Search Worlds Without End

An experiment in the future gone awry... and Duncan Reid, American architect of the 20th century, came out of unconsciousness to find himself hopelessly marooned in the far distant past. Bound to him were three of the strangest humans he had ever encountered... a medieval Russian, a fourth-century Hun, and a sacred priestess who worshiped him as a god. And all shared the same fate - pulled through a hole in time to a present which was ancient history. Together the quartet formed a strange alliance which none dared break. For not only were their own futures at stake... but the very future of the world they had found...

50,000 years ago, three young friends band together for a perilous journey to find a new home after plague devastates their coastal tribe. Accompanied by a blind horse and armed with meager weapons and their own elusive courage, Hamr, Timov and Duru defy savage odds to survive in the strange and brutal realm of Ice Age Europe. This incredible quest takes them through primeval forests stalked by cave lions and across vast glacial moraines of thundering woolly rhinoceros - to the Thundertree clan. These forest people accept Duru, the girl, for her magical powers. But the two young men must prove themselves worthy by hunting down a giant Neanderthal - the last of his line - who has been terrorizing the tribe.

A human fighter pilot's mind inhabits a spaceship.

Young Hiram Walker was born into bondage. When his mother was sold away, Hiram was robbed of all memory of her--but was gifted with a mysterious power. Years later, when Hiram almost drowns in a river, that same power saves his life. This brush with death births an urgency in Hiram and a daring scheme: to escape from the only home he's ever known.

So begins an unexpected journey that takes Hiram from the corrupt grandeur of Virginia's proud plantations to desperate guerrilla cells in the wilderness, from the coffin of the Deep South to dangerously idealistic movements in the North. Even as he's enlisted in the underground war between slavers and the enslaved, Hiram's resolve to rescue the family he left behind endures.

This is the dramatic story of an atrocity inflicted on generations of women, men, and children--the violent and capricious separation of families--and the war they waged to simply make lives with the people they loved. Written by one of today's most exciting thinkers and writers, The Water Dancer is a propulsive, transcendent work that restores the humanity of those from whom everything was stolen.

THE MIDNIGHT DANCERS is a novel of the far future, when mankind has spread through the galaxies, tamed worlds and prospered...until a mysterious plague swept through the worlds of men, a plague that left the race insane and helpless.

Only on a distant rim world where men still fight the elements is there any sanity left. To this world comes the Walker, a supernormal being on a quest to find salvation for humanity. Perhaps here, he thinks, there is a clue to the answer.

But the Walker too is insane, and he plunges even this world into confusion. And one man stalks him across the planet, across the emptiness between the stars, to a final battle against the gods of the cosmos... and a chilling vision of ultimate reality.

Humans have been struggling to live on Frogmore for almost five centuries, adapting themselves to punishing gravity and the deadly mistflowers that dominate its ecology. Financier Inez Gauthier, patron of the arts and daughter of the general commanding the planet's occupation forces, dreams of eliminating the mistflowers that make exploitation of the planet's natural wealth so difficult and impede her father's efforts to crush the native insurgency.

Fascinated by the new art-form of waterdancing created by Solstice Balalzalar celebrating the planet's indigenous lifeforms, Inez assumes that her patronage will be enough to sustain Solstice's art even as she ruthlessly pursues windfall profits at the expense of all that has made waterdancing possible.

Sturgeon Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, April 2004. The story can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy for Teens: First Annual Collection (2005), edited by Jane Yolen and Patrick Nielsen Hayden. It is included in the collection The Involuntary Human (2007).

Nebula Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in the anthology Excalibur (1995), edited by Edward E. Kramer, Richard Gilliam and Martin H. Greenberg.

Read the full story for free at the author's website.

This story can be found in the following collections and anthologies:

• The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fifteenth Annual Collection (1998)
• The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 11th Annual Collection
• Daughters of Earth: Feminist Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century (2006)
• Grazing the Long Acre

This story originally appeared in the anthology Subterranean: Tales of Dark Fantasy (2008), edited by William Schafer, and was reprinted in Lightspeed, April 2012. It can also be found in the anthologies Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded (2010), edited by Jeff and Ann VanderMeer, and The Mammoth Book of Steampunk (2012), edited by Sean Wallace. The story is included in the collections The Ape's Wife and Other Stories (2013) and Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan (Volume Two) (2015).

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

On a Sioux reservation in North Dakota potent forces converge today, as they have for centuries. Ancestral ghosts make their presence known among the living. Dreams inspire journeys, both literal and physical. The dying are summoned to a council fire "five steps beyond the edge of the universe." And, through it all, good medicine and bad magic nudge the intricate twists of fate.

Such is the setting for Susan Power's debut novel, The Grass Dancer, itself a remarkable journey through many times and many realms. Power, an enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, has created a spellbinding collection of interwoven tales that not only illuminate the hearts, minds, and spirits of an unforgettable cast of characters but also offer startling insights into the use and abuse of power.

The oldest written stories in the world are found on fragments of clay tablets in Sumerian cuneiform. All these stories of Mesopotamian gods and goddesses have been gathered together here around the powerful central figure of Inanna, Lady of Love and War. At the climax of the story she descends to the Netherworld, to challenge the power of its fearful Queen Ereshkigal.

Only monsters summon fire by magic. It's a sin against the sun god and a crime against the king. The punishment is death.

But when sixteen-year-old Mina discovers fire magic runs in her family's blood, it's just the beginning of the secrets her father has been keeping from her. When her father is murdered, this half-starved peasant girl finds herself on the run--pursued across the desert by the soldiers and guards of the noble Houses. To survive, she knows she'll have to abandon her past and learn the way of the sword. But only boys are allowed to carry a blade. There's only one solution...

Disguised as a young nobleman, Mina must make a new life for herself in the heart of her enemies. But she knows she can't keep up the masquerade forever. With time running out, which will she choose to find--the truth or revenge?

Nebula Award nominated novelette. It was originally publisehed by Giganotosaurus, July 1, 2011 and can also be found in the Nebula Awards Showcase 2013, edited by Catherine Asaro.

Read the full story for free at Giganotosaurus.

Like so many others before him, reluctant Sam MacGregor was sent on a pilgrimage for the Grail Vision by the Dancers: androids grown from the cells of one man, with the powers of hypnotism and illusion--androids who held the tribes of the Republic of California in thrall.

But soon Sam began to doubt his own identity, for he experienced, in close succession, extra-lives in different corridors of time and space.

And he could not know whom his search would destroy: the Dancers . . . or himself.

Traveling carnival owner Thaddeus Flint expands his tour from the American Northeast out to the stars, only to discover that some of the attractions don't quite hold the audience like they did back on Earth. Realizing that his strip show has no more appeal to an alien audience than watching a saddle come off a horse, he reassigns his girls to work the game booths on the midway. When one of the girls can't make the transition, he improvises an alien solution.

This novella originally appeared in the collection Arcanum Unbounded (2016). It was publised as a single novella in 2017.

Three years ago, Lift asked a goddess to stop her from growing older--a wish she believed was granted. Now, in Edgedancer, the barely teenage nascent Knight Radiant finds that time stands still for no one. Although the young Azish emperor granted her safe haven from an executioner she knows only as Darkness, court life is suffocating the free-spirited Lift, who can't help heading to Yeddaw when she hears the relentless Darkness is there hunting people like her with budding powers. The downtrodden in Yeddaw have no champion, and Lift knows she must seize this awesome responsibility.

Serroi - first a warrior woman, later a pawn of the most evil wizard her people had ever known, and finally a powerful worker of earth magic. For centuries self-imprisoned, Serroi has at last escaped her bonds to find herself in a changed land, a place of scattered city-states which have slowly been acquiring artifacts of technology. And with Serroi's return, magic, long-vanquished and vanished, seems at last to be reappearing.

Awakened from a centuries-long spell of sleep, Serroi finds the world she once knew is now haunted by a strange evil force. As this terrifying enemy scourges the land, Serroi is forced into a struggle against evil she barely understands.

Awakened from a centuries-long spell of sleep, a warrior woman finds she is now a healer with powerful earth-magic. But the land is now haunted by an evil force which has the strength to alter the very laws of life and death.

Rheba is the sole survivor of a blaze that destroyed her planet, and Kirtn is the Bre'n warrior sworn to protect the exquisite, sensual fire dancer on a perilous journey to a far-off planet.

The last fire dancer of a vanished planet, Rheba and her guardian-mentor, Kirtn, pledge to return a shipful of freed slaves to their respective homes throughout the galaxy and are forced to resist their forbidden feelings for one another.

Surviving the devastating fire that consumed their home planet, beautiful Fire Dancer Rheba and warrior protector Kirtn embark on a mission to return liberated slaves to a distant planet, where they uncover deadly secrets

It was the ultimate case: to stop the ultimate drug...

I'm Horowitz. Brandy Horowitz. My husband, Sam, and I are private eyes who take cases for G.O.D., Inc. - the outfit that runs the Labyrinth to infinite alternate Earths filled with crime, danger... and murder.

Power-mad fanatics are running a narcotic V.D. that spreads like a bug, works like a drug, and one touch hooks you for good. You don't become a junkie... you become a zombie. 'Cause this monkey's not just on your back, but in your brain - it's got a mind, and if you kick it, it kicks back with madness and death.

So this beautiful black PI and wonderful Jewish sleuth have to smash the source before the drug-bug reaches our client's Home World. But the opposition's got fake Sams and Brandys set up in headquarters on the two worlds that hold any possible leads: one that never heard of civil rights... and one ruled by Nazis.

Doreen Williamson is a quiet, shy librarian on Earth. As many other young women she is distrustful of her attractions, frightened of men, introverted in manner and sexually inhibited. She lives in a quiet, lonely, dissatisfying, sheltered, frustrated desperation, distant from her true self, her nature denied, her only friends books and her secret thoughts. In the realization and enactment of a profound fantasy, after acute self-conflict, she dares to study dancing, a form of dance in which she is at last free to move her body as a female, a form of dance in which she may revel in her beauty and womanhood, a form of dance historically commanded by masters of selected, suitable slaves, belly dance. Thusly may she fantasize her longed-for desirability. This is, of course, her delicious, shameful secret, one which must be concealed from all, one which must be forever carefully guarded. Unbeknownst to herself, however, she has independently come to the attention of skilled assessors of women, of Gorean slavers. While secretly practicing in the library after hours she is surprised by three men. She must then dance, for the first time, before men. For the first, time, too, she discovers her own desirability, and that she is such as may be well bid upon. She will be taken to the beautiful, perilous world of Gor, there, in a collar, to learn her womanhood, and there, at last, to beautifully and profoundly find and fulfill herself.

Shebat came to the empire of the Kerrions from nowhere, brought by a renegade son into that vast family regime and its endless territorial possessions. Now she stood to inherit the majesty and riches which lay before her, stretching enticingly deep into the infinities of space. Magical seductress of men , passionate in her lust for power, she moved among those who controlled the destinies of millions, for whom treachery and betrayal were as easy as murder.

The Universal Ticker--

The legendary device that dispenses endless pleasure. To the centrifugal rickshaw dancers and other habitat rebels like Roger Count Aerowaffen, it's a potential weapon. For if they can create one, certain powerful decadent allies will be theirs.

Drivers of all habitat ground transport, ferrying police and government officials, and chanting their strangely coded songs to waiting rebel ears, the dancers and their leader Uwalk Wenn form a master spy network unbeknownst to Earth and its ruthless tyrant. Together with the chairmatic Aerowaffen, they conspire to win the support of a beautiful and pleasure-loving habitat queen.

Can their revoluion succeed... or does the Earth hold te ultimate secret that dooms rebellion before it even begins?

It was once a land ravaged by war, minor city states, baronies and principates fight for supremacy, and then the rival cities of Tali and Quon formed an alliance and so Quon Tali came into being.

However that was generations ago, that dynasty has collapsed and the regional powers are now clawing at each others throats once more. But at the heart of Quon Tali lies the powerful city state of Li Heng which has for centuries enjoyed relative stability under the guidance of the powerful sorceress known as the "Protectress". She is not someone likely to tolerate the arrival of two particular young men into her domain: one is determined to prove he is the most skilled assassin of his age; the other is his quarry -- a Dal Hon mage who is proving annoyingly difficult to kill. The sorceress and her cabal of five mage servants were enough to repel the Quon Tali Iron Legions, so how could two such trouble-makers upset her iron-fisted rule?

And now, under a new and ambitious king, the forces of Itko Kan are marching on Li Heng from the south. His own assassins, the Nightblades, have been sent ahead into the city, and rumours abound that he has inhuman, nightmarish forces at his command. So as shadows and mistrust swirl and monstrous beasts that people say appear from nowhere, run rampage through Li Heng's streets, it seems chaos is come - but in chaos, as a certain young Dal Hon mage would say, there is opportunity...

Twenty years after the old world ended in fire, Xander Sykes travels the deserts of a drastically changed Mithgar.

His fascination with the world he never knew--along with his strange abilities--divides him from his clan. But otherworldly forces interrupt his exile.

Pursued by enemies from above and beneath the world, Xander bands together with an ambassador from hell, his heavenly bodyguard, and a reformed guildsman seeking to right his order's wrongs.

The search for answers leads to a vast, decaying city haunted by a presence as tormented as it is deadly. Xander finds a survivor who may give purpose to his nameless longing--if he can help her escape the terror that stalks them both.

The January Dancer tells the fateful story of an ancient pre-human artifact of great power, and the people who found it.

Starting with Captain Amos January, who quickly loses it, and then the others who fought, schemed, and killed to get it, we travel around the complex, decadent, brawling, mongrelized interstellar human civilization the artifact might save or destroy. Collectors want the Dancer; pirates take it, rulers crave it, and they'll all kill if necessary to get it. This is a thrilling yarn of love, revolution, music, and mystery, and it ends, as all great stories do, with shock and a beginning.

Jory Rask is a professional shockball player. The fastest runback in the game, she is loved across Terra. But Jory Rask has a secret that she's lived with for twenty-four years... In a xenophobic world that despises aliens, she is not quite human.

When her mother dies--and that secret is revealed--Jory must honor her last wishes and set out on a journey to find others like herself. And once they meet, none of their lives will ever be the same again. For in order to take the vengeance denied their mothers, they must undergo training at the Tana, the school for assassins known as Blade Dancers--the most lethal killers in the galaxy. And in the heart of that school lies a deadly secret...

The Manhattan-based Unification government controls the earth, but rebellion brews in Occupied America as the American Revolution's tricentennial approaches. Denice Castanaveras, one of only two genetically engineered telepaths to escape destruction by Unification forces (the other is her missing twin brother, David) enters political life by becoming a bodyguard of Unification Councilor Douglass Ripper, whose agenda involves preventing U.N. Secretary General Charles Eddore from grabbing long-term power in this unstable period. However, the Unification rulers do not suspect that a high-ranking rebel called Obodi is actually Gi'Suei'Obodi'Sedon, an alien religious heretic who was banished from his own world thousands of years ago.

The epic adventure that began with Watchtower continues in the second breathtaking book in Elizabeth A. Lynn's Chronicles of Tornor--a series that has won unprecedented acclaim.

Enter a decaying far, far future society, a time when anything and everything is possible, where words like 'conscience' and 'morality' are meaningless, and where heartfelt love blossoms mysteriously between Mrs Amelia Underwood, an unwilling time traveller, and Jherek Carnelian, a bemused denizen of the End of Time.

The Dancers at the End of Time, containing the novels An Alien Heat, The Hollow Lands and The End of All Songs, is a brilliant homage to the 1890s of Wilde, Beardsley and the fin de siecle decadents, satire at its sharpest and most colourful.

This is the omnibus edition of the three books in The Dancers at the End of Time series.

When Jherek Carnelian meets Mrs Amelia Underwood, a lady time traveller from 1896, he determines to possess her and finds himself being plunged backwards in time to Victorian London. An Alien Heat is set in a crazy world of jewelled cities with ripe, rotting technologies…

In which we find Jherek Carnelian, one of the small population of hedonistic immortals remaining on Earth at the end of time, still obsessively in love with Amelia Underwood, a reluctant time-traveller form Victorian England.

After narrowly escaping death in 19th century London, Jherek is separated from his love by several millenia, and so he begins a new, headlong campaign -- seesawing through time and space regardless of risk and consequence -- to reunite himself with Mrs. Underwood.

Jherek Carnelian's return to the End of Time with Mrs. Amelia Underwood, his platonic love, occasions unbridled celebrations among the immortals, followed by a serious crisis, a spate of unorthodox marriages, and Jherek's and Amelia's choice of an unprecedented immortality.

The first in an epic new fantasy series, introducing an unforgettable new heroine and a stunningly original dystopian steampunk world with a flavor of feudal Japan.

A DYING LAND
The Shima Imperium verges on the brink of environmental collapse; an island nation once rich in tradition and myth, now decimated by clockwork industrialization and the machine-worshipers of the Lotus Guild. The skies are red as blood, the land is choked with toxic pollution, and the great spirit animals that once roamed its wilds have departed forever.

AN IMPOSSIBLE QUEST
The hunters of Shima's imperial court are charged by their Shogun to capture a thunder tiger -- a legendary creature, half-eagle, half-tiger. But any fool knows the beasts have been extinct for more than a century, and the price of failing the Shogun is death.

A HIDDEN GIFT
Yukiko is a child of the Fox clan, possessed of a talent that if discovered, would see her executed by the Lotus Guild. Accompanying her father on the Shogun's hunt, she finds herself stranded: a young woman alone in Shima's last wilderness, with only a furious, crippled thunder tiger for company. Even though she can hear his thoughts, even though she saved his life, all she knows for certain is he'd rather see her dead than help her.

But together, the pair will form an indomitable friendship, and rise to challenge the might of an empire.

He was Tiger, born of the desert winds, raised as a slave and winning his freedom by weaving a special kind of magic with a warrior's skill. Now he was an almost legendary sword-dancer, ready to take on any challenge--if the price was right... or the woman pretty enough.

She was Del, born of ice and storm, trained by the greatest of Northern sword masters. Now, her ritual training completed, and steeped in the special magic of her own runesword, she had come South in search of the young brother stolen five years before.

But even Del could not master all the dangers of the deadly Punja alone. And meeting Del, Tiger could not turn back from the most intriguing challenge he'd ever faced--the challenge of a magical, mysterious sword-dancer of the North.

The conclusion to Brian Herbert's epic Timeweb trilogy. As the human race and the sinister shape-shifting Mutatis continue their epic war, the connecting filigree of Timeweb strands that hold the universe together, begins to unravel. Sentient podships travel the strands of the web, but the cosmos itself is disintegrating.

Galactic ecologist Noah Watanabe, possessed of special powers, is the one person who has a chance of saving all races. He is immortal, and faced with the crisis to the universe, he is also evolving, changing both mentally and physically... but into what? Noah is swept on a tidal wave of destiny and knows there is no turning back.

The Morts were turning up all over Aeolis, the Eden-like planet named for the unexpectedwinds which sprang up from nowhere and swiftly faded away. But unlike the winds, the Morts didn't just fade away. These unidentifiable corpses - which on closer examination proved far from human - posed a bizarre threat to human control of Aeolis. So the Serviceship Halcyon XLV was dispatched to the planet to solve the secret of the Morts, a secret whispered by the winds every day - a secret older than mankind, which could spell the end of human life on the planet...