Search Worlds Without End

This novelette originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, March 1997. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fifteenth Annual Collection (1998), edited by Gardner Dozois. The story is included in the collection The Best of Ian McDonald (2016).

Sturgeon Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared in the anthology Old Venus (2015), edited by Gardner Dozois and George R.R. Martin and was reprinted in Clarkesworld, December 2017. The story can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Third Annual Collection (2016), edited by Gardner Dozois, The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2016, edited by Rich Horton, The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Ten (2016), edited by Jonathan Strahan, and The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume 1 (2016), edited by Neil Clarke.

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

Think Bladerunner in the tropics... Be seduced, amazed, and shocked by one of the world's greatest and strangest nations. Past, present, and future Brazil, with all its color, passion, and shifting realities, come together in a novel that is part SF, part history, part mystery, and entirely enthralling.

Three separate stories follow three main characters: Edson is a self-made talent impressario one step up from the slums in a near future Sao Paulo of astonishing riches and poverty. A chance encounter draws Edson into the dangerous world of illegal quantum computing, but where can you run in a total surveillance society where every move, face, and centavo is constantly tracked.

Marcelina is an ambitious Rio TV producer looking for that big reality TV hit to make her name. When her hot idea leads her on the track of a disgraced World Cup soccer goalkeeper, she becomes enmeshed in an ancient conspiracy that threatens not just her life, but her very soul.

Father Luis is a Jesuit missionary sent into the maelstrom of 18th-century Brazil to locate and punish a rogue priest who has strayed beyond the articles of his faith and set up a vast empire in the hinterland. In the company of a French geographer and spy, what he finds in the backwaters of the Amazon tries both his faith and the nature of reality itself to the breaking point.

Three characters, three stories, three Brazils, all linked together across time, space, and reality in a hugely ambitious story that will challenge the way you think about everything.

This novelette originally appeared in the anthology Life on Mars: Tales from the New Frontier (2011), edited by Jonathan Strahan, and was reprinted in Clarkesworld Magazine, February 2019. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Ninth Annual Collection (2012), edited by Gardner Dozois, and The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Six (2012), edited by Jonathan Strahan. The story is included in the collection The Best of Ian McDonald (2016).

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

This short story originally appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine, #76 January 2013. 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.

Published simultaneously with Desolation Road, the Empire Dreams collection was intended to exploit the author's nomination for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 1985. It collects the following stories:

Table of Contents:

• Vivaldi Visits to Remarkable Cities
• Unfinished Portrait of the King of Pain by Van Gogh
• Scenes from a Shadowplay Radio Marrakech
• King of Morning, Queen of Day
• The Island of the Dead
• Empire Dreams (Ground Control to Major Tom)
• Christian The Catharine Wheel (Our Lady of Tharsis)

This novelette originally appreaed in the anthology Tales of the Wandering Jew (1991), edited by Brian Stableford. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Ninth Annual Collection (1992), edited by Gardner Dozois. The story is included in the collection Sacrifice of Fools (1992).

For almost 30,000 years The Land has been a dependency of The Empire Across The River. The Empire retains a mechanistic technology in the hands of the wealthy and the civil service, but The Land uses its dead, whose brains are linked to a massive data network.

Published in the US as The Broken Land.

When Raisa Hopeland, determined to win her race to become the next electromancer of London, bumps into Amon Brightbourne?tweed-suited, otherworldly, guided by the Grace?in the middle of a London riot, she sets in motion a series of events which will span decades, continents and a series of events which will change the world.

From rioting London to geothermal Iceland to the climate-struck islands of Polynesia, from birth to life to death, from tranquillity to terror to joy, Raisa's journey will encompass the world. But one thing will always be true.

Hopeland is family--and family is dangerous.

In the myth-ridden hills of Ireland, three generations of young women struggle to tame the ancient magical powers that course through their blood. They each face the darker side of mytho-consciousness - one will embrace it, one will destroy it, and one will be swallowed whole.

In the 21st century nanotechnology can resurrect the dead, and by the year 2063 the dead account for a third of the world's population. This novel, from the author of "Hearts, Hands and Voices", is set in Necroville, the City of the Dead within 21st-century Los Angeles.

Also published as Terminal Cafe.

In a far-future city where happiness and stability are law, a group of rebels will fight for what it means to be human

The Compassionate Society was designed as a utopia, where people's genetic predispositions and aptitudes--rather than random choice--guide their lives, and pain of any kind is illegal. In the self-contained city, happiness is the most cherished value, and the Ministry of Pain swiftly prosecutes anyone who interferes with the contentment of another. For many of its citizens--who were matched to their jobs, spouses, and friends--the Compassionate Society is perfect. But to Courtney Hall, a political cartoonist, it is a place of stifling mediocrity. When her satirical work makes her a target of the government, Courtney goes on the run, only to discover an entire underground network of dissidents, each fighting against the stagnation imposed by the Compassionate Society--a struggle that could stand as humanity's last chance for growth, innovation, and ultimately, survival.

Thrilling and inventive, Out on Blue Six is Ian McDonald's engrossing story of free will and self-determination, and of the true value of a life ruled not by fear, but by hope.

This short story originally appeared in Other Edens III (1989), edited by Christopher Evans and Robert Holdstock. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Eighth Annual Collection (1991), edited by Gardner Dozois. The story is included in the collection Speaking in Tongues (1992).

This short story was originally published in Interzone, #104 February 1996 and reprinted in Lightspeed, June 2011. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fourteenth Annual Collection (1997), edited by Gardner Dozois and Nanotech (1998), edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois, and Best of the Best: 20 Years of the Year's Best Science Fiction (2005).

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

Protestants, Catholics, aliens... Just another division in Belfast

When the alien Shian come to Earth, they offer technology in exchange for a home. Belfast, Northern Ireland, is where eighty thousand of them settle. From that point on, the already-divided city takes on yet another partition. The Shian integrate themselves into the city's culture, becoming one more set of faces in the crowd. Now, a series of ghastly murders has stunned the city and affected both the Shian and the humans.

Andy Gillespie, a Loyalist and former criminal, is immediately named the main suspect in the killings. To clear his name, he must find the true perpetrators, and in order to do so, he must get help from any source possible--be it Protestant, Catholic, or extraterrestrial.

Shortlisted for the James Tiptree Jr. Award, Sacrifice of Fools depicts a city at once familiar and peculiar. Belfast resident Ian McDonald's interpretation of his hometown is one in which the people live their lives to the best of their abilities; one in which they have to deal with the basics of life with extraterrestrials, from language barriers to surprising new fetishes. Here, Belfastians discover how little things truly change.

The creator of computer-generated images that have the power to heal, erase memories, bring ecstasy, and kill savagely, graphic arts student Ethan Ring must brave treacherous terrain to escape those who would use his invention for evil.

Tiptree and WFA nominated novelette. It was first published in Ellen Datlow's Omni Best Science Fiction Three (1993). The story can also be found in the anthologies Omni Best Science Fiction Three (1993), edited by Ellen Datlow, The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Seventh Annual Collection (1994), edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, and in Flying Cups and Saucers: Gender Explorations in Science Fiction and Fantasy (1998), edited by Debbie Notkin. The story is included in the collection The Best of Ian McDonald (2016).

Read the full story for free at Infinity Plus.

An amazing roller coaster ride through the frontiers of the imagination from the author of the award-winning King of Morning, Queen of Day. Here are eleven previously uncollected tales filled with magic, humor, and the stunning realism that can surface only in the most well-conceived fantasies.

Table of Contents

• Gardenias (1989)
• Rainmaker Cometh (1989)
• Listen (1989)
• Speaking in Tongues (1990)
• Fragments of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (1991)
• Approaching Perpendicular (1988)
• Floating Dogs (1991)
• Atomic Avenue (1990)
• Fronds (1990)
• Winning (1990)
• Toward Kilimanjaro (1990)

This novelette originally appeared in Interzone, #58 April 1992. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Tenth Annual Collection (1993), edited by Gardner Dozois.

Ian McDonald, the author of such landmark novels as Desolation Road, Chaga, River of Gods, and The Dervish House, has long been regarded as one of Britain's finest SF writers. Just like those full-length works, his shorter fiction has commanded much admiration, and now, in this massive retrospective volume, the best McDonald tales are assembled in glittering array.

Represented here are all the phases of McDonald's career: the poetic early retro-visions that in the late Eighties signalled the arrival of a marvellously fluent new stylistic voice; the virtuoso Nineties riffs on themes such as the Irish Troubles, nanotechnology, alternate history, and alien sexuality; the bold post-millennial ventures into the futuristic politics of Third World countries such as Kenya, India, and Brazil, as well as far afield to alien solar systems; and recent, dazzlingly conceived variations on the Arab Spring, the nature of superheroes, and Mars as pulp SF writers once fondly imagined it to be. The treasures are abundant, each presented in McDonald's addictive, immersive prose--language at once elegantly timeless and edgily contemporary.

This novella originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, June 1998. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Sixteenth Annual Collection (1999), edited by Gardner Dozois, The Furthest Horizon: SF Adventures to the Far Future (2000), edited by Gardner Dozois, and The Mammoth Book of Extreme Science Fiction (2006), edited by Mike Ashley.

It begins with an explosion. Another day, another bus bomb. Everyone it seems is after a piece of Turkey. But the shockwaves from this random act of 21st century pandemic terrorism will ripple further and resonate louder than just Enginsoy Square.

Welcome to the world of The Dervish House; the great, ancient, paradoxical city of Istanbul, divided like a human brain, in the great, ancient, equally paradoxical nation of Turkey. The year is 2027 and Turkey is about to celebrate the fifth anniversary of its accession to the European Union; a Europe that now runs from the Arran Islands to Ararat. Population pushing one hundred million, Istanbul swollen to fifteen million; Turkey is the largest, most populous and most diverse nation in the EU, but also one of the poorest and most socially divided. It's a boom economy, the sweatshop of Europe, the bazaar of central Asia, the key to the immense gas wealth of Russia and Central Asia.

Gas is power. But it's power at a price, and that price is emissions permits. This is the age of carbon consciousness: every individual in the EU has a card stipulating individual carbon allowance that must be produced at every CO2 generating transaction. For those who can master the game, who can make the trades between gas price and carbon trading permits, who can play the power factions against each other, there are fortunes to be made. The old Byzantine politics are back. They never went away.

The ancient power struggled between Sunni and Shia threatens like a storm: Ankara has watched the Middle East emerge from twenty-five years of sectarian conflict. So far it has stayed aloof. A populist Prime Minister has called a referendum on EU membership. Tensions run high. The army watches, hand on holster. And a Galatasary Champions' League football game against Arsenal stokes passions even higher.

The Dervish House is seven days, six characters, three interconnected story strands, one central common core--the eponymous dervish house, a character in itself--that pins all these players together in a weave of intrigue, conflict, drama and a ticking clock of a thriller.

When an AI that monitors casino gambling in Reno taunts a magician by revealing all his tricks, the magician is determined to exact his revenge... in Ian McDonald's Tor.com Original short story The Guile.

The full story can be read for free at Tor.com.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Mars Probes (2002), edited by Peter Crowther. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twentieth Annual Collection (2003), edited by Gardner Dozois.

This novelette originally appeared in the anthology Old Mars (2013), edited by Gardner Dozois and George R. R. Martin. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-First Annual Collection (2014), edited by Gardner Dozois, and The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Eight (2014), edited by Jonathan Strahan. The story is included in the collection The Best of Ian McDonald (2016).

Hugo and Sturgeon Award nominated novella. The story originally appeared in the anthology Galactic Empires (2008), edited by Gardner Dozois. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Sixth Annual Collection (2008), edited by Gardner Dozois, The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2009, edited by Rich Horton, Space Opera (2014) edited by Rich Horton, and The Hugo Award Showcase: 2010 Volume edited by Mary Robinette Kowal. The story is included in the collection The Best of Ian McDonald (2016).

A love story stitched across time and war, shaped by the power of books, and ultimately destroyed by it.

In the heart of World War II, Tom and Ben became lovers. Brought together by a secret project designed to hide British targets from German radar, the two founded a love that could not be revealed. When the project went wrong, Tom and Ben vanished into nothingness, presumed dead. Their bodies were never found.

Now the two are lost in time, hunting each other across decades, leaving clues in books of poetry and trying to make their desperate timelines overlap.

This short story originally appaeared in the anthology Masked (2010), edited by Lou Anders, and was reprinted in Lightspeed, November 2013. It can also be found in the anthology Superheroes (2013), edited by Rich Horton.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

Nebula nominated novelette. It first appeared in McDonald's collection Empire Dreams (1988) and was later anthologized in Datlow & Windling's The Year's Best Fantasy: Second Annual Collection (1989).

This short story originally appreared in the anthology The New Space Opera (2007), edited by Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fifth Annual Collection (2008), edited by Gardner Dozois, and Galactic Empires (2017), edited by Neil Clarke. The story is included in the collection The Best of Ian McDonald (2016).

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Now We Are Ten (2016), edited by Ian Whates. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Fourth Annual Collection (2017), edited by Gardner Dozois.

Sturgeon Award winning novella.

From the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro, an alien force begins to spread, turning the land into an unrecognizable alien landscape. Tendeléo is nine years old when this first package comes down, and before she reaches adulthood the Chaga will change her life forever.

The story originally appeared as a chapbook. It can also be found in the anthologies:

• Futures (2001), edited by Peter Crowther
• The Year's Best Science Fiction: Eighteenth Annual Collection (2001), edited by Gardner Dozois
• Best of the Best Volume 2: 20 Years of the Year's Best Short Science Fiction Novels (2007), edited by Gardner Dozois
• Not One of Us: Stories of Aliens on Earth (2018), edited by Neil Clarke.

It is included in the collection The Best of Ian McDonald (2016).

On the trail of the mystery of Saturn's disappearing moons, network journalist Gaby McAslan find herself in Aftrica researching the Kilimanjaro Event: a meteor which landed in Kenya causing the striking African landscape to give way to something equally beautiful – and indescribably alien. Dubbed the Chaga, the alien flora destroys all man-made materials, and moulds human flesh, bone and spirit to its own designs. And when Gaby McAsland finds the first man to survive the Chaga's changes, she realizes it has its own plans for humankind.

Published in the US as Evolution's Shore.

The end of the universe happened at around ten o'clock at night on 22 December, 2032. It's just that humanity hasn't realized it yet. And the Chaga, the strange flora deposited from the stars, is still busy terraforming the tropics into someone else's terra. Gaby McAslan was once a hungry news reporter who compromised her relationship with UNECTA researcher Dr. Shepard for the sake of her story... but Gaby is no longer a journalist and she doesn't want to be a full-time mother, even though her child Serena is her last link with Shepard. Gaby's fire has gone out; she's gone soft. But the massive political and military upheavals rocking the world are about to drag her back into the action.

It all began 30 years ago on Mars, with a greenperson, but by the time it all finished, the town of Desolation Road had experienced every concievable abnormality from Adam Black's Wonderful Travelling Chataqua to the Astounding Tatterdemalion Air Bazaar.

A Mars of the imagination, like no other, in a colorful, witty SF novel, taking place in the kaleidoscopic future of Ian McDonald's Desolation Road, Ares Express is set on a terraformed Mars where fusion-powered locomotives run along the network of rails that is the planet's circulatory system and artificial intelligences reconfigure reality billions of times each second. One young woman, Sweetness Octave Glorious-Honeybun Asiim 12th, becomes the person upon whom the future--or futures--of Mars depends. Big, picaresque, funny; taking the Mars of Ray Bradbury and the more recent, terraformed Marses of authors such as Kim Stanley Robinson and Greg Bear, Ares Express is a wild and woolly magic-realist SF novel, featuring lots of bizarre philosophies, strange, mind-stretching ideas, and trains as big as city blocks.

Multiple-award-winning author making his YA debut

There is not one you. There are many yous. There is not one world. There are many worlds. Ours is one of billions of parallel earths.

When Everett Singh's scientist father is kidnapped from the streets of London, he leaves young Everett a mysterious app on his computer. Suddenly, this teenager has become the owner of the most valuable object in the multiverse-the Infundibulum-the map of all the parallel earths, and there are dark forces in the Ten Known Worlds who will stop at nothing to get it. They've got power, authority, and the might of ten planets-some of them more technologically advanced than our Earth-at their fingertips. He's got wits, intelligence, and a knack for Indian cooking.

To keep the Infundibulum safe, Everett must trick his way through the Heisenberg Gate his dad helped build and go on the run in a parallel Earth. But to rescue his Dad from Charlotte Villiers and the sinister Order, this Planesrunner's going to need friends. Friends like Captain Anastasia Sixsmyth, her adopted daughter Sen, and the crew of the airship Everness.

Can they rescue Everett's father and get the Infundibulum to safety? The game is afoot!

Everett Singh has escaped with the Infundibulum from the clutches of Charlotte Villiers and the Order, but at a terrible price. His father is missing, banished to one of the billions of parallel universes of the Panoply of All Worlds, and Everett and the crew of the airship Everness have taken a wild Heisenberg jump to a random parallel plane. Everett is smart and resourceful, and from the refuge of a desolate frozen Earth far beyond the Plenitude, where he and his friends have gone into hiding, he makes plans to rescue his family. But the villainous Charlotte Villiers is one step ahead of him.

The action traverses three different parallel Earths: one is a frozen wasteland; one is just like ours, except that the alien Thryn Sentiency has occupied the Moon since 1964, sharing its technology with humankind; and one is the embargoed home of dead London, where the remnants of humanity battle a terrifying nanotechnology run wild. Across these parallel planes of existence, Everett faces terrible choices of morality and power. But he has the love and support of Sen, Captain Anastasia Sixsmyth, and the rest of the crew of Everness as he learns that the deadliest enemy isn't the Order or the world-devouring nanotech Nahn - it's himself.

World-hopping, high-action adventure starring a smart boy with computer skills and a tough girl who pilots a blimp

The airship Everness makes a Heisenberg Jump to an alternate Earth unlike any her crew has ever seen. Everett, Sen, and the crew find themselves above a plain that goes on forever in every direction without any horizon. There they find an Alderson Disc, an astronomical megastructure of incredibly strong material reaching from the orbit of Mercury to the orbit of Jupiter.

Then they meet the Jiju, the dominant species on a plane where the dinosaurs didn't die out. They evolved, diversified, and have a twenty-five million year technology head-start on humanity. War between their kingdoms is inevitable, total and terrible.

Everness has jumped right into the midst of a faction fight between rival nations, the Fabreen and Dityu empires. The airship is attacked, but then defended by the forces of the Fabreen, who offers theEverness crew protection. But what is the true motive behind Empress Aswiu's aid? What is her price?

The crew of the Everness is divided in a very alien world, a world fast approaching the point of apocalypse.

This novelette originally appeared in the anthology Fast Forward 2 (2008), edited by Lou Anders, and was reprinted in Clarkesworld, Issue 122, November 2016. The story can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Sixth Annual Collection (2009). It is included in the collection Cyberabad Days (2009).

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

This short story originally appeared Fast Forward 1 (2007), edited by Lou Anders. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fifth Annual Collection (2008), edited by Gardner Dozois, and Year's Best SF 13 (2008), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Kramer. The story is included in the collection Cyberabad Days (2009).

Read the full story for free here.

Hugo Award winning novelette in McDonald's India 2047 setting. Originally published in Asimov's July 2006. Anthologized in Jonathan Strahan's The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume One (2007), Gardner Dozois's The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fourth Annual Collection (2007), and Neil Clarke's More Human Than Human: Stories of Androids, Robots, and Manufactured Humanity (2017). Collected in Cyberabad Days (2009).

This novelette originally appeared in the anthology The Starry Rift: Tales of New Tomorrows (2008), edited by Jonathan Strahan, and was reprinted in Clarkesworld Magazine, #82 July 2013. It can also be found in the anthology The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Three (2009), edited by Jonathan Strahan. The story is included in the collection Cyberabad Days (2009).

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

A Hugo Award nominated novella set in McDonald's India 2047 setting. It was anthologized in Gardner Dozois's The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Third Annual Collection (2006) and Jonathan Strahan's Science Fiction: The Very Best of 2005. It is included in the collection in Cyberabad Days (2009).

Hugo-nominated Novella

Vishnu at the Cat Circus is a novella set in the same world as Ian McDonald's 2004 novel River of Gods. It depicts a futuristic India in 2047, a century after its independence from Britain, characterized both by ancient traditions and advanced technologies such as artificial intelligences, robots and nanotechnology.

The genetically-improved Vishnu looks back on his life, in a story of a sibling rivalry with some very unexpected results.

As Mother India approaches her centenary, nine people are going about their business: a gangster, a cop, his wife, a politician, a stand-up comic, a set designer, a journalist, a scientist, and a dropout. And so is Ajthe waif, the mind reader, the prophet, when she one day finds a man who wants to stay hidden.

In the next few weeks, they will all be swept together to decide the fate of the nation.

River of Gods teems with the life of a country choked with peoples and cultures, one and a half billion people, twelve semi-independent nations, nine million gods. Ian McDonald has written the great Indian novel of the new millennium, in which a war is fought, a love betrayed, a message from a different world decoded, as the great river Ganges flows on.

Extraordinary new fiction set in the future India of River of Gods.

Ian McDonald's River of Gods called a "masterpiece" by Asimov's Science Fiction and praised by the Washington Post as a --"major achievement from a writer who is becoming one of the best SF novelists of our time"-- painted a vivid picture of a near future India, 100 years after independence. It revolutionized SF for a new generation by taking a perspective that was not European or American. Nominated for the Hugo Award and the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and winning the BSFA Award, the rich world of this novel has inspired McDonald to revisit its milieu in a series of short stories, all set in the world of River of Gods.

Cyberabad Days is a triumphant return to the India of 2047, a new, muscular superpower of one and a half billion people in an age of artificial intelligences, climate-change induced drought, water-wars, strange new genders, genetically improved children that age at half the rate of baseline humanity, and a population where males outnumber females four to one. India herself has fractured into a dozen states from Kerala to the headwaters of the Ganges in the Himalayas.

Cyberabad Days is a collection of seven stories, one Hugo nominee and one Hugo winner among them, as well as a thirty-one-thousand word original novella. As with everything Ian McDonald does, it is sure to be one of the most talked about books of the year.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Meeting Infinity (2015), edited by Jonathan Strahan, and was reprinted in Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 145, October 2018. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Third Annual Collection (2016), edited by Gardner Dozois.

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

The Fifth Dragon is about a pair of new moon workers, Achi and Adriana, who find comfort in this alien place in one another's company, only to learn that their time together is strictly limited. 'The Fifth Dragon' flies back and forth between their first days as a pair and their final moments as friends, underscoring that the end of everything is inevitable.

The story originally appeared in Jonathan Strahan's Reach for Infinity (2014). It is also included in The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of the Year: Volume Nine (2015), edited by Jonathan Strahan, The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Second Annual Collection (2015), edited by Gardner Dozois, and The Eagle Has Landed: 50 Years of Lunar Science Fiction (2019), edited by Neil Clarke.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

Remember: Lady Luna knows a thousand ways to kill you, but family is what you know. Family is what works.

Cariad Corcoran has a new sister who is everything she is not: tall, beautiful, confident. They're unlikely allies and even unlikelier sisters, but they're determined to find the moon's first footprint, even if the lunar frontier is doing its best to kill them before they get there.

The Moon wants to kill you. Whether it's being unable to pay your per diem for your allotted food, water, and air, or you just get caught up in a fight between the Moon's ruling corporations, the Five Dragons. You must fight for every inch you want to gain in the Moon's near feudal society. And that is just what Adriana Corta did.

As the leader of the Moon's newest "dragon," Adriana has wrested control of the Moon's Helium-3 industry from the Mackenzie Metal corporation and fought to earn her family's new status. Now, at the twilight of her life, Adriana finds her corporation, Corta Helio, surrounded by the many enemies she made during her meteoric rise. If the Corta family is to survive, Adriana's five children must defend their mother's empire from her many enemies... and each other.

A Dragon is dead.

Corta Helio, one of the five family corporations that rule the Moon, has fallen. Its riches are divided up among its many enemies, its survivors scattered. Eighteen months have passed .

The remaining Helio children, Lucasinho and Luna, are under the protection of the powerful Asamoahs, while Robson, still reeling from witnessing his parent's violent deaths, is now a ward--virtually a hostage-- of Mackenzie Metals. And the last appointed heir, Lucas, has vanished of the surface of the moon.

Only Lady Sun, dowager of Taiyang, suspects that Lucas Corta is not dead, and more to the point--that he is still a major player in the game. After all, Lucas always was the Schemer, and even in death, he would go to any lengths to take back everything and build a new Corta Helio, more powerful than before. But Corta Helio needs allies, and to find them, the fleeing son undertakes an audacious, impossible journey--to Earth.

In an unstable lunar environment, the shifting loyalties and political machinations of each family reach the zenith of their most fertile plots as outright war erupts.

Luna: Wolf Moon continues Ian McDonald's saga of the Five Dragons.

The continuing saga of the Five Dragons, Ian McDonald's fast-paced, intricately plotted space opera pitched as Game of Thrones meets The Expanse

A hundred years in the future, a war wages between the Five Dragons--five families that control the Moon's leading industrial companies. Each clan does everything in their power to claw their way to the top of the food chain--marriages of convenience, corporate espionage, kidnapping, and mass assassinations.

Through ingenious political manipulation and sheer force of will, Lucas Cortas rises from the ashes of corporate defeat and seizes control of the Moon. The only person who can stop him is a brilliant lunar lawyer, his sister, Ariel.

Witness the Dragons' final battle for absolute sovereignty in Ian McDonald's heart-stopping finale to the Luna trilogy.