Search Worlds Without End

Originally published in 1980 as The Best of Walter M. Miller, then republished in 2000 as Dark Benediction.

Walter M. Miller, Jr. is best remembered as the author of A Canticle for Leibowitz, universally recognized as one of the greatest novels of modern SF. But as well as writing that deeply felt and eloquent book, he produced many shorter works of fiction of stunning originality and power.

His profound interest in religion and his innate literary gifts combined in the production of such works as "The Darfstellar", for which he won a Hugo in 1955, "Conditionally Human", "I, Dreamer" and "The Big Hunger", all of which are included in this brilliant and essential collection.

Table of Contents:

• You Triflin' Skunk! - (1965) - shortstory
• The Will - (1954) - shortstory
• Anybody Else Like Me? - (1952) - novelette
• Crucifixus Etiam - (1953) - shortstory
• I, Dreamer - (1953) - shortstory
• Dumb Waiter - (1952) - novelette
• Blood Bank - (1952) - novella
• Big Joe and the Nth Generation - (1952) - shortstory
• The Big Hunger - (1952) - shortstory
• Conditionally Human - (1952) - novella
• The Darfsteller - (1955) - novella
• Dark Benediction - (1951) - novella
• The Lineman - (1957) - novella
• Vengeance for Nikolai - (1957) - novelette

Hugo Award winning novelette. It originally appeared in Astounding Science Fiction, January 1955. The story can also be found in the anthologies The Hugo Winners, Volume 1: (1955-61) (1962), edited by Isaac Asimov, and The Great SF Stories 17 (1955) (1988), edited by Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg. The story is included in the collections Conditionally Human (1962) and Dark Benediction (1980).

In the Utah desert, Brother Francis of the Albertian Order of Leibowitz has made a miraculous discovery: the relics of the martyr Isaac Leibowitz himself, including the blessed blueprint and the sacred shopping list. They may provide a bright ray of hope in a terrifying age of darkness, a time of ignorance and genetic monsters that are the unholy aftermath of the Flame Deluge. But as the spellbinding mystery at the core of this extraordinary novel unfolds, it is the search itself--for meaning, for truth, for love--that offers hope to a humanity teetering on the edge of an abyss.

A timeless and still timely masterpiece, A Canticle for Leibowitz is a classic that ranks with Brave New World and 1984.

Forty years after the classic A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter Miller returns to a world struggling to transcend a terrifying legacy of darkness, as one man undertakes an odyssey of adventure and discovery that promises to alter the destiny of humankind . . . .

Isolated in Leibowitz Abbey, Brother Blacktooth St. George suffers a crisis of faith, torn between his vows and his Nomad upbringing, between the Holy Virgin and visions of the Wild Horse Woman of his people. At the brink of disgrace and expulsion from his order, the young monk is championed by a powerful cardinal who has plans for him. Blacktooth sets out on a journey across a landscape still scarred by the long-ago Flame Deluge, a land divided by nature, politics, and war. He will find horrors and wonders, sins of the flesh . . . and love. As he encounters and reencounters a beautiful but forbidden mutant named Ædrea, he begins to wonder: is a she-devil, the Holy Mother, or the Wild Horse Woman herself?