Search Worlds Without End

Hugo, Nebula and Locus award winning novella. It originally appeared in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, September 1979. At least three different versions of the novella have been published. It can be found in the anthologies The Best Science Fiction Novellas of the Year #2 (1980) edited by Terry Carr, Nebula Winners Fifteen (1981), edited by Frank Herbert, Baker's Dozen: 13 Short Science Fiction Novels (1985) edited by Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg and Charles G. Waugh, and The Hugo Winners, Volume 5: (1980-82) (1986), edited by Isaac Asimov. It is half of Tor Double #6: Enemy Mine/Another Orphan (1989, with John Kessel) and is included in the collection Manifest Destiny (1980).

The story was made into the movie Enemy Mine directed by Wolfgang Petersen and starring Dennis Quaid and Louis Gossett, Jr. in 1985. The movie in turn was the basis van the novelization Enemy Mine (1985), written in collaboration with David Gerrold.

Famous for the mistaken panic that ensued from Orson Welles’s 1938 radio dramatization, The War of the Worlds remains one of the most influential of all science fiction works.

The night after a shooting star is seen streaking through the sky from Mars, a cylinder is discovered on Horsell Common in London. Naïve locals approach the cylinder armed just with a white flag—only to be quickly killed by an all-destroying heat ray, as terrifying tentacled invaders emerge.

Soon the whole of human civilization is under threat as powerful Martians build gigantic killing machines, destroying all life in their path with black gas and burning ray. The forces of Earth, however, may prove harder to beat than they appear.

The Gurus came in peace, bearing gifts.

They were a highly advanced, interstellar species who brought amazingly useful and sophisticated technology to the human race. There was, of course, a catch. The Gurus warned of a far more malevolent life form, beings who have hounded the Gurus from sun to sun, planet to planet, across the cosmos. Pundits have taken to calling them the Antagonists - or Antags - and they have already established a beachhead on Mars. In exchange for all they've done for us, the Gurus would now like our help.

Enter Master Sergeant Michael Venn, a veteran Skyrine (a Marine who is specially trained for off-world combat) who is dropped onto the Red Planet with his band of brothers on a mission to take down as many Antags as possible.

But from the moment they're dropped through the thin Martian atmosphere, their mission goes horribly, terribly wrong. From a group of female special ops Skyrines with secret orders, to mysterious humans who've settled on Mars, to the overwhelming and highly-reinforced Antags themselves, Venn and his brothers will face impossible odds just to survive - let alone make it home alive.