Search Worlds Without End

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Resist: Tales From a Future Worth Fighting Against, edited by Gary Whitta, Christie Yant, and Hugh Howey, and was reprinted in Lightspeed, Issue 102, November 2018.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Dead Man's Hand: An Anthology of the Weird West (2014), edited by John Joseph Adams, and was reprinted in Lightspeed, April 2017.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

This short story originally appeared in The New Yorker, May 30, 2016. It can also be found in the anthology The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Eleven (2017), edited by Jonathan Strahan.

Read the full story for free at The New Yorker.

The author of the widely praised debut novel How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe returns with a hilarious, heartbreaking, and utterly original collection of short stories.

A big-box store employee is confronted by a zombie during the graveyard shift, a problem that pales in comparison to his inability to ask a coworker out on a date... A fighter leads his band of virtual warriors, thieves, and wizards across a deadly computer-generated landscape, but does he have what it takes to be a hero?... A company outsources grief for profit, its slogan: "Don't feel like having a bad day? Let someone else have it for you."

Drawing from both pop culture and science, Charles Yu is a brilliant observer of contemporary society, and in Sorry Please Thank You he fills his stories with equal parts laugh-out-loud humor and piercing insight into the human condition. He has already garnered comparisons to such masters as Kurt Vonnegut and Douglas Adams, and in this new collection we have resounding proof that he has arrived (via a wormhole in space-time) as a major new voice in American fiction.

Table of Contents:

• Standard Loneliness Package - (2010) - novelette
• First Person Shooter - (2012) - short story
• Troubleshooting - (2012) - short story
• Hero Absorbs Major Damage - (2012) - novelette
• Human for Beginners - (2012) - short story
• Inventory - (2012) - novelette
• Open - (2012) - short story
• Note to Self - (2012) - short story
• Yeoman - (2012) - short story
• Designer Emotion 67 - (2012) - short story
• The Book of Categories - (2011) - short story
• Adult Contemporary - (2012) - short story
• Sorry Please Thank You - (2012) - short story

This novelette originally appeared in Lightspeed, November 2010. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2011, edited by Rich Horton and Lightspeed: Year One (2011), edited by John Joseph Adams. The story is included in the collection Sorry Please Thank You (2012).

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

Jane is the only person left on the planet, minding the only business left: a gift shop. She wasn't born on Earth, but her ancestors were; they lived there before the AI in charge of geoengineering failed and the oceans got too hot to sustain the terrestrial food web and before humans took off to colonize other planets.

She's heading to college on Jupiter in the fall of 3020, so her days on the home planet--selling "American Epoch" postcards, "History: The Poster!" and "War: The Soundtrack" to tourists from the suburbs of Europa--are numbered. But as the looping promotional ad for Earth details, in the planet's more recent past there was an amusement park, a museum, and even a model American town to draw visitors: all shuttered now, abandoned. When a man and his son crash-land their rocket and need assistance, as well as some diversion, Jane learns that the other attractions on Earth are not so defunct after all and may have taken on a life of their own.

Told, fittingly, in interconnected fragments, The Only Living Girl on Earth captures a place where only fragments of its landscape remain. At once dead serious and playful, recognizable and as otherworldly and unsettling as Yu's other sci-fi reinventions, it is a cautionary tale about all that we could lose--are losing--by failing to live sustainably and about what we hope to leave behind for future generations. It is also a love letter to what it means to be human, how connected we are to a place and one another, and how we must fight to preserve these gifts. In this, Yu expresses his unique brand of cosmic humanism, that even in the face of dire circumstances, when we feel the most estranged from who and what we are, there is still hope.

National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Award winner Charles Yu delivers his debut novel, a razor-sharp, ridiculously funny, and utterly touching story of a son searching for his father . . . through quantum space–time.

Minor Universe 31 is a vast story-space on the outskirts of fiction, where paradox fluctuates like the stock market, lonely sexbots beckon failed protagonists, and time travel is serious business. Every day, people get into time machines and try to do the one thing they should never do: change the past. That’s where Charles Yu, time travel technician—part counselor, part gadget repair man—steps in. He helps save people from themselves. Literally. When he’s not taking client calls or consoling his boss, Phil, who could really use an upgrade, Yu visits his mother (stuck in a one-hour cycle of time, she makes dinner over and over and over) and searches for his father, who invented time travel and then vanished. Accompanied by TAMMY, an operating system with low self-esteem, and Ed, a nonexistent but ontologically valid dog, Yu sets out, and back, and beyond, in order to find the one day where he and his father can meet in memory. He learns that the key may be found in a book he got from his future self. It’s called How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, and he’s the author. And somewhere inside it is the information that could help him—in fact it may even save his life.

Wildly new and adventurous, Yu’s debut is certain to send shock waves of wonder through literary space–time.

Science fiction and fantasy can encompass so much, from far-future deep-space sagas to quiet contemporary tales to unreal kingdoms and beasts. But what the best of these stories do is the same across the genres--they illuminate the whole gamut of the human experience, interrogating our hopes and our fears. With a diverse selection of stories chosen by series editor John Joseph Adams and guest editor Charles Yu, The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017 continues to explore the ever-expanding and changing world of SFF today, with Yu bringing his unique view--literary, meta, and adventurous--to the series' third edition.

Table of Contents:

Editorial

• Foreword by John Joseph Adams
  
• Introduction by Charles Yu

Fantasy

• Head, Scales, Tongue, Tail by Leigh Bardugo
  • from Summer Days and Summer Nights
• I've Come to Marry the Princess by Helena Bell
  • from Lightspeed
• The Witch of Orion Waste and the Boy Knight by E. Lily Yu
  • from Uncanny
• Vulcanization by Nisi Shawl
  • from Nightmare
• Not by Wardrobe, Tornado, or Looking Glass by Jeremiah Tolbert
  • from Lightspeed
• This is Not a Wardrobe Door by A. Merc Rustad
  • from Fireside
• The Story of Kao Yu by Peter S. Beagle
  • from Tor.com
• The City Born Great by N.K. Jemisin
  • from Tor.com
• Successor, Usurper, Replacement by Alice Sola Kim
  • from BuzzFeed READER
• I Was a Teenage Werewolf by Dale Bailey
  • from Nightmare

Science Fiction

• Teenagers from Outer Space by Dale Bailey
  • from Clarkesworld
• Everyone From Themis Sends Letters Home by Genevieve Valentine
  • from Clarkesworld
• When They Came to Us by Debbie Urbanski
  • from The Sun
• Openness by Alexander Weinstein
  • from Beloit Fiction Journal
• The Future is Blue by Catherynne M. Valente
  • from Drowned Worlds
• On the Fringes of the Fractal by Greg van Eekhout
  • from 2113: Stories Inspired by the Music of Rush
• Smear by Brian Evenson
  • from Conjunctions: Other Aliens
• Welcome to the Medical Clinic at the Interplanetary Relay Station | Hours Since the Last Patient Death: 0 by Caroline M. Yoachim
  • from Lightspeed
• Caspar D. Luckinbill, What Are You Going to Do? by Nick Wolven
  • from F&SF
• The Venus Effect by Joseph Allen Hill
  • from Lightspeed