice and halt its expansion.

A love out of time. A spaceship built of secrets and murder.

Seventeen-year-old Amy joins her parents as frozen cargo aboard the vast spaceship Godspeed and expects to awaken on a new planet, three hundred years in the future. Never could she have known that her frozen slumber would come to an end fifty years too soon and that she would be thrust into the brave new world of a spaceship that lives by its own rules.

Amy quickly realizes that her awakening was no mere computer malfunction. Someone-one of the few thousand inhabitants of the spaceship-tried to kill her. And if Amy doesn't do something soon, her parents will be next.

Now Amy must race to unlock Godspeed's hidden secrets. But out of her list of murder suspects, there's only one who matters: Elder, the future leader of the ship and the love she could never have seen coming.

The human race is running out of time on overcrowded Earth, and only one man has the courage to save it. Colony ship Ark is the greatest project the human race will ever attempt, a self contained world one hundred years in the building, launched on a ten thousand year voyage to carry the seeds of civilization to the stars. It is humanity's final gamble for escape from a desperate world, but the price of hope is measured in lives.

Joshua Crewe, Ark's designer. Obsessed with his vision, he's devoted his life to winning the power to turn it into reality. No burden is too great to bear in pursuit of his dream? especially when other people are the ones to bear it.

Aurora Brady, first of the spaceborne, with one foot in the future and one in the past. She must give power to her enemies to see Ark launched, but giving too much will mean its destruction.

Jedidiah Fourgere, a simple farm boy, he finds himself caught up in a revolution that will forever change the balance of power in Ark's hermetically sealed world. Torn between love and faith, humanity's future lies in his hands.

The gigantic starship Ark was launched on a voyage of ten thousand years from an Earth on the brink of collapse. Its mission was to carry a portion of the human race to a new home circling another star, but, centuries after its departure, the descendants of the original crew no longer remember that they are on a city-sized spaceship, and know nothing of the Ark's mission, nor of the starry universe outside. The Prophetsy, a theocracy based on slavery and terror, has ruled over most of the Ark for longer than anyone now living can remember, and it has just succeeded in conquering the few remaining free regions of the ship. Yet there are chinks in the monolithic tyranny...

Danil has been a slave since he was a young boy, but his spirit has never been broken, and his keen mind sees ways that the theocracy might be overthrown and envisions new weapons that could achieve that victory.

Annaya is the daughter of the Prophet Polldor, undisputed ruler of the Prophetsy. She is far more intelligent and strong-willed than her brother, but only a male heir can become the next Prophet. To her father, she is only a pawn, to be married off to a powerful ally. But she is determined that will not happen, even if she has to somehow overthrow both her father and the Prophetsy itself.

Olen, the Prophet's son, is anxious to become the next Prophet. He will cooperate in his sister's plans as long as he thinks they will lead to his assuming the throne and gaining absolute power, but he is a more dangerous ally than Annaya realizes.

These three, each with a different motive, will strive to change the course of history for the Ark. But even if they restore freedom to their artificial world, can they discover the nature of that world, and regain the knowledge necessary for the successful completion of its mission?

On a routine mission in deep space, Captain James Kirk and the crew of the Enterprise discover a lost city, drifting in space, more than 20 years from the nearest Human colony.

Its inhabitants are human, but so isolated that they are unable to grasp the existence of other worlds besides their own. Outsiders must be demons. Earth is a place that exists only in legend, in the tales of their ancestors. But time is running out for this forgotten civilization... their world is being pulled straight towards the center of a galactic whirlpool, two orbiting black holes in space.

Can Kirk convince them to trust him, before their world is destroyed forever?

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.

Science fiction masters Larry Niven (Ringworld) and Gregory Benford (Timescape) continue the thrilling adventure of a human expedition to another star system that is jeopardized by an encounter with an astonishingly immense artifact in interstellar space: a bowl-shaped structure cupping a star, with a habitable area equivalent to many millions of Earths. And which, tantalizingly, is on a direct path heading toward the same system the human ship is to colonize.

Investigating the Bowl, or Shipstar, the human explorers are separated--one group captured by the gigantic structure's alien inhabitants, the other pursued across its strange and dangerous landscape--while the mystery of the Shipstar's origins and purpose propel the human voyagers toward discoveries that transform their understanding of their place in the universe.

Humankind has escaped a dying Earth and set out to find a new home among the stars aboard an immense generation spaceship, affectionately named the Ark. Bryan Benson is the Ark's greatest living sports hero, enjoying retirement working as a detective in Avalon, his home module. The hours are good, the work is easy, and the perks can't be beat.

But when a crew member goes missing, Benson is thrust into the center of an ever-expanding web of deception, secrets, and violence that overturns everything he knows about living on the Ark and threatens everyone aboard. As the last remnants of humanity hurtle towards their salvation, Benson finds himself in a desperate race to unravel the conspiracy before a madman turns mankind's home into its tomb.

Against all odds, the Ark and her thirty-thousand survivors have reached Tau Ceti G to begin the long, arduous task of rebuilding human civilization. Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, Tau Ceti G's natives, the G'tel, are coming to grips with the sudden appearance of what many believe are their long-lost Gods.

But first contact between humans and G'tel goes catastrophically wrong, visiting death on both sides. Rumors swirl that the massacre was no accident. The Ark's greatest hero, Bryan Benson, takes on the mystery.

Partnered with native 'truth-digger' Kexx, and against both of their better judgment, Benson is thrust into the heart of an alien culture with no idea how to tell who wants to worship him from who wants him dead.

Together, Benson and Kexx will have to find enough common ground and trust to uncover a plot that threatens to plunge both of their peoples into an apocalyptic war that neither side can afford to fight.

A new generation comes of age eighteen years after humanity arrived on the colony planet Gaia. Now threats from both within and outside their Trident threaten everything they've built.

The discovery of an alien installation inside Gaia's moon, terrorist attacks, and the kidnap of a man's daughter stretch the community to its breaking point, but only two men stand a chance of solving all three mysteries before the makeshift planetary government shuts everything down.

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.

The descendants of Expatria's first colonists from Earth have rejected technology. When Mathias Hanrahan, heir to the primacy of Newest Delhi, wants to reintroduce the old ways he is framed for his father's murder and forced to flee.

Recruited by a research team which is trying to relearn the ancient technologies, he goes to work for them, and against a background of impending war, Mathias discovers that strange messages are coming from space.

This is an omnibus edition of The Heliconia Trilogy.

Bestselling science-fiction superstars Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle combine their talents with those of rising young author Steven Barnes in an extraordinary adventure of humankind's first outpost in the farthest reaches of space.

Keep Your Head Down.

Don't Get Noticed.

Or Else.

I'm Trella. I'm a scrub. A nobody. One of thousands who work the lower levels, keeping Inside clean for the Uppers. I've got one friend, do my job and try to avoid the Pop Cops. So what if I occasionally use the pipes to sneak around the Upper levels? The only neck I risk is my own... until I accidentally start a rebellion and become the go-to girl to lead a revolution.

On a broken ship orbiting a doomed sun, dwellers have grown complacent with their aging metal world. But when a serving girl frees a captive noblewoman, the old order is about to change....

Ariane, Princess of the House of Rule, was known to be fiercely cold-blooded. But severing an angel's wings on the battlefield-even after she had surrendered-proved her completely without honor. Captive, the angel Perceval waits for Ariane not only to finish her off-but to devour her very memories and mind. Surely her gruesome death will cause war between the houses-exactly as Ariane desires. But Ariane's plan may yet be opposed, for Perceval at once recognizes the young servant charged with her care.

Rien is the lost child: her sister. Soon they will escape, hoping to stop the impending war and save both their houses. But it is a perilous journey through the crumbling hulk of a dying ship, and they do not pass unnoticed. Because at the hub of their turning world waits Jacob Dust, all that remains of God, following the vapor wisp of the angel. And he knows they will meet very soon.

Sometimes the greatest sin is survival. The generation ship Jacob's Ladder has barely survived cataclysms from without and within. Now, riding the shock wave of a nova blast toward an uncertain destiny, the damaged ship-the only world its inhabitants have ever known-remains a war zone. Even as Perceval, the new captain, struggles to come to terms with the traumas of her recent past, the remnants of rebellion aboard the ship still threaten the crew's survival.

Yet as Perceval's relatives Tristen and Benedick play a deadly game of cat and mouse in pursuit of a traitor through a vast ship that is renewing itself in strange and dangerous ways, an even more insidious threat is building in a place no one ever thought to look. And this implacable enemy could change the face of the ship forever if a ragtag band of heroes cannot stop it.

Rife with intrigue and betrayal, heroism and sacrifice, Grail brings Elizabeth Bear's brilliant space opera to a triumphant conclusion.

At last the generation ship Jacob's Ladder has arrived at its destination: the planet they have come to call Grail. But this habitable jewel just happens to be populated already: by humans who call their home Fortune. And they are wary of sharing Fortune-especially with people who have genetically engineered themselves to such an extent that it is a matter of debate whether they are even human anymore. To make matters worse, a shocking murder aboard the Jacob's Ladder has alerted Captain Perceval and the angel Nova that formidable enemies remain hidden somewhere among the crew.

On Grail-or Fortune, rather-Premier Danilaw views the approach of the Jacob's Ladder with dread. Behind the diplomatic niceties of first-contact protocol, he knows that the deadly game being played is likely to erupt into full-blown war-even civil war. For as he strives to chart a peaceful and prosperous path forward for his people, internal threats emerge to take control by any means necessary.

Curiosity was discouraged in the Greene tribe. Its members lived out their lives in cramped Quarters, hacking away at the encroaching ponics. As to where they were - that was forgotten.

Roy Complain decides to find out. With the renegade priest Marapper, he moves into unmapped territory, where they make a series of discoveries which turn their universe upside-down...

Non-Stop is the classic SF novel of discovery and exploration; a brilliant evocation of a familiar setting seen through the eyes of a primitive.

The Executives control Oichi's senses, her voice, her life. Until the day they kill her.

An executive clan gives the order to shoot Oichi out of an airlock on suspicion of being an insurgent. A sentient AI, a Medusa unit, rescues Oichi and begins to teach her the truth -- the Executives are not who they think they are. Oichi, officially dead and now bonded to the Medusa unit, sees a chance to make a better life for everyone on board.

As she sets things right one assassination at a time, Oichi becomes the very insurgent the Executives feared, and in the process uncovers the shocking truth behind the generation starship that is their home.

In 2088, humankind is at last ready to explore beyond Earth's solar system. But one uncertainty remains: Where do we go?

Astrophysicist Reggie Straifer has an idea. He's discovered an anomalous star that appears to defy the laws of physics, and proposes the creation of a deep-space mission to find out whether the star is a weird natural phenomenon, or something manufactured.

The journey will take eons. In order to maintain the genetic talent of the original crew, humankind's greatest ambition--to explore the furthest reaches of the galaxy--is undertaken by clones. But a clone is not a perfect copy, and each new generation has its own quirks, desires, and neuroses. As the centuries fly by, the society living aboard the nine ships (designated Convoy Seven) changes and evolves, but their mission remains the same: to reach Reggie's mysterious star and explore its origins--and implications.

A mosaic novel of discovery, Noumenon--in a series of vignettes--examines the dedication, adventure, growth, and fear of having your entire world consist of nine ships in the vacuum of space. The men and women, and even the AI, must learn to work and live together in harmony, as their original DNA is continuously replicated and they are born again and again into a thousand new lives. With the stars their home and the unknown their destination, they are on a voyage of many lifetimes--an odyssey to understand what lies beyond the limits of human knowledge and imagination.

When Raf Kurbi's Terran spaceship burst into unexplored skies of the far planet Astra and was immediately made welcome by the natives of a once-mighty metropolis, Kurbal was unaware of three vital things:

One was that Astra already harbored an Earth colony—descended from refugees from the worl of the previous century.

Two was that these men and women were facing the greatest danger of their existence from a new outburst of inhuman fiends who had once tyrannized Astra.

Three was that the natives who were buying Kurbi's science know-how were those very fiends—and their intentions were implacably deadly for all humans, whether Earth born or STAR BORN.

Chiku Yellow is earthbound: living a peaceful life on a changing world as humanity explores a thousand new ways to experience life.

Chiku Red is space-bound: blasted into deep space to investigate Eunice Akinya's last journey, and maybe discover the final secrets of space travel.

Chiku Green is planet-bound: travelling thousands of lightyears to the planet Crucible. A new home for humankind; it's a habitable planet hosting a fascinating alien labyrinth.

All three are Chiku Akinya.

All three are pivotal to our future in space.

All three are in danger...

Years after the appearance in the solar system of the immense, deserted spaceship, Rama, a second craft arrived, destined to become home for a group of human colonists. But now the colony has become a brutal dictatorship, terrorizing its own inhabitants. Nicole Wakefield, condemned to death for treason, has escaped to New York. There she is reunited with her husband, but pursuit is not far behind and they are forced to flee to the subterranean corridors of New York inhabited by the menacing octospiders. So begins the greatest adventure of the Rama cycle, a story of massive scope and extraordinary revelations.

If a violent battle destroyed the only world you've ever known, would you be brave enough to save who was left? Would love be strong enough to survive the fight? Either way, there's no turning back.

The Empyrean is the only home 15-year-old Waverly has ever known. Part of the first generation to be successfully conceived in deep space, she and her boyfriend, Kieran, will be pioneers of New Earth. Waverly knows she must marry young in order to have children who can carry on the mission, and Kieran, the handsome captain-to-be, has everything Waverly could want in a husband. Everyone is sure he's the best choice. Still, there's a part of Waverly that wants more from life than marriage, and she is secretly intrigued by the shy, darkly brilliant Seth.

Suddenly, Waverly's dreams are interrupted by the inconceivable: a violent betrayal by the Empyrean's sister ship, the New Horizon. Its leaders are desperate to populate the new planet first, and will do anything to get what they need: young girls. In one pivotal moment, Waverly and Kieran are separated and then find themselves at the helm of dangerous missions, where every move has potentially devastating consequences, and decisions of the heart may lead to disaster.

Waverly, Kieran, and Seth are in a race against time - and with the future of humanity hanging in the balance, there's no room for mistakes....

After a desperate escape from the enemy ship, Waverly has finally made it back to the Empyrean. The memory of home has been keeping her alive for the past months... but home is nothing like she left it. Forced to leave their captive parents behind on the New Horizon, she's returned only to find that Kieran has become a strict leader and turned the crew against Seth. What happened to the Kieran she thought she knew?

Now Waverly's not sure whom she can trust. And the one person she wants to believe in is darkly brilliant Seth, the ship's supposed enemy. Waverly knows that the situation will only get worse until they can rescue their parents - but how?

Before they have time to make a plan, an explosion rocks the Empyrean, and Seth and Waverly are targeted as the prime suspects. Can they find the true culprit before Kieran locks them away... or worse? Will Waverly follow her heart, even if it puts lives at risk? Now more than ever, every step could bring them closer to a new beginning - or a sudden end.

In the first in the Starfarers series of novels, the commander of the Starfarer spacecraft, scientist Victoria MacKenzie, must battle her own commanders on Earth to keep on her mission to find extraterrestrial life.

Nightside the Long Sun is the beginning of the science fiction masterpiece from Gene Wolfe, Book of the Long Sun

Life on the Whorl, and the struggles and triumphs of Patera Silk to satisfy the demands of the gods, will captivate readers yearning for something new and different in science fiction, for the magic of the future.

Enormous in breadth and scope, Wolfe's ambitious new work opens out into a world of wonders, of gods and humans, aliens and machines, and mysterious adventures far out in space and deep inside the human spirit. It is set on a ship-world whose origins are shrouded in legend, ruled by strange gods who appear infrequently to their worshippers on large screens, and peopled by a human race changed by eons of time, yet familiar.

Lake of the Long Sun is the second volume in the Book of the Long Sun series from science fiction and fantasy master Gene Wolfe

It is the far future, and the giant spaceship, The Whorl, has traveled for forgotten generation towards its destination. Lit inside by the artificial Long Sun, The Whorl is so huge that you can see whole cities in the sky. And now the gods of The Whorl begin to intervene in human affairs. A god speaks to Patera Silk, a clergyman at work in the schoolyard of his church. Silk must go on a quest to save his church and his people.

A Nebula Award Finalist and Winner of the Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel, Caldé of the Long Sun is the third volume in science fiction Grand Master Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun tetralogy.

Journeying aboard the generational starship the Whorl, the young priest Patera Silk becomes a prophet and revolutionary as he questions his faith while confronting a crime lord in a saga where "[Wolfe] continues to prove himself one of the genre's most literate writers and luminescent thinkers" (Library Journal).

Exodus from the Long Sun concludes Gene Wolfe's masterful sci-fi epic series, the Book of the Long Sun

It is the far future, and the giant spaceship, The Whorl, has traveled for forgotten generations toward its destination.

Lit inside by the artificial Long Sun, The Whorl is so huge that whole cities can be seen in the sky. And the gods of The Whorl have begun to intervene in human affairs. An entirely unexpected future awaits as Patera Silk and the other inhabitants are confronted with the world of an alien race.

Wolfe's great work is complete, with the mysterious fullness of life itself.

Seventy-five years from today, the human race has been cast from a dying Earth to wander the stars in a vast fleet of arks--each shaped by its inhabitants into a diverse and fascinating new environment, with its own rules and eccentricities.

When her sister disappears while responding to a mysterious alien distress call, Eryn insists on being part of the crew sent to look for her. What she discovers on Candidate-623 is both terrifying and deadly. When the threat follows her back to the fleet and people start dying, she is tasked with seeking out a legendary recluse who may just hold the key to humanity's survival.

Hugo Award nominated novella. It originally appeared in Science Fiction Age, July 1997. The story can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fifteenth Annual Collection (1998), edited by Gardner Dozois and The Hard SF Renaissance (2002), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. It was later expanded to the full novel Marrow (2000).

A talented stardrive mechanic is kidnapped and hauled across light-years, ending up inside a derelict alien ship. The mission is to recover the treasure that must be somewhere on board. But where? The crew is untrustworthy, and the ancient creature at the helm might be insane. And the mechanic isn't a real mechanic, but instead Pamir is a criminal with just enough skills to maybe, maybe save the day.

This novella originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, June 2013. It can also be found in the anthologies Space Opera (2014), edited by Rich Horton, and The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-First Annual Collection (2014), edited by Gardner Dozois.

Ash is a professional interrogator and at times has served as a torturer. He enlists an alien friend to help him cope with one of his victims, and the alien, one of the peculiar 31-1s, is witness to a pivotal moment in the lives of two immortal humans.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Extrasolar (2017), edited by Nick Gevers. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Fifth Annual Collection (2018), edited by Gardner Dozois.

The Ship has traveled the universe for longer than any of the near-immortal crew can recall, its true purpose and origins unknown. It is larger than many planets, housing thousands of alien races and just as many secrets.

Now one of those secrets has been discovered: at the center of the Ship is . . . a planet. Marrow. But when a team of the Ship's best and brightest are sent down to investigate, will they return with the origins of the Ship--or will they bring doom to everyone on board?

The Hind by Kevin J. Anderson and Rick Wilber was first published in Asimov's Science Fiction, November/December issue, 2020.

It concerns an ill-fated generational ship.

Death of the Hind by Kevin J. Anderson and Rick Wilber was first published in Asimov's Science Fiction, November/December issue 2023.

It concerns the final outcome of an ill-fated generational ship.

"Tortoise and Hare", a novella by Kevin J Anderson, tells the story of Jorie Taylor, who has lived her whole life on the generation ship Beacon. Fleeing an Earth tearing itself apart from its exhaustive demand for resources, the Beacon is finally approaching Sarbras, the planet circling Tau Ceti which they hope to make humanity's new home.

But Earth has recovered from its near-death experience, and is now under the control of a ruthless dictator whose sights are set on Tau Ceti as well. President Jurudu knows how to get what he wants - and he wants Sarbras. He sends the military ship Conquistador, which uses newly-developed FTL (faster-than-light) technology, to ensure that he gets it.

In the sequel novelette "Grasshopper and Ants" by Steven Savile, Jorie is now the eleventh captain of the generation ship Beacon, which has at last reached its destination, the colony planet Sarbras. But one by one, the colonists come down with a mysterious, undiagnosible illness. And the Conquistador's arrival is imminent.

Tau Ceti won the 2013 "Lifeboat to the Stars" Award as the best work of science fiction contributing to an understanding of the benefits, means, and difficulties of interstellar travel.

Stephen Baxter's highly acclaimed first novel and the beginning of his stunning Xeelee Sequence. A spaceship from Earth accidentally crossed through a hole in space-time to a universe where the force of gravity is one billion times as strong as the gravity we know. Somehow the crew survived, aided by the fact that they emerged into a cloud of gas surrounding a black hole, which provided a breathable atmosphere. Five hundred years later, their descendants still struggle for existence, divided into two main groups. The Miners live on the Belt, a ramshackle ring of dwellings orbiting the core of a dead star, which they excavate for raw materials. These can be traded for food from the Raft, a structure built from the wreckage of the ship, on which a small group of scientists preserve the ancient knowledge which makes survival possible. Rees is a Miner whose curiosity about his world makes him stow away on a flying tree -- just one of the many strange local lifeforms -- carrying trade between the Belt and the Raft.

Accepted as an apprentice scientist, he learns that their world is dying, and that in order to live these survivors must contemplate a journey even more perilous and fantastic than that of their ancestors.

Hundreds of years ago, the last humans on Earth boarded the Exodus Fleet in search of a new home among the stars. After centuries spent wandering empty space, their descendants were eventually accepted by the well-established species that govern the Milky Way.

But that was long ago. Today, the Exodus Fleet is a living relic, the birthplace of many, yet a place few outsiders have ever visited. While the Exodans take great pride in their original community and traditions, their culture has been influenced by others beyond their bulkheads. As many Exodans leave for alien cities or terrestrial colonies, those who remain are left to ponder their own lives and futures: What is the purpose of a ship that has reached its destination? Why remain in space when there are habitable worlds available to live? What is the price of sustaining their carefully balanced way of life -- and is it worth saving at all?

A young apprentice, a lifelong spacer with young children, a planet-raised traveler, an alien academic, a caretaker for the dead, and an Archivist whose mission is to ensure no one's story is forgotten, wrestle with these profound universal questions. The answers may seem small on the galactic scale, but to these individuals, it could mean everything.