Search Worlds Without End

Reporter Spencer Finch is embroiled in the hunt for a missing book, encountering along the way cat burglars and mobsters, hackers and monks. At the same time, he's trying to make sense of the legacy left him by his late grandfather, a chest of what appear to be magazines from the golden age of pulp fiction, and even earlier.

Following his nose, Finch gradually uncovers a mystery involving a lost Greek play, secret societies, generations of masked vigilantes... and an entire secret history of mankind.

This tremendous modern fantasy is like The Da Vinci Code rewritten by the Coen Brothers. Already critically acclaimed worldwide for both his SF and fantasy series, Chris Roberson is at the very height of his powers. A lost classic, originally self-published by Chris as Voices of Thunder back in 2001, this revised, definitive edition, from the author's preferred text, is published for the mass-market for the very first time.

This novelette originally appeared in the anthology Edison's Frankenstein (Postscripts #20/21) (2009), edited by Nick Gevers and Peter Crowther. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Seventh Annual Collection (2010), edited by Gardner Dozois, Year's Best SF 15 (2010), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Kramer, and The Mammoth Book of Steampunk (2012), edited by Sean Wallace.

Humankind is spread across three thousand light years in a myriad of worlds and habitats known as the Human Entelechy. Linked by a network of wormholes with Earth at its center, it is the world Captain RJ Stone awakens to after a twelve-thousand-year cryogenic suspension.

Stone soon finds himself commanding the maiden voyage of the first spacecraft to break the light speed barrier: the FTL Further. In search of extraterrestrial intelligence, the landing party explores a distant pulsar only to be taken prisoner by the bloodthirsty Iron Mass, a religious sect exiled from the Entelechy millennia before. Now Stone and his crew must escape while they try to solve the riddle of the planet's network of stone towers that may be proof of the intelligence they've come to find.

The first in critically acclaimed author Chris Roberson's scintillating new series, Further: Beyond the Threshold is a fascinating ride to the farthest reaches of the imagination.

When Roxanne Bonaventure is eleven years old, a dying woman gives her a gift that changes her life utterly. With the strange device called the 'Sofia', she is granted the ability to travel anywhere in space and time, not only through times that were and will be, but also through the worlds that could have been and might someday be.

Paragaea: A Planetary Romance is the story of Akilina "Leena" Chirikov, who shortly after launching from Star Town in the Soviet Union, finds herself thrown into another dimension, a world of strange science and ancient mystery. There she meets another time-lost person from Earth, Lieutenant Hieronymus Bonaventure of the Royal Navy--who left home to fight the forces of Napoleon and never returned--and his companion, Balam--outlaw prince of the jaguar men. Bonaventure is interested only in adventure and amusement, while Balam only wants distraction until the day he can reclaim his throne. Having little better to do, they agree to help Chirikov find a way home.

In the tradition of the planetary romances of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Leigh Brackett, Paragaea is in fact a "hard" science fiction adventure, grounded in the latest thinking in the fields of theoretical physics, artificial intelligence, genetics, and more. There is a rigorously rational explanation behind all of the unearthly elements, with most of the "magic" the protagonist encounters being the products of a forgotten, transhuman, post-singularity culture that has long since disappeared. Chirikov, a strictly rational Soviet cosmonaut, interprets these as best she can, using the framework of early 1960s science. Being a dutiful Soviet, she wants only to return home to Earth, to inform her superiors about what she has discovered. But she soon finds herself developing ties to her companion Bonaventure that make her wonder whether she really wants to go home at all.

1808. While Europe burns and the Napoleonic Wars set the world aflame, the HMS Fortitude patrols the sea lanes of the South Pacific, harrying enemies of the British Crown. The Fortitude's captain sets his sights on a Spanish galleon weighted down with a fortune in gold and spices, but Lieutenant Hieronymus Bonaventure thinks the prize not worth the risk.

In the midst of Battle the ships are driven apart by storms and far into unknown seas. The galleon and her treasure are lost in the tempest and soon Bonaventure and the rest of the Fortitude's crew find themselves aground on an island in uncharted waters, their ship badly damaged. Whilst they struggle to rebuild their vessel an encounter with the island's natives leads to a discovery of a dark and terrible secret that lurks behind the island's veneer of beauty...

At the eve of the new millennium, teenager Alice Fell is alone on the streets of a strange city, friendless and without a pound to her name. She is not sure whether she's losing her mind, or whether she is called by inescapable visions to some special destiny. Along with a strange man named Stillman Waters, a retired occultist and spy - or so he claims - she finds herself pursued by strange creatures, and driven to steal the priceless "vanishing gem" that may contain the answers to the mysteries that plague her.

A century earlier, consulting detective Sandford Blank, accompanied by his companion Roxanne Bonaventure, is called upon to solve a string of brutal murders on the eve of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee. The police believe that Jack the Ripper is back on the streets, but Blank believes that this is a new killer, one whose motive is not violence or mayhem, but the discovery of the Holy Grail itself. And what of the corpse-white Huntsman and his unearthly hounds, who stalks the gaslit streets of London?

And in the sixth century, Galaad, a young man driven by strange dreams of a lady in white and a tower of glass, travels to the court of the high king Artor in Londinium, abandoned stronghold of the Roman Empire in Britain. With Galaad's bizarre dreams as their only guide, Artor and his loyal captains journey west to the Summerlands, there to face a threat that could spell the end of the new-forged kingdom of Britain.

These three adventures--Dark Ages fantasy, gaslit mystery, and modern-day jewel heist--alternate until the barriers between the different times begin to break down, and our heroes confront the secrets that connect the Grail, the Glass Tower, and the vanishing gem. And lurking behind it all, the entity known only as Omega.

This short story originally appeared in Postscripts, Autumn 2005, and was reprinted in Clarkesworld Magazine, #94 July 2014. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Third Annual Collection (2006), edited by Gardner Dozois.

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

Sidewise Award winning and World Fantasy Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in the anthology Live Without a Net (2003), edited by Lou Anders. The story can also be found in the anthologies The Mammoth Book of Alternate Histories (2010), edited by Ian Watson and Ian Whates, and Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded (2010), edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer.

Read the full story for free at the author's website.

This short story orignally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, July 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 The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Two (2008), edited by Jonathan Strahan.

Read the full story for free at the author's website.

In an alternate history dominated by Imperial China, the forces of the Dragon Throne control most of the Earth, and now turn their attentions to the heavens. In the tradition of its great fifteenth century admiral, Zheng He, the Chinese Empire constructs a massive Treasure Fleet. But unlike the dragon boats which coursed across terrestrial seas, the ships of this new armada are ceramic and steel, fuelled by nuclear reactors and spun against tethered counterweights to provide a semblance of gravity for their crews. Rather than sailing to open new trade routes to foreign shores, this new fleet sails interplanetary gulfs, to the red planet fourth from the sun, in search of mineral wealth and territorial claims.

The least of the ships of the Treasure Fleet is Night Shining White, one of many water tenders. It will be the last to reach the red planet, and the first to return, its hold emptied of precious water and filled with mineral samples and ores to be milled and studied back on Earth. The ship's captain, a eunuch who has sacrificed much in the service of his emperor, has never ventured beyond the bounds of Earth before, much less in command of a ship and her crew.

Before it reaches its destination, Night Shining White's reactor coolant system fails, and the crew is faced with the prospect of a quick death by runaway nuclear meltdown, or a slow painful demise by radiation poisoning. Their only hope of salvation is the captain, but will his inexperience only ensure their demise?

This novella can also be found in the anthology Best Short Novels: 2007, edited by Jonathan Strahan.

A disgraced naval captain and a commando who knows secrets he should never have learned are picked to lead a suicide mission, piloting a salvaged Mexica spacecraft to Xolotl, the asteroid stronghold of their enemies, armed with enough explosives to reduce the Mexica base to dust. But when they arrive to find dozens of Chinese prisoners destined to be used as human sacrifices, their suicide mission suddenly becomes a rescue operation.

Mars is controlled by the Chinese, who call their civilization the Celestial Empire. But for teenagers Gamine and Huang, it is anything but heavenly. Gamine was taken off the street by an aristocrat, schooled as a fine young lady--then abandoned at her patron's whim and forced to make her living as a grifter. Huang's army career is cut short by a bandit ambush. When the two meet, Gamine --"Iron Jaw"--is the leader of a sham religious movement, and Huang, or "Hummingbird," is the bandits' chief tactician. They join forces to bring down the corrupt government that has determined their lives.

Iron Jaw and Hummingbird offers a planet's worth of adventure!

'Three Unbroken' is the next epic novel in the Celestial Empire sequence and details the explosive war between the Chinese and Aztec empires as they battle for control of the red planet, Fire Star.

Izzie Lefevre was the newest investigator for the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit when she first came to Recondito, a coastal city that's been shrouded in mystery and legend for centuries. Local law enforcement had requested the Bureau's assistance in hunting a sword-wielding serial killer who'd left a dozen mutilated bodies in his wake. Patrick Tevake was a local homicide detective assigned to the taskforce, and together he and Izzie managed to track down and stop the killer before he claimed another victim.

Five years later, Izzie and Patrick remain haunted by what the killer said before he fell in a hail of gunfire. Izzie's ancestors were "mambos," voodoo priestesses who claimed to communicate with the dead and protect the faithful from evil spirits. Patrick's Polynesian great uncle told stories of Recondito's supernatural menaces that lurk in flame and shadow. The killer's last words have brought up a past both Izzie and Patrick thought they'd long since left behind, and neither has been able to shake the feeling that their case was never completely solved.

So when Patrick, now working with the vice squad to investigate a dangerous new street drug, discovers a connection between the street drug and the serial killer's victims, he realizes that their instincts were right: the threat is far from over. Reunited again, he and Izzie will discover that Recondito is a city of dark secrets, and their own pasts may be the key to unlocking them.

After reopening a long-closed murder investigation, FBI agent Izzie Lefevre and police detective Patrick Tevake have uncovered a bizarre connection between a dangerous new drug on the streets of Recondito, California, and a series of mass murders and serial killings carried out around the coastal city going back at least one hundred years.

Their discovery has unlocked a secret history of mystics and madmen who believed that Recondito is a special place, where it was possible to make contact with beings from other planes of existence, beings best described as demons. For generations there have been those who secretly dedicated themselves to protecting humanity against threats from beyond our world, but Izzie and Patrick realize that their investigation not only eliminated the last remaining defender, but they are now the only ones standing in the way of a full scale invasion.

It's been said that for any event, there are an infinite number of possible outcomes. Our choices determine which outcome will follow, and therefore all possibilities that could happen do happen across countless alternate realities. In these divergent realms, known history is bent, like white light through a prism -- broken into a boundless spectrum of what-might-have-beens. But in those myriad universes, what might have been... is what actually happened.

THE CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT: In a continuum where Spock died during childhood, an Andorian named Thelin became Captain Kirk's stalwart friend and first officer. But at the moment of Khan's final defeat, history takes an even stranger turn, and the emerging potential of Project Genesis is revealed as the galaxy's greatest hope... and its most ominous threat.

A GUTTED WORLD: Terrorist Kira Nerys -- from a Bajor that was never liberated -- may hold the key to winning a war that has engulfed half the galaxy. But with the Romulans and the Klingons at each other's throats, and the Federation pulled into the conflict, even victory may not bring salvation.

BRAVE NEW WORLD: Dr. Noonien Soong's dream has been realized: androids are now woven inextricably into the fabric of the Federation, revolutionizing Starfleet and transforming the quality of humanoid life. But when Soong's long-missing breakthrough creation, Data, mysteriously resurfaces, civilization reaches a crossroads that could lead to a bright new future, or to ruin.