Search Worlds Without End

This novelette originally appeared on the author's Patreon site in 2018. It was reprinted in Uncanny Magazine, Issue 28, May-June 2019.

Read the full story for free at Uncanny.

The corpse-jumping body mercenary Nev is used to filling other people's shoes. When his assistant Tera recognizes the most recent waterlogged cadaver they bought off the street, though, he finds that his new body is carrying more trouble than he bargained for.

This short story 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.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology The Lowest Heaven (2013), edited by Anne C. Perry and Jared Shurin, and was reprinted in Lightspeed, October 2013. The story can also be found in the anthology The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women (2014).

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

Brutal. Devastating. Dangerous.

Join an investigation into a cruel and heartless leader... crawl through filth and mud to escape biological warfare... team up with time-traveling soldiers faced with potentially life-altering instructions.

Kameron Hurley, award-winning author and expert in the future of war and resistance movements, has created eighteen exhilarating tales giving glimpses into the warfare of tomorrow.

A bleak future, yet there is hope for us. With Hurley's characteristic grim optimism, her characters fight for what they believe is right. They exhibit degrees of humanity only possible in the worst of circumstances. It is these characters, driven by a murky sense of honor and written with sincere, deep empathy, that make Future Artifacts: Stories a powerful collection you won't soon forget.

Contains the following stories:

• Sky Boys
• Overdark
• The Judgement of Gods and Monsters
• Broker of Souls
• The One We Feed
• Corpse Soldier
• Levianthan
• Unblooded
• The Skulls of Our Fathers
• Body Politic
• We Burn
• Antibodies
• The Traiter Lords
• Wonder Maul Doll
• Our Prisoners, the Stars
• The Body Remembers
• Moontide
• Citizens of Elsewhen

When renegade author Kameron Hurley (The Light Brigade; The Stars Are Legion) takes you to the future, be prepared for the unexpected. Yes, it will be dangerous, frequently brutal, and often devastating. But it’s also savagely funny, deliriously strange, and absolutely brimming with adventure.

In these edgy, unexpected tales, a body-hopping mercenary avenges his pet elephant, and an orphan falls in love with a sentient starship. Fighters ally to power a reality-bending engine, and a swamp-dwelling introvert tries to save the world—from her plague-casting former wife.

So come meet Kameron Hurley in the future. The version she's created here is weirder—and far more hopeful—than you could ever imagine.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction by Kameron Hurley
• Elephants and Corpses
• When We Fall
• The Red Secretary
• The Sinners and the Sea
• The Women of Our Occupation
• The Fisherman and the Pig
• The Plague Givers
• Tumbledown
• Warped Passages
• Our Faces, Radiant Sisters, Our Faces Full of Light!
• Enyo-Enyo
• The Corpse Archives
• The War of Heroes
• The Light Brigade
• The Improbable War

This short story originally appeared on the author's Patreon site. It was reprinted in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, #235, September 2017. The story can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2018, edited by Rich Horton.

Read the full story for free at Beneath Ceaseless Skies.

Hugo-nominated Related Work

The Geek Feminist Revolution is a collection of essays by double Hugo Award-winning essayist and fantasy novelist Kameron Hurley.

The book collects dozens of Hurley's essays on feminism, geek culture, and her experiences and insights as a genre writer, including "We Have Always Fought," which won the 2013 Hugo for Best Related Work. The Geek Feminist Revolution will also feature several entirely new essays written specifically for this volume.

Unapologetically outspoken, Hurley has contributed essays to The Atlantic, Locus, Tor.com, and others on the rise of women in genre, her passion for SF/F, and the diversification of publishing.

They said the war would turn us into light. I wanted to be counted among the heroes who gave us this better world.

The Light Brigade: it's what soldiers fighting the war against Mars call the ones who come back... different. Grunts in the corporate corps get busted down into light to travel to and from interplanetary battlefronts. Everyone is changed by what the corps must do in order to break them down into light. Those who survive learn to stick to the mission brief--no matter what actually happens during combat.

Dietz, a fresh recruit in the infantry, begins to experience combat drops that don't sync up with the platoon's. And Dietz's bad drops tell a story of the war that's not at all what the corporate brass want the soldiers to think is going on.

Is Dietz really experiencing the war differently, or is it combat madness? Trying to untangle memory from mission brief and survive with sanity intact, Dietz is ready to become a hero--or maybe a villain; in war it's hard to tell the difference.

This short story originally appeared in Lightspeed, November 2015.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

This novelette originally appeared on the author's Patreon page and was rerpinted in Uncanny Magazine, Issue 10, May-June 2016. The story can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2017, edited by Rich Hoton, and Swords Against Darkness (2017), edited by Paula Guran.

Read the full story for free at Uncanny Magazine.

This shot story originally appeared on the autor's Patreon site in July 2016, and was reprinted in Uncanny Magazine, Issue 15, March-April 2017.

Read the full story for free at Uncanny Magazine.

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?

This story originally appeared on Patreon.com, April 30, 2016, and was later reprinted in Lightspeed, August 2016.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

This short story originally appeared on Strange Horizons, 31 July 2006. It can also be found in the anthology Year's Best SF 12 (2012), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer.

Read the full story for free at Strange Horizons.

Ex-government assassin turned bounty-hunter, Nyx, is good at solving other people's problems. Her favorite problem-solving solution is punching people in the face. Then maybe chopping off some heads. Hey?it's a living.

Nyx's disreputable reputation has been well earned. After all, she's trying to navigate an apocalyptic world full of giant bugs, contaminated deserts, scheming magicians, and a centuries-long war that's consuming her future. Managing her ragtag squad of misfits has required a lot of morally-gray choices. Every new job is another day alive. Every new mission is another step toward changing a hellish future?but only if she can survive.

Table of Contents:

• The Body Project
• The Heart is Eaten Last
• Soulbound
• Crossroads at Jannah
• Paint it Red

Nyx had already been to hell. One prayer more or less wouldn t make any difference...

On a ravaged, contaminated world, a centuries-old holy war rages, fought by a bloody mix of mercenaries, magicians, and conscripted soldiers. Though the origins of the war are shady and complex, there's one thing everybody agrees on--

There's not a chance in hell of ending it.

Nyx is a former government assassin who makes a living cutting off heads for cash. But when a dubious deal between her government and an alien gene pirate goes bad, Nyx's ugly past makes her the top pick for a covert recovery. The head they want her to bring home could end the war--but at what price?

The world is about to find out.

The only thing worse than war is revolution. Especially when you're already losing the war...

Nyx used to be a bel dame, a government-funded assassin with a talent for cutting off heads for cash. Now she's babysitting diplomats to make ends meet and longing for the days when killing was a lot more honorable.

When Nyx's former bel dame "sisters" lead a coup against the government that threatens to plunge the country into civil war, Nyx is tasked with bringing them in. The hunt takes Nyx and her inglorious team of mercenaries to one of the richest, most peaceful, and most contaminated places on the planet - a country wholly unprepared to host a battle waged by the world's deadliest assassins.

In a rotten nation of sweet-tongued politicians, giant bugs, and renegade shape shifters, Nyx will forge unlikely allies and rekindle old acquaintances. And the bodies she leaves scattered across the continent this time... may include her own.

Because no matter where you go or how far you run in this world, one thing is certain: the bloody bel dames will find you.

After years in exile, Nyxnissa so Dasheem is back in action in service to the bel dames, a sisterhood of elite government assassins tasked with eliminating deserters and traitors. The end of a centuries-long holy war between her country, Nasheen, and neighboring Chenja has flooded the streets of Nasheen with unemployed - and unemployable - soldiers whose frustrations have brought the nation to the brink of civil war.

Not everyone likes this tenuous and unpredictable "peace," however, and somebody has kidnapped a key politician whose death could trigger a bloody government takeover. With aliens in the sky and revolution on the ground, Nyx assembles a team of mad magicians, torturers,and mutant shape-shifters for an epic journey across a flesh-eating desert in search of a man she's not actually supposed to kill.

Trouble is, killing is the only thing Nyx is good at. And she already left this man to die...

On the eve of a recurring catastrophic event known to extinguish nations and reshape continents, a troubled orphan evades death and slavery to uncover her own bloody past...while a world goes to war with itself.

In the frozen kingdom of Saiduan, invaders from another realm are decimating whole cities, leaving behind nothing but ash and ruin. At the heart of this war lie the pacifistic Dhai people, once enslaved by the Saiduan and now courted by their former masters to provide aid against the encroaching enemy.

Stretching from desolate tundra to steamy, semi-tropical climes seething with sentient plant life, this is an epic tale of blood mages and mercenaries, emperors and priestly assassins who must unite to save a world on the brink of ruin.

As the dark star of the cataclysm rises, an illegitimate ruler is tasked with holding together a country fractured by civil war; a precocious young fighter is asked to betray his family to save his skin; and a half-Dhai general must choose between the eradication of her father's people or loyalty to her alien Empress.

Through tense alliances and devastating betrayal, the Dhai and their allies attempt to hold against a seemingly unstoppable force as enemy nations prepare for a coming together of worlds as old as the universe itself.

In the end, one world will rise - and many will perish.

Loyalties are tested when worlds collide...

Every two thousand years, the dark star Oma appears in the sky, bringing with it a tide of death and destruction. And those who survive must contend with friends and enemies newly imbued with violent powers. The kingdom of Saiduan already lies in ruin, decimated by invaders from another world who share the faces of those they seek to destroy.

Now the nation of Dhai is under siege by the same force. Their only hope for survival lies in the hands of an illegitimate ruler and a scullery maid with a powerful - but unpredictable - magic. As the foreign Empire spreads across the world like a disease, one of their former allies takes up her Empress's sword again to unseat them, and two enslaved scholars begin a treacherous journey home with a long-lost secret that they hope is the key to the Empire's undoing.

But when the enemy shares your own face, who can be trusted?

In this devastating sequel to The Mirror Empire, Kameron Hurley transports us back to a land of blood mages and sentient plants, dark magic, and warfare on a scale that spans worlds.

The Dhai nation has broken apart under the onslaught of the Tai Kao, invaders from a parallel world. With the Dhai in retreat, Kirana, leader of the Tai Kao, establishes a base in Oma's temple and instructs her astrologers to discover how they can use the ancient holy place to close the way between worlds.

With all the connected worlds ravaged by war and Oma failing, only one world can survive. Who will be sacrificed, and what will the desperate people of these worlds do to protect themselves?