Search Worlds Without End

By the acclaimed author of Carve the Sky--a stunning new work that explores the consequences of God-playing. It is the year 2015, and Ilya Stasov in the newly rebonded Russian Reorganized Republic, has been placed in charge of a futile, underfunded dolphin research center. To ensure survival of the center, he takes advantage of an accidental discovery--and molds his dolphins into deadly superweapons, not realizing the dolphins have their own agenda.

Table of Contents

• The Breath of Suspension - (1991) - novella
• Living Will - (1991) - novelette
• Many Mansions - (1988) - novelette
• The Death Artist - (1990) - novelette
• At the Cross-Time Jaunters' Ball - (1987) - novelette
• Above Ancient Seas - (1992) - novelette
• Deathbinder - (1988) - novelette
• The Ring of Memory - (1989) - novelette
• Beneath the Shadow of Her Smile - (1985) - novelette
• A Deeper Sea - (1989) - novella

This novella originally appeared in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, October 1989. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Seventh Annual Collection (1990), edited by Gardner Dozois. The story is included in the collection The Breath of Suspension (1994) and was expanded to the full novel A Deeper Sea (1992).

This novelette originally appeared in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, August 1987, and was reprinted in Clarkesworld, #126, March 2017. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fifth Annual Collection (1988), edited by Garnder Dozois. The story is included in the collection The Breath of Suspension (1994).

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

This novelette originally appeared in the anthology The Other Half of the Sky (2013), edited by Athena Andreadis and Kay Holt. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-First Annual Collection (2014), edited by Garder Dozois.

This short story originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, March 2010. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Eighth Annual Collection (2011), edited by Gardner Dozois.

This novelette originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, February 2007. It can also be found in the anthology Science Fiction: The Best of the Year, 2008 Edition, edited by Rich Horton.

Bernal Haydon-Rumi, executive assistant to a funder of eccentric projects, drops by his boss's house on the way home from a business trip. By the next morning, he's been knocked out, his wealthy socialite boss Muriel has stolen a car and vanished, and the AI designed for planetary exploration that she's been funding turns out to be odder than it should be. In figuring out what's going on, Bernal has to deal with an anti-AI activist toting a handmade electronic arsenal, a local serial killer, a drug dealer with a business problem, a cryonic therapist stalked by past mistakes-and someone who specifically wants Bernal dead.

Brain Thief is a fun, literate speculative fiction adventure, sort of New England cyberpunk noir, set a year or ten from now, somewhere between the Berkshires and Boston, and includes, at no extra charge, a 30-foot-tall fiberglass cowgirl.

With the threat of interplanetary war looming in the twenty-fifth century solar system, Anton Lindgren, security officer for the powerful Lord Monboddo, acquires a priceless piece of art that comes with a legacy of intrigue and death.

In the twenty-first-century, eleven extraterrestrial races have settled our solar system, sometimes interacting with human beings, sometimes ignoring them altogether in pursuit of their own enigmatic ends. They reached human space with faster-than-light drives-deepdrives-designed to self-destruct after use. Without deepdrives of their own, humans have no way to cross the vast, interstellar gulf, or to compete as equals in the galactic community.

But then a renegade alien crashed on Venus and a ragtag group of mercenaries determines to break him out and learn his secrets for themselves-maybe even the secret of the deepdrive. But in a search for the deepdrive, nothing is as it seems, no one exactly who-or what- they appear to be. There are no easy answers, only layer upon layer of secrets and lies. And as events set in motion long ago and far away begin to ripple into human space, it is no longer even clear who are the hunters, and who the hunted.

This novella was first published in Asimov's Science Fiction, January-February 2019.

This novelette originally appeared in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, June 1991. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Ninth Annual Collection (1992), edited by Gardner Dozois, and Hackers (1996), edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois. The story is included in the collection The Breath of Suspension (1994).

This novelette originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, September 1998. It can also be found in the anthology Year's Best SF 4 (1999), edited by David G. Hartwell.

During the Devolution Wars his name was Theo Bronkman - one of seven enlisted in a prefabricated family of orphans, strays and runaways to work on a top-secret government project called Nimbus. But that life has been long-forgotten, and he is now simply Peter Ambrose - a struggling jazz musician who makes his living implanting mental prosthetics into the skulls of those with the money and the desire to artificially expand their brainpower.

But in a world awash in the artifacts of countless invented pasts - where faces and personalities can be changed as easily and often as clothing - even the most scrupulously suppressed memories can take on murderous lives of their own.

And now Peter Ambrose is trapped in a nightmare suddenly, and violently, reawakened - in which someone is killing off his Nimbus brothers and sisters, one by one...

Struggling for independence from Earth, Mars colonists Hektor and Breyton Passman pursue their goals on opposing paths as the former rallies his political contacts and the latter joins a radical underground movement.

A collection of ten stories creates a realm of "irrelevant miracles," where civilization-building is a pastime and death is an art, and offers unique interpretations of fear, love, guilt, greed, obligation, and obsession.

Table of Contents:

• The Breath of Suspension
• Living Will
• Many Mansions
• The Death Artist
• At the Cross-Time Jaunters' Ball
• Above Ancient Seas
• Deathbinder
• The Ring of Memory
• Beneath the Shadow of Her Smile
• A Deeper Sea

This short story originally appeared in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, August 1990. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Eighth Annual Collection (1991), and The Furthest Horizon: SF Adventures to the Far Future (2000), both edited by Gardner Dozois. The story is included in the collection The Breath of Suspension (1994).

This short story originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, July 2014. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2015, edited by Rich Horton.