Search Worlds Without End

This short story originally appeared in Discover, October 2012, and was reprinted in Lightspeed, April 2013. It can also be found in the anthology Year's Best SF 18 (2013), edited by David G. Hartwell.

Read the full story for free at Lighstpeed.

"A Short History of the Twentieth Century, or, When You Wish Upon a Star", by Kathleen Ann Goonan, is about the daughter of a rocket scientist in the post 1950s who wants to go to the moon, despite being discouraged because "girls don't do that." A novelette that's science fiction by association.

This novelette is included in the anthology Worlds Seen in Passing: Ten Years of Tor.com Short Fiction (2018), edited by Irene Gallo.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

Short stories are a process of keeping juggled balls or perhaps, fiery torches aloft. They must, like any juggled object, remain constantly in play; one cannot falter when executing a work of short fiction. Timing the adept catch and pass of word, image, nuance is everything; without perfect cadence, the writer s efforts drop out of the sky. Constant motion is imperative, although it can be as subtle as a second s silvery bow of a grassy meadow beneath a whisper of wind. No matter how quiet-seeming the tale, good stories embody concentrated, incandescent energy that may be hidden until the last word reveals the meaning of the just-read work, igniting a fire in the mind, compelling the reader to retrace the points in the story that are now luminescent, infused with allusion that was always there, but not yet discerned just like much of life. Short stories are effervescent, for their life is hardly less fleeting than a round of juggling, gone in a month, flashing in and out of existence with the speed of a subatomic particle. A short story is a remarkable thing indeed.

Table of Contents:

• Angels and You Dogs - (2003) - novelette
• Solitaire - (1996) - shortstory
• Sunflowers - (1995) - novelette
• The Bride of Elvis - (1996) - shortstory
• Susannah's Snowbears - (1994) - novelette
• Klein Time - (1996) - novelette
• Dinosaur Songs - (2004) - shortstory
• Wanting to Talk to You - (1991) - shortstory
• The String - (1995) - novelette
• The Day the Dam Broke - (1995) - novelette
• Sundiver Day - (2008) - novelette
• Memory Dog - (2008) - novelette
• Electric Rains - (2007) - shortstory
• The Bridge - (2002) - novelette
• Story Notes - essay

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Eclipse One: New Science Fiction and Fantasy (2007), edited by Jonathan Strahan, and was reprinted in Lightspeed, March 2012. It is included in the collection Angels and You Dogs (2012).

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

Sturgeon Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, April-May 2008. The story can aslo be found in the anthology Year's Best SF 14 (2009), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. The story can also be found in the collection Angels and You Dogs (2012).

A near future novelette about the surge in AI that might bring hope to humanity if used well, in Kathleen Ann Goonan's One/Zero.

In war-torn Kurdistan, a group of traumatized orphans is given a gift that could change their lives and the lives of everyone in the world, while in Washington, DC, an elderly woman undergoes medical procedures that radically change her life.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

Early in the next century, the Interspace company, in charge of humanity's first-generation starship, has been given extraordinary powers. Cen, a descendant of Hawaiian shaman-priests and a mathematical genius, finds out as an adolescent how ruthless they are in their preparedness to exploit human weakness and brilliance, yet he sells his work to them to gain the leisure to pursue his own plans--the conquest of time and the saving of the long-dead princess whom he meets and loves in moments of vision.

A decade later, Lynn, a geneticist renegade from Interspace's ruling dynasty, rescues from assassination Akamu, a clone of Hawaii's legendary unifier, and finds herself, like Cen before her, manipulated by Interspace's Hawaiian nationalist foes. She and Akamu are pursued from Hawaii to Hong Kong and into the uplands of Tibet.

This short story originally appeared in Science Fiction Age, May 1996. It can also be found in the anthology Year's Best SF 2 (1997), edited by David G. Hartwell. The story is included in the collection Angels and You Dogs (2012).

This novelette originally appeared in the French anthology Détectives de l'impossible (2002), edited by Stéphane Nicot. The first English publication was in Asimov's Science Fiction, August 2007. It can also be found in the anthology Year's Best SF 13 (2008), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. The story is included in the collection Angels and You Dogs (2012).

A family will never be the same after Dad is consumed by the perfect puzzle.

Nebula Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, June 1995 and can also be found in the collection Angels and You Dogs (2012).

This novella originally appeared in the anthology Extrasolar (2017), edited by Nick Gevers, and was reprinted in Lightspeed, July 2018. It can also be found in the anthologies The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume 3 (2018), edited by Neil Clarke, and The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2018, edited by Rich Horton.

Sam Dance is a young enlisted soldier in 1941 when his older brother Keenan is killed at Pearl Harbor. Afterwards, Sam promises that he will do anything he can to stop the war.

During his training, Sam begins to show that he has a knack for science and engineering, and he is plucked from the daily grunt work of twenty-mile marches by his superiors to study subjects like code breaking, electronics, and physics in particular, a science that is growing more important to the war effort. While studying, Sam is seduced by a mysterious female physicist that is teaching one of his courses, and given her plans for a device that will end the war, perhaps even end the human predilection for war forever. But the device does something less, and more, than that.

After his training, Sam is sent throughout Europe to solve both theoretical and practical problems for the Allies. He spends his free time playing jazz, and trying to construct the strange device. It's only much later that he discovers that it worked, but in a way that he could have never imagined.

Kathleen Ann Goonan introduced Sam Dance and his wife, Bette, and their quest to alter our present reality for the better in her novel In War Times (winner of the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Novel and ALA's Best Science Fiction Novel of 2008). Now, in This Shared Dream, she tells the story of the next generation.

The three Dance kids, seemingly abandoned by both parents when they were younger, are now adults and are all disturbed by memories of a reality that existed in place of their world. The older girl, Jill, even remembers the disappearance of their mother while preventing the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

Goonan has created a new kind of utopian SF novel, in which the changes in history have created a present world that is in many ways superior to our own, while in other worlds people strive to prevent their own erasure by restoring the ills to ours. This Shared Dream is certainly the most provocative SF speculation of the year, and perhaps the decade.

In Verity's world, nanotech plagues decimated the population after an initial renaissance of utopian nanotech cities. Growing up on an isolated farm, she finds her happy life changing course when Blaze, the only young man in the community and Verity's best friend, is shot. With Blaze's body wrapped in a nanotech cocoon, Verity sets off on a quest to the Enlivened City of Cincinnati.

It is a place of legend, where huge bio-engineered bees carry information through the streets and enormous nanotech flowers burst from the tops of strange buildings. It is the place where Blaze might be brought back from the brink of death. But Cincinnati is a city of dreams turned into nightmares, endlessly reliving the fantasies of its creator, a city that Verity must rule--or die.

The journey of Verity across the wonderfully altered landscape of mid-America began in Queen City Jazz. From a Shaker commune to the nanotech-enlivened walled city of Cincinnati, young Verity traveled to save her best friend, Blaze, and to reject her controlling destiny: to become the queen of Queen City. Now the journey continues, on down the river, in Mississippi Blues.

As the enlivened city of Cincinnati is about to be transformed, and the enslaved citizens freed, Verity causes the construction of a huge nanotech riverboat, launched so that she and Blaze can accompany the released but nano-plagued people of that city down the Mississippi River to the mysterious city of New Orleans, where a rumored salvation awaits them. On and on they travel, through a landscape altered and strange, past dead cities, drowned cities, and cities weirdly alive, always accompanied by the music of the river, possessed by jazz and the blues.

This is how it begins...

...with the Silence, born of mysterious, space-originated phenomena that render Earth's dominant technologies useless -- inspiring paranoia and alien invasion fears within secret government agencies, which, in turn, inspire repressive actions against a perceived enemy populace.

...and with murder, as New Orleans mob boss and voudoun queen, Marie Laveau, dies in a hail of gunfire -- and is remade through the wonders of nanotechnology.

In a new world that necessity has transfigured -- an exhilarating, seething stew of microscopic machinery and genetic engineering; of totalinarianism, eco-terrorism and violence -- Marie Laveau's hunger for vengance is giving way to something greater.

For Destiny has named her savior of the outcasts, the opressed, the crazies, the hunted and the Silence's mutant children, who all flock to her dream of a future as sweet as an Ellington riff...and a safe haven called Crescent City.

Once the world worked differently -- before the Silence from space quieted the airwaves and rendered electronics useless.

Once there was a haven called Crescent City, built through the wonders of nanotechnology to transport its enlightened inhabitants into the cosmos, far away from the chaos and terrors of a world gone mad. But humanity has failed the city. And carelessness has left it vulnerable to attack from those who covet the health and prosperity it offers.

One of the original pioneers -- a recipient of the DNA-altering virus affecting a remarkable few who were born at the Silence's onset-Jason Peabody must now flee in the wake of an unanticipated assault on Crescent City by pirates. In the city-imposed persona of musical six-gun-toting Radio Cowboy, entrusted with the recovery of lost technology needed to heal the sentient metropolis and rocket it upward, he embarks on a bizarre odyssey across a perilous, unrecognizable outside -- through a landscape of Western round-ups and tragically "youngening" children of plague-ravaged humans in foreboding flower cities of conscious machines, talking animals, and toys that long to be real. With him is Dania, a brilliant scientist and resilient survivor whose hidden, troubled past is now painfully remembered beyond the walls of her urban sanctuary.

But even as Dania and her Cowboy journey westward, others are being relentlessly drawn to Crescent City from all parts of the globe -- and two from the moon, the last humans remaining from the inexplicably vanished Unity colony.

For an existence that is not as it was is on the brink of yet another astonishing transformation -- either by grand design or random cosmic accident. And the appearance on Earth of strange unearthly illuminations is causing widespread fear and panic -- as pilgrims from everywhere gather in Crescent City seeking answers to the Silence's long-concealed mysteries, responding to the hypnotic light music that's calling them toward a remarkable destiny in the stars.

One of three stories inspired by the same painting by Richard Anderson. Anthologized in The Anderson Project.

Kathleen Ann Goonan's stories and novels often evoke a deep desire for some form of utopian future, both better and somehow wilder that the present. This is a story about an animal rights activist and a genius parrot, inter-species communication, and the dream of space, a great leap forward in several ways.

Read this story online for free at Tor.com.