Search Worlds Without End

The aliens are here, all around us. They always have been. And now, one by one, they're destroying our cities.

Dodge Mercer deals in identities, which is fine until the day he deals the wrong identity and clan war breaks out. Hope Burren has no identity and no past, but she does have a multitude of voices filling her head.

In a world where nothing is as it seems, where humans are segregated and aliens can sing realities and tear worlds apart, Dodge and Hope lead a ragged band of survivors on a search for sanctuary in what may be the only hope for humankind.

This book is published as "Harmony" in the US.

This short story originally appeared in Lightspeed, January 2016.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

The village: a close-knit community where everyone knows everyone else. Here, houses can be grown out of the dirt; livestock and the sub-human mutts can be changed into something else, something other; and fleshy, drastically mutated Oracles guide humankind on the delicate path of survival.

The wildlands: the land between human settlements where animals that are not animals live among plants that are not plants, and people who might not be people live in fear of human intervention. Out here organic AIs grow in the wildlands, either worshiped or feared; trees sing to each other; and tempting, dark fruit hang from the branches. Out here nothing can be trusted, nothing is necessarily as it seems, and no sane human would ever want to set foot.

Out here is Flint's missing sister.

Genetopia is the story of a young man in search of his possibly abducted sister in a far future where nano- and biotechnology have transformed and accelerated the evolution of humans and their strangely altered surroundings. In this world, you can never take anything -- or anyone -- at face value. Illness and contact with the unknown are always to be feared, as viruses re-engineer genes and germ cells, migrating traits from species to species through plague and fever. Humankind lives in isolated communities, connected by trade routes, and always fighting to keep the unclean at arm's length.

But if Flint is to find his sister he must brave the fevers, the legendary beasts, the unknown. He must enter strange communities and seek help in the most unlikely places. He must confront both his own dark past and the future of his kind.

He must go into the wildlands.

Flint's story is the story of the last true humans, and of the struggles between those who want to defend their heritage and those who choose to embrace the new. But Flint doesn't see it like that: he just wants to find his sister.

Jed Brindle is an alien. At least that's what they call him on earth. He's a colony-bred soldier with the Extraterran Peacekeeping Force, fighting in a war for control of what used to be the US. Sent on a mission behind enemy lines, Jed struggles for survival and tries to find his real self.

Trace: a country where magic is dying out. A country at war with itself. A country where the prophecies of the Book of the World have started to come true.

Bligh: a young foreigner, drawn irresistibly to the war in Trace. A man who has rejected religion, yet appears to be possessed by one of the six Lords Elemental.

Bligh thinks he's going mad, but if he is then it's a madness shared by others...

Gritty and passionate, Lord of Stone is a fantasy for the new millennium by the acclaimed author of The Accord and Genetopia.

With his health failing, the great mage Donn has chosen to pass on his Talents to a new generation: an old era is drawing to a close, a new era about to begin. But with change comes instability. War looms and a rogue church leader threatens to set loose the wild powers of the First City. Donn's children must oppose this man but, also, they must contend with Donn himself: the old mage has not finished with his children yet.

On the run from the religious repression of the mainland, Leeth Hamera joins a group of outcasts on the Serpent's Back, a continually changing island continent in the middle of a lava sea. Leeth has never lived up to the expectations of his wealthy merchant family and his only magical skill is the lowly Talent of bonding with animals. But, as he learns, the greatest Talents can sometimes be the slowest to emerge.

The leader of the outcasts is Chi, son of Donn and the greatest healer of his generation. Chi is in exile for breaking the Embodied Church's edict against intervening in the natural order: many years ago Chi used his skills to revive his son from the dead. That son, Lachlan Pas, is now a church leader tortured by the guilty knowledge of what his father had to do to return him to life. When he learns Chi is still alive, he orders his execution, determined that his secret should never be exposed.

Until now, Chi has been content to live in exile but now he knows that his son's insane and cruel rule must be stopped. Chi summons his half-siblings from throughout the inhabited lands of the Rift valley. The need for action is confirmed when one of them reveals that Lachlan and his mage, Oriole, are rebuilding the ancient city of Samhab--an act which will release the powers of the earth with unforeseeable consequences.

Welcome to the magical island city of Zigané, endlessly adrift in the southern lava sea; the searing soda plains home of the Morani warriors; the impenetrable Zochi jungle, full of illusion and hidden hazard; the charmed fortress-like City of the Divine Wall; and Samhab, the fantastic First City of the True, built at the geographical centre of the Rift, where the magical powers of the earth rise up to be set free by the earth-charmers and mages. The novel's cast of shape-changers, earth-charmers, healers and illusionists must battle to save civilization from the evil rule of Lachlan Pas and his followers.

For whoever controls the power of Samhab controls the future of the world.

A tale of love, murder and revenge that crosses the boundaries between the real world and a virtual reality.

This novelette originally appeared in the anthology The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction (2007), edited by George Mann, and was reprinted in Clarkesworld, Issue 106, July 2015. The story can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fifth Annual Collection (2008), edited by Garder Dozois.

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

We've all dreamt of Faraway, a place so like the world we know but where we make the rules. For Frankie Finnegan, a boy whose sister has died, whose family is in meltdown and whose school life is blighted by bullies, such dreams have a keener edge. Until one day he wakes up in Faraway. His World; His Rules; His Dream; where Grace is still alive and his parents can be happy again.

Yet it soon becomes clear that he's not the only one with power in Faraway, and the mysterious 'Owner' doesn't take kindly to interference. Things start to unravel, and Frankie's Dream slides inexorably towards Nightmare...

This short story originally appeared in Lightspeed, February 2012. The story can also be found in the anthology War Stories: New Military Science Fiction (2014), edited by Jaym Gates and Andrew Liptak. It is included in the collection Mementoes (2016).

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

2110. Earth is suffering major resource shortages, and the impact of climate change is peaking, with much of the planet's equatorial regions turned to lifeless desert and populations displaced. Colonies have been established on Mars and the Moon, but these cannot hope to sustain any more than a scant population of hundreds of citizens.

Attention has turned to the need to discover an extra-solar colony world.

European scientists, using discoveries made at CERN, have identified the means of creating a wormhole in the space-time continuum, which would allow interstellar travel. However, to do so they must first physically transport one end of the wormhole to where they want it to be, so settingup a wormhole will always rely on physical travel first of all.

A ship is sent to Mu Arae, earth-like planet discovered 10 years before. It is a journey that will take 80 years, the crew, who will eventually set up the wormhole on the planet, kept in suspended animation. But only a few years into the trip, catastrophe strikes and the ship blows up en route, killing all aboard.

2190, eighty years after the starship set out.

Gordon Kemp is a detective working in the cold case department in London. Usually he works on cases closed ten, twenty-five years earlier. Now, however, he has been assigned a murder investigation closed, unsolved, over eighty years ago. What he unearths will change history and threatens everything we know about what the powers that be have planned for Earth. The tragedy that befell the ship 80 years before is not what it seems and the past and the present are radically different to what everyone on Earth believes. We made the journey. Why has it been kept a secret?

The descendants of Expatria's first colonists from Earth have rejected technology. When Mathias Hanrahan, heir to the primacy of Newest Delhi, wants to reintroduce the old ways he is framed for his father's murder and forced to flee.

Recruited by a research team which is trying to relearn the ancient technologies, he goes to work for them, and against a background of impending war, Mathias discovers that strange messages are coming from space.

...AND THE LORD COMMANDED HER TO UNPLUG

For Katya Tatin, a passionate devotee of the Holy Corporation of GenGen, the mission to the recently rediscovered colony of Expatria is much more than a chance to spread the gospel - it offers a break with the past on Earth and a chance to reconfirm her faith.

On Expatria itself, and on the ancient arkships that orbit it, the news of the impending arrival of a mission from Earth further complicates an already murderously complex web of religious and political intrigue. For some, it looks like salvation from a backward-looking, superstition-ridden society; for others, it looks suspiciously like an invasion.

Table of Contents:

• Mementoes - (2013) - short fiction
• likeMe - (2010) - short story
• War 3.01 - (2012) - short story
• Sussed - (2010) - short story
• Rewrites - (2016) - short fiction
• Imago - (2011) - short fiction
• A Flicker in the Deep - short fiction
• A Decent Man - short fiction

Project Kon-tiki, the world's first extra-solar colony expedition, is just weeks away from departure, and tension is mounting at Lakenheath Base. Psychologist Kat Manning is one of the eighteen specialist whose clone will be sent to the stars, and her job is to work with the original specialists, the 'left behind', to monitor and support them through their dislocation... But when Kat is kidnapped by the Allianz, a faction opposed to the colonisation program, more than just her safety is at stake. The entire mission is in jeopardy.

Humankind has at last sent a ship to the stars, leaving an Earth ravaged by environmental disaster and torn apart by competing sectarian interests.

Kat Manning is one of eighteen specialists aboard the starship Kon-Tiki, clones whose various areas of expertise will be crucial in the months and years ahead as they forge a new life on a strange alien world.

But what Kat finds on Newhaven is nothing she could have planned for, and every bit as surprising and challenging as the issues she left behind on Earth: mysterious aliens, political in-fighting, and someone willing to go to any lengths to keep a deadly secret.

On the colony world of Newhaven, biologist Travis Denholme has refined the drug by which the planet's alien species achieve telepathic contact. He has the means of bringing telepathy to the human race, and faces the dilemma of whether to make his discovery public knowledge - and risk changing everything. But before he and psychiatrist Kat Manning can decide on a way forward, an assassin attempts to kill them. As they flee for their lives, they must find out not only why they are being targeted by a ruthless killer, but why someone is trying to eradicate the planet's largest lifeform, the geosaurs.

In the concluding novella of the Kon-Tiki Quartet the action moves from the colony world of Newhaven back to Earth. Two hundred and fifty years have passed since Kon-Tiki I set off for the stars, and Earth is a very different place. The ravages of climate change have taken their toll, and humankind's depleted population struggles to survive at primitive, subsistence levels, with the majority ruled over by a desperate elite who cling to power by utilising old and failing technology.

But all this is about to change when returnees bring with them the means of restoring equality to the human race - though there are some who will stop at nothing, including murder, to maintain the status quo.