Search Worlds Without End

This short story originally appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine, July 2010. It can als be found in the anthologies Wilde Stories 2011: The Year's Best Gay Speculative Fiction, edited by Steve Berman, and Clarkesworld: Year Four (2013), edited by Sean Wallace and Neil Clarke.

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

A Lambda Literary Award Winner! A writer of whimsy and passion, Sandra McDonald has collected her most evocative short fiction to offer readers in Diana Comet & Other Improbable Stories. A beautiful adventuress from the ancient city of New Dalli sets off to reclaim her missing lover. What secrets does she hide beneath her silk skirts? A gay cowboy flees the Great War in search of true love and the elusive undead poet Whit Waltman, but at what cost? A talking statue sends an abused boy spinning through a great metropolis, dodging pirates and search for a home. On these quests, you will meet macho firefighters, tiny fairies, collapsible musicians, lady devils and vengeful sea witches. These are stories to stir the heart and imagination.

Table of Contents:

• Prologue
• Graybeard and the Sea
• Diana Comet and the Disappearing Lover - (2009)
• Pieter and the Sea Witch
• In the Land of Massasoit
• Fay and the Goddesses
• Diana Comet and the Lovesick Cowboy
• What You Wish For
• The Goddess and Lieutenant Teague
• The Fireman's Fairy - (2007)
• Nets of Silver and Gold
• The Instrument - (2005)
• Kingdom Coming
• Diana Comet & the Collapsible Orchestra
• Women of the Lace. - (2006)

Tiptree nominated short story. Originally published on Strange Horizons where it can still be read for free (part 1, part 2). Later collected in Diana Comet and Other Improbable Stories (2010)

Tiptree nominated short story, originally published in Crossed Genres Issue 24: Characters of Color, November 2010.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology We See a Different Frontier: A Postcolonial Speculative Fiction Anthology (2013), edited by Djibril al-Ayad and Fábio Fernandes, and was reprinted in Clarkesworld, #131, August 2017. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-First Annual Collection (2014), edited by Gardner Dozois.

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

This short story originally appeared in Lightspeed, November 2012.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

This short story originally appeared in Lightspeed, May 2014. It can also be found in the anthologies Year's Best Young Adult Speculative Fiction 2014, edited by Julia Rios and Alisa Krasnostein, and The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2015, edited by Rich Horton.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

Tiptree nominated short story originally published on Strange Horizons, 4 October 2010, where it can still be read for free. Later anthologized in Jonathan Strahan's The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume Five (2011), and Neil Clarke's More Human Than Human: Stories of Androids, Robots, and Manufactured Humanity (2017).

This short story originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, December 2012. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2013, edited by Rich Horton.

Tiptree nominated short story. Appearing originally in Realms of Fantasy August 2003, it was later anthologized in The James Tiptree Award Anthology 1 (2005).

This short story originally appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine, #75 December 2012. It can also be found in the anthology Clarkesworld: Year Seven (2015), edited by Sean Wallace and Neil Clarke.

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

Lieutenant Jodenny Scott is a hero. She has the medals and the scars to prove it.

She's cooling her heels on Kookaburra, recovering from injuries sustained during the fiery loss of her last ship, the Yangtze, and she's bored -- so bored, in fact, that she takes a berth on the next ship out. That's a mistake. The Aral Sea isn't anyone's idea of a get-well tour.

Jodenny's handed a division full of misfits, incompetents, and criminals. She's a squared-away officer. She thinks she can handle it all. She's wrong. Aral Sea isn't a happy ship. And it's about to get a lot unhappier.

As Aral Sea enters the Alcheringa -- the alien-constructed space warp that allows giant settler-ships to travel between worlds, away from all help or hope -- Jodenny comes face to face something powerful enough to dwarf even the unknown force that destroyed her last ship and left her with missing memories and bloody nightmares. Lieutenant Jodenny Scott is about to be introduced to love.

Author Sandra McDonald brings her personal knowledge of the military, and of the subtle interplay between men and women on deployment, to a stirring tale that mixes ancient Australian folklore with the colonization of the stars.

Chief Terry Myell and Lieutenant Commander Jodenny Scott are in that most precarious of military situations, a mixed marriage. Enlisted and officer. It's unnatural.

Terry and Jodenny have been assigned to duty on the planet Fortune, away from the huge ships that carry colonists from the wreckage of polluted Earth to clean new worlds across the galaxy.

But there's another way besides spaceships to travel from world to world. A group within Team Space is exploring the Wondjina Spheres, a set of ancient alien artifacts that link places and times. Now those spheres have shut down and Team Space thinks that Terry and Jodenny are part of the key to make them work again --no matter how the two of them feel about it. They can volunteer, or be "volunteered."

What the researchers can't anticipate is that the status quo, in which Team Space holds the monopoly on travel between worlds, is about to change. And as a result, Terry and Jodenny will be tested to their limits and beyond....

Chief Terry Myell died and became a god. Now he's back to life, careening around space and time at the behest of a voice that told him to save all of mankind. Helping and hindering this quest are his elderly wife, his young wife, grandchildren who haven't been born yet, romantic rivals he hasn't even met, a descendant from two thousand years in the future, and an alien nemesis who calls itself the Flying Doctor. Life in the military has never been so complicated.

Commander Jodenny Scott would agree. She's seven months pregnant and trying to come to peace with her husband's death. When Myell reappears with tales of time travel, she's not sure what to believe.

But with an invading army bearing down on Earth's last fleet of spaceships, there's not much time for debate. When the dust clears Jodenny is stranded in an Australia she never imagined, and Myell's more desperate than ever to rescue her--from aliens, from treachery, and from history itself.