Search Worlds Without End

Skillfully combining complex science with finely executed prose, these edgy, award-winning tales explore the always-shifting border between the known and the alien.

The beauty and peril of technology and the passion and penalties of conviction merge in stories that are by turns dark, satiric, bold, and introspective. A seemingly humanized monster from John Carpenter's The Thing reveals the true villains in an Antarctic showdown. An artificial intelligence shields a biologically-enhanced prodigy from her overwhelmed parents. A deep-sea diver discovers that her true nature lies not within the confines of her mission but in the depths of her psyche. A court psychologist analyzes a psychotic graduate student who has learned to reprogram reality itself. A father tries to hold his broken family together in the wake of an ongoing assault by sentient rainstorms.

Gorgeously saturnine and exceptionally powerful, these collected fictions are both intensely thought-provoking and impossible to forget.

Table of Contents:

• The Things - (2010) - shortstory
• The Island - (2009) - novelette
• The Second Coming of Jasmine Fitzgerald - (1998) - novelette
• A Word for Heathens - (2004) - novelette
• Home - (1999) - shortstory
• The Eyes of God - (2008) - shortstory
• Flesh Made Word - (1994) - shortstory
• Nimbus - (1994) - shortstory
• Mayfly - (2005) - shortstory by Peter Watts and Derryl Murphy
• Ambassador - (2001) - shortstory by Peter Watts
• Hillcrest v. Velikovsky - (2008) - shortstory
• Repeating the Past - (2007) - shortstory
• A Niche - (1990) - novelette
• Outtro: En Route to Dystopia with the Angry Optimist - (2013) - essay

This novelette originally appeared in the anthology Upgraded (2014), edited by Neil Clarke, and was reprinted in Lightspeed, April 2016. It can also be found in the anthologies The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Nine (2015), edited by Jonathan Strahan, and The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2015, edited by Rich Horton.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

This short story originally appeared in Twelve Tomorrows (2013), edited by Stephen Cass. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2014, edited by Rich Horton.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Engineering Infinity (2010), edited by Jonathan Strahan. It can also be found in the anthologies The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Six (2012), edited by Jonathan Strahan, and Imaginarium 2012: The Best Canadian Speculative Writing (2012), edited by Halli Villegas and Sandra Kasturi.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Tesseracts Nine (2005), edited by Nalo Hopkinson and Geoff Ryman. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Third Annual Collection (2006), edited by Gardner Dozois. The story is included in the collection Beyond the Rift (Watts, 2013).

This short story originally appeared in Nature, November 29, 2007. It can also be found in the anthologies Year's Best SF 13 (2008), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer, and Distant Early Warnings: Canada's Best Science Fiction (2009), edited by Robert J. Sawyer. It can also be found in the collection Beyond the Rift (2013).

Read the full story for free at Nature.

In this collection of short stories from best-selling author Peter Watts, enter strange new worlds that defy the imagination. Journey to the depths of the ocean floor with genetically engineered human beings... push the boundaries of life with a scientist obsessed with death... and watch as sentient gaseous entities offer destruction and salvation to the human race.

Table of Contents:

• 3 - A Niche
• 35 - Fractals
• 51 - The Second Coming of Jasmine Fitzgerald
• 75 - Bulk Food
• 97 - Nimbus
• 109 - Flesh Made Word
• 127 - Ambassador
• 139 - Bethlehem
• 159 - Home

This short story originally appeared in the anthology The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction: Volume Two (2008), edited by George Mann. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2009, edited by Rich Horton, and Distant Early Warnings: Canada's Best Science Fiction (2009), edited by Robert J. Sawyer. The story is included in the collection Beyond the Rift (2013).

Shiley Jackson Award winning and Hugo and BSFA Award nominated short story. Originally published in Clarkesworld Magazine, January 2010. It can aslo be found in the anthologies Clarkesworld: Year Four (2013), edited by Neil Clarke and Sean Wallace, The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume Five (2011), edited by Jonathan Strahan, The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2011, edited by Rich Horton and The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Eighth Annual Collection (2011), edited by Gadner Dozois. The story is collected in Beyond the Rift (2013).

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

This novelette originally appeared in the anthology Infinity Wars (2017) and was reprinted by Tor.com. It can alos be found in the anthology The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume 3 (2018), edited by Neil Clarke, The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2018, edited by Rich Horton, and The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018, edited by N. K. Jemisin and John Joseph Adams.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

Colonel Keaton is in trouble. His wife has retreated into a virtual heaven and his son remains missing after joining an extrasolar mission to track down an alien race. He is presently tasked by his superiors with the threat assessment of hived human intelligences, one of which successfully attacks a compound under his watch. Now, one of the strongest hive minds in the world approaches Keaton with an offer that could completely change his world.

This story is included in Gardner Dozois' anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Second Annual Collection (2015).

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

Two months since the stars fell...

Two months since sixty-five thousand alien objects clenched around the Earth like a luminous fist, screaming to the heavens as the atmosphere burned them to ash. Two months since that moment of brief, bright surveillance by agents unknown.

Two months of silence, while a world holds its breath.

Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune's orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Whatever's out there isn't talking to us. It's talking to some distant star, perhaps. Or perhaps to something closer, something en route.

So who do you send to force introductions on an intelligence with motives unknown, maybe unknowable? Who do you send to meet the alien when the alien doesn't want to meet?

You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees x-rays and tastes ultrasound, so compromised by grafts and splices he no longer feels his own flesh. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won't be needed, and the fainter one she'll do any good if she is. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called vampire, recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. And you send a synthesist-an informational topologist with half his mind gone-as an interface between here and there, a conduit through which the Dead Center might hope to understand the Bleeding Edge.

You send them all to the edge of interstellar space, praying you can trust such freaks and retrofits with the fate of a world. You fear they may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find.

But you'd give anything for that to be true, if you only knew what was waiting for them...

Prepare for a different kind of singularity in Peter Watts' Echopraxia, the follow-up to the Hugo-nominated novel Blindsight.

It's the eve of the twenty-second century: a world where the dearly departed send postcards back from Heaven and evangelicals make scientific breakthroughs by speaking in tongues; where genetically engineered vampires solve problems intractable to baseline humans and soldiers come with zombie switches that shut off self-awareness during combat. And it's all under surveillance by an alien presence that refuses to show itself.

Daniel Bruks is a living fossil: a field biologist in a world where biology has turned computational, a cat's-paw used by terrorists to kill thousands. Taking refuge in the Oregon desert, he's turned his back on a humanity that shatters into strange new subspecies with every heartbeat. But he awakens one night to find himself at the center of a storm that will turn all of history inside-out.

Now he's trapped on a ship bound for the center of the solar system. To his left is a grief-stricken soldier, obsessed by whispered messages from a dead son. To his right is a pilot who hasn't yet found the man she's sworn to kill on sight. A vampire and its entourage of zombie bodyguards lurk in the shadows behind. And dead ahead, a handful of rapture-stricken monks takes them all to a meeting with something they will only call "The Angels of the Asteroids."

Their pilgrimage brings Dan Bruks, the fossil man, face-to-face with the biggest evolutionary breakpoint since the origin of thought itself.

A huge international corporation has developed a facility along the Juan de Fuca Ridge at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean to exploit geothermal power. They send a bio-engineered crew--people who have been altered to withstand the pressure and breathe the seawater--down to live and work in this weird, fertile undersea darkness.

Unfortunately the only people suitable for long-term employment in these experimental power stations are crazy, some of them in unpleasant ways. How many of them can survive, or will be allowed to survive, while worldwide disaster approaches from below?

This is the way the world ends:

A nuclear strike on a deep sea vent. The target was an ancient microbe-voracious enough to drive the whole biosphere to extinction-and a handful of amphibious humans called rifters who'd inadvertently released it from three billion years of solitary confinement.

The resulting tsunami killed millions. It's not as through there was a choice: saving the world excuses almost any degree of collateral damage.

Unless, of course, you miss the target.

Now North America's west coast lies in ruins. Millions of refugees rally around a mythical figure mysteriously risen from the deep sea. A world already wobbling towards collapse barely notices the spread of one more blight along its shores. And buried in the seething fast-forward jungle that use to be called Internet, something vast and inhuman reaches out to a woman with empty white eyes and machinery in her chest. A woman driven by rage, and incubating Armageddon.

Her name is Lenie Clarke. She's a rifter. She's not nearly as dead as everyone thinks.

And the whole damn world is collateral damage as far as she's concerned....

Starfish lit the fuse. Maelstrom was the explosion. But five years into the aftermath, things aren't quite so simple as they once seemed...

Lenie Clarke-rifter, avenger, amphibious deep-sea cyborg-has destroyed the world. Once exploited for her psychological addiction to dangerous environments, she emerged in the wake of a nuclear blast to serve up vendetta from the ocean floor. The horror she unleashed-an ancient, apocalyptic microbe called ßehemoth- has been free in the world for half a decade now, devouring the biosphere from the bottom up. North America lies in ruins beneath the thumb of an omnipotent psychopath. Digital monsters have taken Clarke's name, wreaking havoc throughout the decimated remnants of something that was once called Internet. Governments have fallen across the globe; warlords and suicide cults rise from the ashes, pledging fealty to the Meltdown Madonna. All because five years ago, Lenie Clarke had a score to settle.

But she has learned something in the meantime: she destroyed the world for a fallacy.

Now, cowering at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, rifters and the technoindustrial "corpses" who created them hide from a world in its death throes. But they cannot hide forever: something is tracking them, down amongst the lightless cliffs and trenches of the Midatlantic Ridge. The consequences of past acts reach inexorably towards the very bottom of the world, and Lenie Clarke must finally confront the mess she made.

Redemption doesn't come easy with the blood of a world on your hands. But even after five years in purgatory, Lenie Clarke is still Lenie Clarke. There will be consequences for anyone who gets in her way-and worse ones, perhaps, if she succeeds....

Lenie Clarke-amphibious cyborg, Meltdown Madonna, agent of the Apocalypse-has grown sick to death of her own cowardice.

For five years (since the events recounted in Maelstrom0, she and her bionic brethren (modified to work in the rift valleys of the ocean floor) have hidden in the mountains of the deep Atlantic. The facility they commandeered was more than a secret station on the ocean floor. Atlantis was an exit strategy for the corporate elite, a place where the world's Movers and Shakers had hidden from the doomsday microbe ßehemoth-and from the hordes of the moved and the shaken left behind. For five years "rifters" and "corpses" have lived in a state of uneasy truce, united by fear of the outside world.

But now that world closes in. An unknown enemy hunts them through the crushing darkness of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. ßehemoth- twisted, mutated, more virulent than ever-has found them already. The fragile armistice between the rifters and their one-time masters has exploded into all-out war, and not even the legendary Lenie Clarke can take back the body count.

Billions have died since she loosed ßehemoth upon the world. Billions more are bound to. The whole biosphere came apart at the seams while Lenie Clarke hid at the bottom of the sea and did nothing. But now there is no place left to hide. The consequences of past acts reach inexorably to the very floor of the world, and Lenie Clarke must return to confront the mess she made.

Redemption doesn't come easy with the blood of a world on your hands. But even after five years in pitch-black purgatory, Lenie Clarke is still Lenie Clarke. There will be consequences for anyone who gets in her way-and worse ones, perhaps, if she succeeds...

Hugo Award winning and Sturgeon Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared in the anthology The New Space Opera 2 (2009), edited by Jonathan Strahan and Gardner Dozois. It can also be found in the anthologies:

• The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Four (2010), edited by Jonathan Strahan
• The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2010, edited by Rich Horton
• Year's Best SF 15 (2010), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer
• The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Seventh Annual Collection (2010), edited by Gardner Dozois
• Twenty-First Century Science Fiction (2013), edited by David G. Hartwell and Patrick Nielsen Hayden
• The Final Frontier (2018), edited by Neil Clarke

The story is included in the collection Beyond the Rift (2013).

Read the story for free at the author's website (pdf).

She believed in the mission with all her heart. But that was sixty million years ago.

How do you stage a mutiny when you're only awake one day in a million? How do you conspire when your tiny handful of potential allies changes with each shift? How do you engage an enemy that never sleeps, that sees through your eyes and hears through your ears and relentlessly, honestly, only wants what is best for you?

Sunday Ahzmundin is about to find out.

This is a novella of less than 42,000 words.