Search Worlds Without End

This novella was first published in Asimov's Science Fiction, January/February 2021.

Read the full story for free at Asimov's.

This short story originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, June 2015. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2016, edited by Rich Horton.

A weary resilience worker should know better than anyone: no one is safe when the world is always ending...

Originally published on 30 August 2023, read it for free on Tor.com

Rumors begin to spread of a species of hyperintelligent, dangerous octopus that may have developed its own language and culture. Marine biologist Dr. Ha Nguyen, who has spent her life researching cephalopod intelligence, will do anything for the chance to study them.

The transnational tech corporation DIANIMA has sealed the remote Con Dao Archipelago, where the octopuses were discovered, off from the world. Dr. Nguyen joins DIANIMA's team on the islands: a battle-scarred security agent and the world's first android.

The octopuses hold the key to unprecedented breakthroughs in extrahuman intelligence. The stakes are high: there are vast fortunes to be made by whoever can take advantage of the octopuses' advancements, and as Dr. Nguyen struggles to communicate with the newly discovered species, forces larger than DIANIMA close in to seize the octopuses for themselves.

But no one has yet asked the octopuses what they think. And what they might do about it.

When you bring back a long-extinct species, there's more to success than the DNA.

Moscow has resurrected the mammoth. But someone must teach them how to be mammoths, or they are doomed to die out again.

Dr. Damira Khismatullina, an expert in elephant behavior, was brutally murdered trying to defend the world's last elephants from the brutal ivory trade. Now, her digitized consciousness has been downloaded into the mind of a mammoth.

As the herd's new matriarch, can Damira help fend off poachers long enough for the species to take hold? Or will her own ghosts, and Moscow's real reason for bringing the mammoth back, doom them to a new extinction?

This short story originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, January-February 2017. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Fifth Annual Collection (2018), edited by Gardner Dozois, and The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2018, edited by Rich Horton.