Search Worlds Without End

Table of Contents:

• The Wireless Folly - (1992) - short story
• Mother Grasshopper - (1997) - short story
• North of Diddy-Wah-Diddy - (1995) - novelette
• The Edge of the World - (1989) - short story
• Radio Waves - (1995) - novelette
• The Changeling's Tale - (1994) - short story

Hugo Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, April-May 2007. The story is included in the collection The Dog Said Bow Wow (2007).

Hugo, Locus and Nebula Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, February 1999, and was reprinted in Clarkesworld, Issue 127, April 2017. The story can also be found in the anthologies Year's Best SF 5 (2000), edited by David G. Hartwell, Beyond Flesh (2002), edited by Gardner Dozois and Jack Dann and Asimov's Science Fiction: 30th Anniversary Anthology (2007), edited by Sheila Williams. The story is collected in Tales of Old Earth (2000).

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

An act of indiscretion from her immortal trickster companion sends Annie and her league of ladies-in-waiting on a time-defying adventure that becomes the inspiration for William Shakespeare. An act of indiscretion from her immortal trickster companion sends Annie and her league of ladies-in-waiting on a time-defying adventure that becomes the inspiration for William Shakespeare.

Read the full story for free at Tor Reactor.

An in-depth look at a noted writer, anthologist and award winning editor. A facinating interview with Gardner Dozois describes his obsessions, collaborations, and his influence in the world of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

World-renowned paleontologist Richard Leyster's universe changedforever the day a stranger named Griffin walked into his office with a remarkable job offer... and an ice cooler containing the head of a freshly killed Stegosaurus. For Leyster and a select group of scientific colleagues an impossible fantasy has come true: the ability to study dinosaurs up close, in their own era and milieu. But tampering with time and paradox can have disastrous effects on the future and the past alike, breeding a violent new strain of fundamentalist terror -- and, worse still, encouraging brilliant rebels like Dr. Gertrude Salley to toy with the working mechanisms of natural law, no matter what the consequences. And when they concern the largest, most savage creatures that ever walked the Earth, the consequences may be too horrifying to imagine...

God was in his Heaven – which was fifteen miles away, due east.

Far in Earth's future, in a post-utopian hell-hole, Hanson works ten solid back-breaking hours a day, shoveling endless mountains of coal, within sight of the iridescent wall that separates what’s left of humanity from their gods.

One day, after a tragedy of his own making, Hanson leaves the city, not knowing what he will do, or how he will survive in the wilderness without work. He finds himself drawn to the wall, to the elusive promise of God. And when the impossible happens, he steps through, into the city beyond.

The impossible was only the beginning.

This is an expansion of the novella The City of God.

Nebula Award nominated novella. It originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, November 1993. There are no other known publications available at this time.

This short story originally appeared in Omni, December 1986. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fourth Annual Collection (1987), edited by Gardner Dozois, and Omni Visions One (1993), edited by Ellen Datlow. The story is included in the collection Gravity's Angels (1991).

This short story originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, October-November 2003. It can also be found in the anthology Year's Best SF 9 (2004), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer.

Hugo and Nebula Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared in Omni, July 1985. The story can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Third Annual Collection (1986), edited by Gardner Dozois, The Sixth Omni Book of Science Fiction (1989) edited by Ellen Datlow, Future on Fire (1991), edited by Orson Scott Card, Hackers (1996), edited by Gardner Dozois and Jack Dann, Masterpieces: The Best Science Fiction of the Century (2001), edited by Orson Scott Card and The Ultimate Cyberpunk (2002) edited by Pat Cadigan. It is included in the William Gibson collection Burning Chrome (1986).

This short story originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, August 2011 and was reprinted in Clarkesworld, January 2018. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Ninth Annual Collection (2012), edited by Gardner Dozois, Year's Best SF 17 (2012), edited by David Hartwell, and Stars: Original Stories Based on the Songs of Janis Ian (2013), edited by Janis Ian and Mike Resnick. The story is included in the collection Not So Much Said the Cat (2016).

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

Hugo Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, February 2008. The story can also be found in the anthologies The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Three (2009), edited by Jonathan Strahan and The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Sixth Annual Collection (2009), edited by Gardner Dozois and The Hugo Award Showcase: 2010 Volume, edited by Mary Robinette Kowal, as well as the collections The Best of Michael Swanwick (2008) and 'Not So Much' Said the Cat (2016).

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

Nebula Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared in TriQuarterly 49 in 1980. It can also be found in the anthologies The Best Science Fiction of the Year #10 (1981), edited by Terry Carr, Nebula Award Stories Sixteen (1982), edited by Jerry Pournelle and John F. Carr, Life Among the Asteroids (1992), edited by Jerry Pournelle and John F. Carr, The Science Fiction Century (1997), edited by David G. Hartwell, and Explorers: SF Adventures to Far Horizons (2000), edited by Gardner Dozois. It is included in the collections Gravity's Angels (1991) and The Best of Michael Swanwick (2008).

Read the full story for free at the Baen website.

This novelette originally appeared in Penthouse, March 1984 as Virgin Territory. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Fantasy Stories: 11 (1985), edited by Arthur W. Saha, and The Mammoth Book of Comic Fantasy (1998), edited by Mike Ashley. The story can also be found in the collections Slow Dancing Through Time (Dozois, 1990), Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys with Gardner Dozois (Dozois, 2001) and The Fiction Factory (Dann, 2005).

Read the full story for free at the Baen website.

Gravity's Angels is a showcase for a decade's worth of Swanwick's shorter fictions, from his first published short story, "The Feast of Saint Janis," to a descent past the edge of a flat Earth otherwise very like our own in "The Edge of the World," which won the 1990 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. The stories collected here are luminous with the promise of his ambition, smart and allusive, dense with ideas and images, sacred and profane.

Short Stories included:

• "A Midwinter's Tale"
• "The feast of Saint Janis"
• "The Blind Minotaur"
• "The Transmigration of Philip K'"
• "Covenant of Souls"
• "The Dragon Line"
• "Mummer Kiss"
• "Trojan Horse"
• "Snow Angels"
• "The Man Who met Picasso"
• "Foresight"
• "Ginungagap"
• "The Edge of the World"

Hugo and Nebula Award nominated novella.

Two people fall in love and a community fights for its life against a backdrop of thermonuclear war and a hi-tech repressive government in this science-fiction story written by the author of "In the Drift" and "Vacuum Flowers".

The story was published as a chapbook before being reprinted in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, May 1992, and again in Lightspeed, January 2016. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Tenth Annual Collection (1993), edited by Gardner Dozois, The Hard SF Renaissance (2002), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer, Best of the Best Volume 2: 20 Years of the Year's Best Short Science Fiction Novels (2007), edited by Gardner Dozois, and The Eagle Has Landed: 50 Years of Lunar Science Fiction, edited by Neil Clarke. The novella is included in the collections Moon Dogs (2000) and The Best of Michael Swanwick (2008).

Hugo Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, March 2002. The story is included in the collection The Dog Said Bow Wow (2007).

Hope-in-the-Mist is the first book-length study of British author HOPE MIRRLEES, whom Virginia Woolf described as "her own heroine -- capricious, exacting, exquisite, very learned, and beautifully dressed." Raised in Scotland and Zululand, Mirrlees studied with the great classical scholar Jane Harrison and later lived with her in Paris and London. Mirrlees wrote one major poem, Paris (1920), the missing link between French avant-garde poetry and her friend T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922) ; her novel Lud-in-the-Mist is an acknowledged classic of fantastical literature. With a preface by NEIL GAIMAN. Hope-in-the-Mist also includes " A Lexicon of Lud " prepared by Michael Swanwick (first published in shorter form in The New York Review of Science Fiction in July 2005).

When a meltdown at Three Mile Island creates a death zone known as the Drift, the area becomes a terrible place of eerie skies, body-mutilating boneseekers, monsters, and mutants, who fight to escape the island for their own vengeful purposes.

Jack Faust is a breathtaking and masterful new spin on Goethe's story of a scholar who sells his soul to the Devil for the gift of unlimited knowledge.

But unlike the classic Mephistopheles, the seductive demon who approaches Swanwick's Johannes Faust is not the devil as we know him, but rather a representative of a mysterious race that seeks nothing less than the extermination of the hated human animal. And the wisdom this creature offers the disenchanted thinker goes far beyond anything known or imagined in Goethe's day: the secrets of flight and the cosmos, the principles of economics and engineering, the mysteries of medicine and the atom.

And so begins Faust's transition from madman to savior -- from Johannes to Jack -- as he accelerates human progress at blinding speed, setting the mighty gears and pistons of industry in motion to first remake Germany, and then all Europe, in his own image. Ushering in a New Age of Mechanization hundreds of years before its rightful time, he is alternately adored and despised for his accomplishments, as he attempts to elevate humankind from the muck of ignorance, superstition and disease.

Yet it is love that damns Jack Faust and, ultimately, humanity as well. For Mephistopheles has revealed to him the beauty and purity of innocence in the person of Margarete Reinhardt, the daughter of a struggling businessman. To win her heart, Faust will give Margarete power and influence in an age when women are powerless -- and fame in a time when notoriety can be fatal -- and, in the process, blind his beloved, and himself, to the horrors Faust's "progress" has wrought. For brutality and greed will always pervert love and genius in a degenerate world -- a world which now, thanks to Jack Faust, is rapidly sliding into chaos... or something far worse.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology The Dragon Quintet (2003), edited by Marvin Kaye. It can also be found in the anthologies:

• The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-First Annual Collection (2004), edited by Gardner Dozois
• Year's Best Fantasy 4 (2004), edited by David G. Hartwll and Kathryn Kramer
• The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Seventeenth Annual Collection (2004), edited by Ellen Datlow, Gavin J. Grant and Kelly Link
• Wings of Fire (2010), edited by Jonathan Strahan and Marianne S. Jablon

The story was later incorporated in the novel The Dragons of Babel (2008).

Hugo Award winning novelette. It originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, April 2003. The story can also be found in the anthologies Science Fiction: The Best of 2003, edited by Karen Haber and Jonathan Strahan, and The Mammoth Book of Time Travel SF (2013) edited by Mike Ashley. It is included in the collections The Dog Said Bow Wow (2007) and The Best of Michael Swanwick (2008).

This short story originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, December 2010. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Eighth Annual Collection (2011), edited by Gardner Dozois. The story is in the collection Not So Much Said the Cat (2016).

Hugo and Sturgeon Award nominated novella. It originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, December 2006. The story can also be found in Best Short Novels: 2007, edited Jonathan Strahan.

Nebula Award nominated novella. It originally appeared in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, Mid-December 1984. It was later incorporated into the novel In the Drift (1985).

Hugo Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in the limited edition collection Moon Dogs (2000). It was reprinted in Asimov's Science Fiction, March 2000.

Table of Contents:

• Michael Swanwick: The Chameleon Eludes the Net - essay by Gardner Dozois
• Author Profile: Michael Swanwick (1997) - essay by Michael Swanwick
• Moon Dogs (2000) - shortstory by Michael Swanwick
• The Death of the Magus: Two Myths (1994) - essay by Michael Swanwick
• Mickelrede, or, The Slayer and the Staff - shortfiction by Avram Davidson and Michael Swanwick
• Vergil Magus: King Without Country (1998) - novelette by Avram Davidson and Michael Swanwick
• Jane Swanwick and the Search for Identity (1998) - essay by Michael Swanwick
• The Hagiography of Saint Dozois (1997) - essay by Michael Swanwick
• Ancestral Voices (1998) - novella by Gardner Dozois and Michael Swanwick
• The City of God (1995) - novella by Gardner Dozois and Michael Swanwick
• The Dead (1996) - shortstory by Michael Swanwick
• They Fell Like Wheat (1996) - essay by Michael Swanwick
• A User's Guide to the Postmoderns (1986) - essay by Michael Swanwick
• Ships (1996) - novelette by Michael Swanwick and Jack Dann
• In the Tradition ... (1994) - essay by Michael Swanwick
• Growing Up in the Future (1997) - essay by Michael Swanwick
• Griffin's Egg (1991) - novella by Michael Swanwick

Nebula Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared in the anthology Universe 11 (1981), edited by Terry Carr. The story is also included in the collection Gravity's Angels (1991) and was incorporated in the novel In the Drift (1985).

The master of literary science fiction returns with this dazzling new collection. Michael Swanwick takes us on a whirlwind journey across the globe and across time and space, where magic and science exist in possibilities that are not of this world. These tales are intimate in their telling, galactic in their scope, and delightfully sesquipedalian in their verbiage.

Join the caravan through Swanwick's worlds and into the playground of his mind. Travel from Norway to Russia and America to Gehenna. Discover a calculus problem that rocks the ages and robots who both nurture and kill. Meet a magical horse who protects the innocent, a semi-repentant troll, a savvy teenager who takes on the Devil, and time travelers from the Mesozoic who party till the end of time...

Table of Contents:

• Introduction by Michael Swanwick
• Steadfast Castle
• The Man in Grey
• The Dala Horse
• The Woman Who Shook the World-Tree
• Of Finest Scarlet Was Her Gown
• 3 A.M. in the Mesozoic Bar
• Passage of Earth
• From Babel's Fall'n Glory We Fled...
• For I Have Lain Me Down on the Stone of Loneliness and I'll Not Be Back Again
• Libertarian Russia
• The Scarecrow's Boy
• The She-Wolf's Hidden Grin
• Goblin Lake
• Pushkin the American
• An Empty House with Many Doors
• Tawny Petticoats
• The House of Dreams

This short story originally appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine, #91 April 2014. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Second Annual Collection (2015), edited by Gardner Dozois, Clarkesworld: Year Eight (2016), edited by Neil Clarke and Sean Wallace, Not One of Us: Stories of Aliens on Earth (2018), edited by Neil Clarek. It is included in the collection Not So Much Said the Cat (2016).

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

Locus, Sturgeon, Hugo and Nebula Award nominated story. It was originally published in Asimov's Science Fiction, September 1998 and has been reprinted many times. It can be found in the anthologies Year's Best SF 4 (1999), edited by David G. Hartwell, Nebula Awards Showcase 2001, edited by Robert Silverberg, and Futures Past (2006), edited by Gardner Dozois and Jack Dann. The story has been colleccted in Tales of Old Earth (2000) and The Best of Michael Swanwick (2008).

World Fantasy Award winning and Sturgeon Award nominated novella. It originally appeared in Omni, Winter 1995. The story can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirteenth Annual Collection (1996), edited by Gardner Dozois, and The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Tenth Annual Collection (1997), edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. It is included in the collections A Geography of Unknown Lands (1997), Tales of Old Earth (2000) and The Best of Michael Swanwick (2008).

Hugo Award wiining and Nebula Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, July 1999. The story can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Seventeenth Annual Collection (2000), edited by Gardner Dozois, and the collections Tales of Old Earth (2000) and The Best of Michael Swanwick (2008).

Hugo Award winning novelette. It was originally published in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, December 2002. The story can also be found in the anthologies Year's Best SF 8 (2003) edited by Kathryn Cramer and David G. Hartwell The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twentieth Annual Collection (2003), edited by Gardner Dozois, and The Final Frontier (2018), edited by Neil Clarke, as well as the the collections The Dog Said Bow-Wow (2007) and The Best of Michael Swanwick (2008).

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed Magazine.

This short story originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, September-October 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.

From author Michael Swanwick -- one of the most brilliantly assured and darkly inventive writers of contemporary fiction -- comes the Nebula Award-winning masterwork of radically altered realities and world-shattering seductions.

The "Jubilee Tides" will drown Miranda beneath the weight of her own oceans. But as the once-in-two centuries cataclysm approaches, an even greater catastrophe threatens this dark and dangerous planet of tale-spinners, conjurers, and shapechangers. For Gregorian has come, a genius renegade scientist and bush wizard. With magic and forbidden technology, he plans to remake the rotting dying world in his own evil image -- and to force whom or whatever remains on its diminishing surface toward a terrifying, astonishing confrontation with death and transcendence.

This short story originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, September-October 2010. It can also be found in the anthology Year's Best SF 16 (2011), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. The story is included in the collection Not So Much Said the Cat (2016).

From pure fantasy to hard science fiction, this finely crafted offering by one of the greatest science fiction writers of his generation promises to stretch readers' minds far beyond ordinary limits. Nineteen tales from Michael Swanwick's best short fiction of the past decade are gathered here for the first time, including the 1999 Hugo Award-nominated "Radiant Doors" and "Wild Minds" and this year's winning story, "The Very Pulse of the Machine." The collection also features "The Raggle Taggle Gypsy-O," written especially for this volume.

Table of Contents:

• The User's Guide to Michael Swanwick - (2000) - essay by Bruce Sterling
• The Very Pulse of the Machine - (1998) - novelette
• The Dead - (1996) - shortstory
• Scherzo with Tyrannosaur - (1999) - shortstory
• Ancient Engines - (1999) - shortstory
• North of Diddy-Wah-Diddy - (1995) - novelette
• The Mask - (1994) - shortstory
• Mother Grasshopper - (1997) - shortstory
• Riding the Giganotosaur - (1999) - shortstory
• Wild Minds - (1998) - shortstory
• The Raggle Taggle Gypsy-O - (2000) - shortstory
• Microcosmic Dog - (1998) - shortstory
• In Concert - (1992) - shortstory
• Radiant Doors - (1998) - shortstory
• Ice Age - (1984) - shortstory
• Walking Out - (1995) - shortstory
• The Changeling's Tale - (1994) - shortstory
• Midnight Express - (1998) - shortstory
• The Wisdom of Old Earth - (1997) - shortstory
• Radio Waves - (1995) - novelette

This short story originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, April-May 2009, and was reprinted in Lightspeed, March 2014. It can also be found in the Eileen Gunn collection Questionable Practices: Stories (2014).

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

It's here at last the first comprehensive overview of the extraordinary career of master storyteller Michael Swanwick. Covering over a quarter of a century, from his first two published stories both of them Nebula finalists to his most recent, these works bear witness to one of the most vivid and far-ranging imaginations in contemporary fiction. From the hardest of hard science fiction to the purest of core fantasy, from the heartwarming to the despairing, these are works incandescent with literary brilliance.

In these pages, Janis Joplin is worshiped as a god, teenagers climb down the edge of the world, zombies are commodified, a vengeful man tracks a wizard across the surface of a planet-sized grasshopper, dinosaurs invade Vermont, a train leaves New York City bound for Hell, and those lovable Post-Utopian con men, Darger and Surplus, seek their fortunes in Buckingham Labyrinth.

Michael Swanwick is one of the most acclaimed and prolific writers of his generation, as well as being the only person ever to win five Hugo Awards for fiction in the space of six years. All five of those stories are included here plus much, much more, all of it beautifully written, critically acclaimed, and deeply satisfying to read.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - (2008) - essay
• The Feast of Saint Janis - (1980) - novelette
• Ginungagap - (1980) - novelette
• Trojan Horse - (1984) - novelette
• A Midwinter's Tale - (1988) - shortstory
• The Edge of the World - (1989) - shortstory
• Griffin's Egg - (1991) - novella
• The Changeling's Tale - (1994) - shortstory
• North of Diddy-Wah-Diddy - (1995) - novelette
• Radio Waves - (1995) - novelette
• The Dead - (1996) - shortstory
• Mother Grasshopper - (1997) - shortstory
• Radiant Doors - (1998) - shortstory
• The Very Pulse of the Machine - (1998) - novelette
• Wild Minds - (1998) - shortstory
• Scherzo with Tyrannosaur - (1999) - shortstory
• The Raggle Taggle Gypsy-O - (2000) - shortstory
• The Dog Said Bow-Wow - (2001) - shortstory
• Slow Life - (2002) - novelette
• Legions in Time - (2003) - novelette
• Triceratops Summer - (2005) - shortstory
• From Babel's Fall'n Glory We Fled - (2008) - shortstory

WFA nominated short story. It originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, January 1994. The story can also be found in the anthology Modern Classics of Fantasy (1997), edited by Gardner Dozois. It is included in the collections A Geography of Unknown Lands (1997), Tales of Old Earth (2000) and The Best of Michael Swanwick (2008).

Long after the wars, there are things abroad in the world--things more than human. And they have scores to settle with one another.

This story was anthologized in Jonathan Strahan's The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume Six (2012) and Gardner Dozois' The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Ninth Annual Collection (2012). It is included in the collection 'Not So Much' Said the Cat (2016).

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

"The Dead" presents a future world where zombies take center stage not as a threat, but as a commodity...

This Hugo and Nebula Award nominated story originally appeared in the Patrick Nielsen Hayden anthology Starlight (1996). It has been reprinted numerous times. In can be found in the anthologies:

The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fourteenth Annual Collection (1997) edited by Gardner Dozois
Nebula Awards 33 (1999) edited by Connie Willis
The Best of the Best: 20 Years of the Year's Best Science Fiction (2005) edited by Gardner Dozois
The Living Dead (2008) edited by John Joseph Adams

It also appears in the collections Tales of Old Earth (2000) and The Best of Michael Swanwick (2008).

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

Science fiction and fantasy's most adept short-story author reinvents some classic themes in an engaging collection that includes three of his Hugo award-winning stories. These smart expansions of traditional themes summon dinosaurs, dragons, peril in space, myths, faeries, and time travel, each undergoing artful alchemy to create serious genre literature that is playful, original, and clever. Comprising 16 imaginative and mischievous adventures, including the previously unpublished novelette, The Skysailor's Tale, this adroit gathering makes a collection to truly revel in.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - essay by Terry Bisson
• "Hello," Said the Stick - (2002) - short story
• The Dog Said Bow-Wow - (2001) - short story
• Slow Life - (2002) - novelette
• Triceratops Summer - (2005) - short story
• Tin Marsh - (2006) - novelette
• An Episode of Stardust - (2006) - short story
• The Skysailor's Tale - novelette
• Legions in Time - (2003) - novelette
• The Little Cat Laughed to See Such Sport - (2002) - short story
• The Bordello in Faerie - (2006) - short story
• The Last Geek - (2004) - short story
• Girls and Boys, Come Out to Play - (2005) - novelette
• A Great Day for Brontosaurs - (2002) - short story
• Dirty Little War - (2002) - short story
• A Small Room in Koboldtown - (2007) - short story
• Urdumheim - (2007) - novelette

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Terry's Universe (1988), edited by Beth Meacham. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Sixth Annual Collection (1989), edited by Gardner Dozois, and The Mammoth Book of Merlin (2009), edited by Mike Ashley. The story is included in the collection Gravity's Angels (1991).

Sturgeon Award winning and Hugo and Wold Fantasy Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in the anthology Full Spectrum 2 (1989), edited by Lou Aronica, Shawna McCarthy, Amy Stout, Pat LoBrutto. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Seventh Annual Collection (1990), edited by Gardner Dozois, The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Third Annual Collection (1990), edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, and Modern Classics of Science Fiction (1991), edited by Gardner Dozois. It is included in the collections Gravity's Angels (1991), A Geography of Unknown Lands (1997) and The Best of Michael Swanwick (2008).

Read the full story for free at Fantasy Magazine.

Nebula Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in the anthology New Dimensions 11 (1980), edited by Robert Silverberg and Marta Randall. It can also be found in the anthology Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year: Tenth Annual Collection (1981) and the collections Gravity's Angels (1991) and The Best of Michael Swanwick (2008).

Read the full story for free at the Baen website.

Nebula nominated short story. It originally appeared in Omni, March 1985. The story can also be found in the anthologies The 1986 Annual World's Best SF, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Arthur W. Saha, and Omni Visions Two (1994), edited by Ellen Datlow. It was included in the Jack Dann collection The Fiction Factory (2005) and the Gardner Dozois collections Slow Dancing Through Time (1990) and Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys with Gardner Dozois (2001).

World Fantasy Award nominated short stoy. It originally appeared in Omni, September 1982. Thet story can also be found in the anthology The Second Omni Book of Science Fiction (1984), edited by Ellen Datlow. It is included in the collection Gravity's Angels (1991).

When Mendeleev set forth the Periodic Table of the Elements, he revolutionised chemistry - but just as importantly, he planted the seeds for Michael Swanwick's Periodic Table of Science Fiction. Now, after their epochal appearances online at www.scifi.com, this collection gathers together the one hundred and eighteen stories of the PTSF in print for the first time, in their definitive form. Life, Chemistry, and Science Fiction will never be the same again.

Swanwick, grand master of the SF short story and absolute master of the short-short, is at his exuberant and ingenious best in these tales, each inspired by a single chemical element. Here are cosmos-spanning future histories, slyly conceived alternative timelines, shockingly subversive secret chronicles of intellectual passion, divine jests, and fragments of incomparable wisdom. In The Periodic Table of Science Fiction, revelations flow like heady wine: the real reason the Hindenburg exploded; how to measure the apocalyptic mood swings of God; why you never want pond scum to preside over your office; which is the most boring element in existence; how the Plains Indians adopted not the horse but the motorcycle; the best way to avert a spaceship hijacking; how to make a fortune in interplanetary metals prospecting; robot ideology; and much, much more. If Mendeleev encompassed all matter in his Periodic Table, Michael Swanwick's encompasses all that really matters...

With a new Afterword by the author, and an Introduction by Theodore Gray, winner of the Ig Nobel Prize for his Wooden Periodic Table.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - essay by Theodore W. Gray
• The Hindenburg - short story
• Jane Carter of Mars - short story
• Lithium for God - short story
• A Beryl as Big as the Ritz - short story
• Francis, Child of Scorn - short story
• They're Made of Carbon - short story
• Nitrogen: An Introduction - short story
• Oxygen Planets - short story
• The Message - short story
• House Rules - short story
• Electric Pickles - short story
• Under's Game - (2001) - short story
• Aluminium Foil - short story
• Programmable Breasts - short story
• Blockade Runners - short story
• Vitriol - short story
• Seven Days of Creation - short story
• The Eye of Argon - short story
• Bananas - short story
• Angels of the Apocalypse - short story
• Bingham's Folley - short story
• Killer Robots - short story
• Vanadium - short story
• Babe - short story
• Graffiti - short story
• The Era of the Iron Horse - short story
• Merfolk - short story
• What This Country Needs- - short story
• Lucky Penny - short story
• Brass - short story
• Space Pirates - short story
• Germanium - short story
• Lucrezia Borgia - short story
• H.G. Wells on the Moon - short story
• Try Not To Think of Elephants - short story
• Man of Steel - short story
• Glass Beads - short story
• Fallout - short story
• It: A Preliminary Account - short story
• It's Not Virtual Anything-It's Real Zirconium! - short story
• Woman of Stone - short story
• Living in the Shadow of the Molly-Be-Damned - short story
• Claimjumper and Ting - short story
• Land of Our Fathers - short story
• Cecil Rhodes in Hell - (2002) - short story
• War of the Worlds - short story
• Dark Secrets of the Western Heroes - short story
• Starry Night - short story
• On the India Line - short story
• The Man With a Clock for a Heart - short story
• Money and Its Opposite - short story
• A Change of Seasons - short story
• In Loco Parentis - short story
• Warrior Princess - short story
• Castles in the Air - short story
• What to Expect from Your Barium Enema - short story
• Immortality - short story
• Cerium-At Last! - short story
• Absolute Zero - short story
• Retirement Day - short story
• Foresight - (1987) - short story
• Singular Cities - short story
• Europa and the Bull - short story
• Tattoos - short story
• Morphobots - short story
• A Letter from Hell - short story
• Nanotechnologist's Lung - short story
• Tarzan of the Periodic Table - short story
• Conan the Elemental - short story
• Elements Day - short story
• Dragon Star - short story
• Riding the Rods - short story
• Consider Poor Doris! - short story
• Light Bulb Jokes - short story
• Beads and Trinkets - short story
• Everything Your Mother Wants You to Know About Osmium - short story
• Don't Look to the Skies! - short story
• Platinum Blonde - short story
• Crown of Beauty - short story
• The Outriders - short story
• A Perfect Murder - short story
• A Polite Society - short story
• The Pepto-Bismol Hour - short story
• Neither a Borrower Nor a Lender Be (Polonius Updated) - short story
• Bad Brains - short story
• Monster in the Basement - short story
• Vive la Francium! - short story
• The Ghost of Pierre Curie Reminisces - short story
• The Case of the Purloined Actinium - short story
• Mjolnir - short story
• Forge Star - short story
• Cooking With Uranium - short story
• The Oceans of Neptune - short story
• Pure Science - short story
• Nuclear Blackmail - short story
• Holy Mother Church - short story
• Vindicating Bishop Berkeley - short story
• Nuclear Handguns - short story
• The Dark Lady of the Equations - short story
• The Fermi Paradox - short story
• The Feast of Saint Mendeleyev - short story
• My Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech (Presented Here Against the Unlikely Chance I Never Get to Deliver It) - short story
• Lawrence of America - short story
• "Radioactive" B. Hayes - short story
• George "Dubna" Bush - short story
• The Sea Borg - short story
• Boring Niels - short story
• To Hass and Hass Not - short story
• Lise Meitner, Physicist - short story
• Science Made Ugly - short story
• Defining Our Terms - short story
• Don't Blink! - short story
• What We Talk About When We Talk About Ununtrium - short story
• Island of Stability - short story
• Uup, Uup, and Awaaaaaaay! - short story
• Spanish Witches - short story
• The Dragon Lady at the End of Time - short story
• Now You See It Now You - short story
• Afterword - essay

The publication of Michael Swanwick's "A User's Guide to the Post Moderns" sent angry shockwaves rippling through the science fiction community. Not since the controversy surrounding the advent of the so-called New Wave writers of the 1960s and early 1970s had anyone dared to categorize writers. A work that was originally intended as an homage, to illuminate the works of many of the younger writers in the field, was vilified in numerous fanzine articles and convention panels. But Swanwick's essay was not intended to generate controversy and it remains, beyond the initial conflagration, a thoughtful and insightful look into the science fiction field of the early to mid-1980s. Herein lies the genesis of writers like William Gibson and Kim Stanley Robinson, Bruce Sterling and James Patrick Kelly. "A User's Guide to the Post Moderns," is published here for the first time since its initial magazine appearance along with "In the Tradition...", Swanwick's elegant assay on the fantasy genre, and a brand new introduction written specially for this collection. BACK COVER: Reviews of "A User's Guide to the Post Moderns": Juicy and intelligent, these critical overviews provide a valuable snapshot of our field... - Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine

Some of the writers that he praises may actually believe that they are as important to the field of science fiction as Swanwick says they are. The more they believe that, the more it will hurt when a more accurate perspective is forced upon them. - Orson Scott Card

A bilious assemblage of self-congratulatory twaddle... jejune mixture of bluster and untried arrogance... My God, if this is the direction science fiction is going, it is doomed... A self-conscious piece of snobbery not worth the powder to blow it to Kingdom Come. Like reading a history of Europe written from the point of view of Bulgaria. Swanwick's article has proved nothing, clarified nothing, accomplished nothing except to get his name before a large number of people where he can spout his conspiracy-literary theories in a pseudo-journalistic 'I'm above all this' manner better served by UFO magazines and the Flat Earth Society newsletter.Praise for "In the Tradition... "A brave, lonely attempt to stem the tide. - Nova Express

An incisive essay... - Publisher's Weekly

Thought-provoking and informative, the essay is as beautifully penned as any of the works lauded therein. - Terri Windling

Table of Contents:

• A Tale of Two Essays - essay by Michael Swanwick
• A User's Guide to the Postmoderns - (1986) - essay by Michael Swanwick
• "In the Tradition..." - (1994) - essay by Michael Swanwick

WFA nominated short story. It originally appeared in the collection Tales of Old Earth (2000). The story can also be found in the anthologies Year's Best Fantasy (2001), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer, and The Year's Best Science Fiction: Eighteenth Annual Collection (2001), edited by Gardner Dozois. It is included in the collection The Best of Michael Swanwick (2008).

This short story originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, October-November 2008. It can also be found in the anthology Year's Best SF 14 (2009), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. The story is included in the collection Not So Much Said the Cat (2016).

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Shadows of the New Sun: Stories in Honor of Gene Wolfe (2013), edited by J. E. Mooney and Bill Fawcett, and was reprinted in Lightspeed, Issue 107, April 2019. It can also be found in the antology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-First Annual Collection (2014), edited by Gardner Dozois. The story is included in the collection Not So Much Said the Cat (2016).

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

This novelette originally appeared in the collection The Dog Said Bow-Wow (2007). It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fifth Annual Collection (2008), edited by Gardner Dozois, and Science Fiction: The Best of the Year, 2008 Edition, edited by Rich Horton.

'A Russian émigré poet living in Paris is visited by a mysterious bear with an agenda...'

'Originally published on 7 June 2023, read it for free at Tor.com'

When the elves come out of the mirrors one Christmas, they send Sasha on a harrowing train trip to get back a brother she never knew she had.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

Hugo Award winning short story. It originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, February 1998 and was reprinted in Clarkesworld, Issue 121, October 2016. The story can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Sixteenth Annual Collection (1999), edited by Gardner Dozois, and The Mammoth Book of Science Fiction (2002), edited by Mike Ashley. It is included in the collections Tales of Old Earth (2000) and The Best of Michael Swanwick (2008).

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

This short story originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, December 1997. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fifteenth Annual Collection (1998), edited by Gardner Dozois, Year's Best SF 3 (1998), edited by David G. Hartwell, and Supermen: Tales of the Posthuman Future (2002), edited by Gardner Dozois. The story is included in the collection Tales of Old Earth (2000).

Spies and sorcerers face off during the Cold War, with the fate of the world in balance in this print edition of a hugely popular serial novel from five award-winning and critically acclaimed authors.

The Cold War rages in back rooms and dark alleys of 1970s Prague as spies and sorcerers battle for home and country. The fate of the East and the West hangs in the balance right along the Iron Curtain--and crackling beneath the surface is a vein of magic that is waiting to be tapped.

This novelette originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, August 2006. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fourth Annual Collection (2007), edited by Gardner Dozois, and Year's Best SF 12 (2007), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Kramer. The story is included in the collection The Dog Said Bow-Wow (2007).

This short story originally appeared in Penthouse, April 1981. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Horror Stories: Series X (1982), edited by Karl Edward Wagner, and After Midnight (1986), edited by Charles L. Grant. The story is included in the collections Slow Dancing Through Time (Dozois, 1990), Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys with Gardner Dozois (Dozois, 2001), and The Fiction Factory (Dann, 2005).

Read the full story for free at the Baen website.

Here's a summer memorable for more than the sudden appearance of a herd of triceratopsies, or whatever the plural is, with a comfortable relationship contrasted with a brand-new, more intense one. If it is better to have loved and lost than not have loved at all, how does having loved and lost and not having loved at all stack up?

This short story originally appeared in Amazon.com website, August 19, 2005. It can also be found in the anthologies:

• Science Fiction: The Very Best of 2005 (2006), edited by Jonathan Strahan
• The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Third Annual Collection (2006), edited by Gardner Dozois
• Science Fiction: The Best of the Year, 2006 Edition, edited by Rich Horton
• The Time Traveler's Almanac (2014), edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer
• As Time Goes By (2015), edited by Hank Davis

The story is included in the collections The Dog Said Bow-Wow (2007) and The Best of Michael Swanwick (2008).

Read the full story for free at the Baen website.

Nebula Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared in Omni, December 1984. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Second Annual Collection (1985), edited by Gardner Dozois, Best SF of the Year #14 (1985), edited by Terry Carr and The Seventh Omni Book of Science Fiction (1989) edited by Ellen Datlow. It is included in the collections Gravity's Angels (1991) and The Best of Michael Swanwick (2008).

Read the full story for free at the Baen website.

This short story originally appeared on Sci Fiction in 2001. It can also be found in the anthology Year's Best SF 7 (2002), edited by David G. Hartwell and Karhryn Cramer. The story is included in the collection The Periodic Table of Science Fiction (2005).

This short story originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, October-November 2007. It can also be found in the anthology The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Two (2008). The story is included in the collection The Dog Said Bow-Wow (2007).

In a world of plug-in personalities and colonized asteroids, daring fugitive Rebel Elizabeth Mudlark seeks refuge on Earth orbiting settlements, where evil, self-interest, and greed flourish in the vacuum of space.

Hugo Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, February 1995. The story is included in the collection Tales of Old Earth (2000).

Hugo and Sturgeon Award nominatd short story. It originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, May 1998. The story is included in the collections Tales of Old Earth (2000) and The Best of Michael Swanwick (2008).

Will Radio Jones's invention save the day? Can Amelia Spindizzy outfly all competition and outsmart the brains in jars?

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Chasing the Phoenix: a science fiction masterpiece from a five-time Hugo Award winner Michael Swanwick!

In the distant future, Surplus arrives in China dressed as a Mongolian shaman, leading a yak which carries the corpse of his friend, Darger. The old high-tech world has long since collapsed, and the artificial intelligences that ran it are outlawed and destroyed. Or so it seems.

Darger and Surplus, a human and a genetically engineered dog with human intelligence who walks upright, are a pair of con men and the heroes of a series of prior Swanwick stories. They travel to what was once China and invent a scam to become rich and powerful. Pretending to have limited super-powers, they aid an ambitious local warlord who dreams of conquest and once again reuniting China under one ruler. And, against all odds, it begins to work, but it seems as if there are other forces at work behind the scenes. Chasing the Phoenix is a sharp, slick, witty science fiction adventure that is hugely entertaining from Michael Swanwick, one of the best SF writers alive.

Dancing With Bears follows the adventures of notorious con-men Darger and Surplus: They've lied and cheated their way onto the caravan that is delivering a priceless gift from the Caliph of Baghdad to the Duke of Muscovy. The only thing harder than the journey to Muscovy is their arrival in Muscovy. An audience with the Duke seems impossible to obtain, and Darger and Surplus quickly become entangled in a morass of deceit and revolution. The only thing more dangerous than the convoluted political web surrounding Darger and Surplus is the gift itself, the Pearls of Byzantium, and Zoesophia, the governess sworn to protect their virtue.

The world is grown strange.

Gloriana, the six-brained Queen of England, squats in her throne room at the center of Buckingham Labyrinth. In Paris, the glowing Seine may, or may not, conceal the disassembled remnants of the Eiffel Tower. A dragon haunts the high passes of the Germanic states, swallowing travelers whole for purposes impossible to understand. All these signs and portents together mean but one thing to the forgettable-faced Aubrey Darger and his humanoid canine partner Surplus.

There is money to be made.

Here are five novelettes and four never-before-collected vignettes that describe episodes from the careers of those most charming of con artists, Darger and Surplus, spiritual heirs to Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser and unwitting agents of change in a world where ancient artificial intelligences scheme to destroy the descendants of their makers. The comrades' adventures across a wildly detailed world by turns astonish and delight.

The Hugo Award-winning "The Dog Says Bow-Wow" tells the tale of the redoubtable pair's first confidence game, played out at the dizzying heights of English society. In "The Little Cat Laughed to See Such Sport," Surplus works to overcome his prejudice against Darger's new lover, a member of that most contemptible and capricious of races, cats. Gods walk a future Arcadia in "Girls and Boys Come Out to Play," tables are turned by the formidable woman who lends her name as title to "Tawny Petticoats," and Darger and Surplus are separated as each attempts to thwart the machinations of a most unique AI "There Was an Old Woman," which debuts herein.

The collection closes with "Smoke and Mirrors," four brief episodes that lend nuance to all that has come before, expanding our understanding and appreciation of this world and of these unforgettable roguish characters.

Hugo Award winning and Nebula Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, October-November 2001. The story can be found in the anthologies Year's Best SF 7 (2002), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer, The Year's Best Science Fiction: Nineteenth Annual Collection (2002), edited by Gardner Dozois, Science Fiction: The Best of 2001 (2002), edited by Karen Haber and Robert Silverberg, Future Crimes (2003), edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois, Beyond Singularity (2005) edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois, Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology (2007), edited byJames Patrick Kelly and John Kessel and the Nebula Awards Showcase 2004, edited by Vonda N. McIntyre. It is included in the collections The Dog Said Bow-Wow (2007) and The Best of Michael Swanwick (2008).

Read the full story for free at the Baen website.

Hugo Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, October-November 2002. The story is included in the collection The Dog Said Bow Wow (2007).

This novelette originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, July 2005. It can also be found in the anthology Year's Best SF 11 (2006), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. The story is included in the collection The Dog Said Bow-Wow (2007).

This novelette originally appeared in the anthology Rogues (2014), edited by George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois. It can also ve found in the anthology The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Nine (2015), edited by Jonathan Strahan. The story is included in the collection Not So Much Said the Cat (2016).

Jane is a changeling child, enslaved in a factory that makes the iron dragons - terrible engines of war - until she discovers the secret of the dragons' sentience and is able to use one of the beasts to escape. Then, her adventures as a thief and an outsider take her into a reality rich in wild magic and sharp-edged technology, a world where Time and shopping malls have a strange relationship and gryphons have a low capacity for alcohol. A surprising and brilliant novel that undercuts the easy escapism of more conventional fantasy.

A war-dragon of Babel crashes in the idyllic fields of a post-industrialized Faerie and, dragging himself into the nearest village, declares himself king and makes young Will his lieutenant. Nightly, he crawls inside the young fey's brain to get a measure of what his subjects think. Forced out of his village, Will travels with female centaur soldiers, witnesses the violent clash of giants, and acquires a surrogate daughter, Esme, who has no knowledge of the past and may be immortal.

Evacuated to the Tower of Babel -- infinitely high, infinitely vulgar, very much like New York City -- Will meets the confidence trickster Nat Whilk. Inside the Dread Tower, Will becomes a hero to the homeless living in the tunnels under the city, rises as an underling to a haint politician, meets his one true love – a high-elven woman he dare not aspire to.

Caitlin of House Sans Merci is the young half-human pilot of a sentient mechanical dragon. Returning from her first soul-stealing raid, she discovers an unwanted hitchhiker.

When Caitlin is framed for the murder of her brother, to save herself she must disappear into Industrialized Faerie, looking for the one person who can clear her.

Unfortunately, the stakes are higher than she knows. Her deeds will change her world forever.

With "The Mongolian Wizard," Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author Michael Swanwick launches a new fiction series -- beginning with this story of a very unusual international conference in a fractured Europe that never was.

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A second "Mongolian Wizard" tale from Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author Michael Swanwick - continuing an epic of magic and deception in an alternate Europe of railroads and sorcery.

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The third in Hugo and Nebula Award-winning Michael Swanwick's "Mongolian Wizard" series of tales set in an alternate fin de siècle Europe shot through with sorcery and intrigue.

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The fourth in Hugo and Nebula Award-winning Michael Swanwick's "Mongolian Wizard" series of tales set in an alternate fin de siècle Europe shot through with magic, mystery, and intrigue.

The story is included in the collection 'Not So Much' Said the Cat (2016).

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

A locked room, a murder, and an unexpected kind of magic: the fifth of Michael Swanwick's "Mongolian Wizard" tales.

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The Wizard has swallowed more and more of Europe--and inside his shuttered realm are magic and mass death. The Pyramid of Krakow is the sixth of Michael Swanwick's "Mongolian Wizard" tales.

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We tamper with time at our peril. A new story in the Mongolian Wizard series.

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Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author Michael Swanwick has been building the world of the Mongolian Wizard on Tor.com, beginning with the first installment in 2012. The series depicts an alternate fin de siècle Europe shot through with magic, mystery, and intrigue, unveiled piece by piece in a series of stand-alone stories, and visualized with art by Greg Manchess.

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A new story in the Mongolian Wizard universe.

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One of five stories inspired by the same painting by John Jude Palencar. Anthologized in The Palencar Project and later in The Year's Best SF 18. It is included in the collection 'Not So Much' Said the Cat (2016).

Read this story online for free at Tor.com.