Search Worlds Without End

The Colony left Earth to find their utopia--a home on a new planet where their leader could fully explore the colonists' genetic potential, unfettered by their homeworld's restrictions. They settled a new paradise, and have been evolving and adapting for centuries.

Earth has other plans.

The original humans have been tracking their descendants across the stars, bent on their annihilation. They won't stop until the new humans have been destroyed, their experimentation wiped out of the human gene pool.

Can't anyone let go of a grudge anymore?

This short story originally appeared in the anthology 2084 (2017), edited by George Sandison. It can also be found in the anthology The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Twelve (2018), edited by Jonathan Strahan.

BSFA nominated novella.

A tale of human colonisation, of struggle and impossible choices.

Neil Hanson answers a call to return to Reith, a colony world he helped to establish many, many years ago and never intended to see again; a world haunted by painful memories and now threatened by a secret from his past which even he didn't know was there. Hanson is faced with an impossible challenge and seems destined to be either the young world's saviour... or its destroyer.

In a Europe fractured by a flu pandemic and crippled by economic collapse, the continent has fractured into a hundred tiny principalities of ever-shifting loyalties, borders and covert operations.

For Carey Tews, a former operative with Les Coureurs des Bois -- a clandestine organisation of high-risk smugglers -- Europe and the coureurs are in her past. Her legend in Hungary is blown six way from Sunday, and even if she could go back to working in Europe, she wouldn't. That is until an old friend and lover is declared dead in mysterious circumstances.

What she doesn't know is that the investigation will take her to places she couldn't even imagine.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - essay
• The Fortunate Isles - short fiction
• Sugar Engines - short fiction
• Dali's Clocks - short fiction
• Sic Transit Gloria Mundi - short fiction
• All the News, All the Time, from Everywhere - (2003) - short story
• The Incredible Exploding Man - (2011) - short fiction

For Adam Hardy and his small Berkshire community, hardship is all they've ever known. For almost a century after the coming of The Sisters, the survivors of rainswept England have huddled in their tiny communities, scavenging the ruins of the old world. Now, finally, the Long Autumn is coming to an end, and society of a kind is starting to rebuild.

But for how long? A new tyrant, Frank Pendennis, has risen in the east, while rumours of something even worse are coming from the north.

The struggle to inherit the world is just beginning...

After the war in the Parish, Adam is looking forward to a period of peace, but his superiors have other ideas. There are rumours from Oxford and the Cotswolds that Father John - who once almost overthrew Plymouth - is building an army, and someone has to go and investigate.

Arriving in Oxford, Adam is surprised to find a thriving city with a healthy populace and technology not seen since before the fall of The Sisters. He also finds it patrolled by the descendants of the Thames Valley Police, among them Detective Inspector Leonie Mellow.

However, it doesn't not take long for dark events to concern Adam. Murders, paint-splashed graffiti on walls, people going missing - and he can't help but wonder if the past is following him.

Award-winning author Dave Hutchinson delivers one of his finest tales yet. A story that starts out firmly in the mundane world we know but slides steadily into the bizarre and unsettling.

Are there really refugees from 'elsewhere' living among us? If so, what cataclysmic event are they fleeing from? When a high speed car chase leads Police Sergeant Frank Grant to Dronfield Farm, he finds himself the focus of unwanted attention from Internal Affairs and is faced with the prospect of things being unearthed that he would far rather stayed buried.

Rudi is a cook in a Kraków restaurant, but when his boss asks Rudi to help a cousin escape from the country he's trapped in, a new career - part spy, part people-smuggler - begins. Following multiple economic crises and a devastating flu pandemic, Europe has fractured into countless tiny nations, duchies, polities and republics. Recruited by the shadowy organisation Les Coureurs des Bois, Rudi is schooled in espionage, but when a training mission to The Line, a sovereign nation consisting of a trans-Europe railway line, goes wrong, he is arrested and beaten, and Coureur Central must attempt a rescue.

With so many nations to work in, and identities to assume, Rudi is kept busy travelling across Europe. But when he is sent to smuggle someone out of Berlin and finds a severed head inside a locker instead, a conspiracy begins to wind itself around him. With kidnapping, double-crosses and a map that constantly re-draws itself, Europe in Autumn is a science fiction thriller like no other.

Europe is crumbling. The Xian Flu pandemic and ongoing economic crises have fractured the European Union, the borderless Continent of the Schengen Agreement is a distant memory, and new nations are springing up everywhere, some literally overnight. For an intelligence officer like Jim, it's a nightmare. Every week or so a friendly power spawns, a new and unknown national entity which may or may not be friendly to England's interests; it's hard to keep on top of it all. But things are about to get worse for Jim. A stabbing on a London bus pitches him into a world where his intelligence service is preparing for war with another universe, and a man has come who may hold the key to unlocking the mystery.

Union has come. The Community is now the largest nation in Europe; trains run there from as far afield as London and Prague. It is an era of unprecedented peace and prosperity. So what is the reason for a huge terrorist outrage? Why do the Community and Europe meet in secret, exchanging hostages? And who are Les Coureurs des Bois? Along with a motley crew of strays and mafiosi and sleeper agents, Rudi sets out to answer these questions -- only to discover that the truth lies both closer to home and farther away than anyone could possibly imagine.

Alice works at the Scottish Embassy in Tallinn in Estonia as a member of the Cultural Section. When two men bring her the jewelled skull of a Scottish saint her world gets turned on its head, and she becomes the latest recruit to Les Coureurs des Bois.

On a Greek island Benno is just one of hundreds of refuges dreaming of a new life in Continental Europe. After hatching an audacious escape plan, he may just get his dream, but at the price of serving some powerful mysterious new masters.

Rudi and Rupert, the seasoned Coureur and the scientist in exile from a pocket universe, discover that someone they thought long dead is very much still alive. Not only that, but the now defunct Line - the railway that once bisected the European continent - may be being used for nefarious means.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Solaris Rising: The New Solaris Book of Science Fiction (2011), edited by Ian Whates. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Ninth Annual Collection (2012), edited by Gardner Dozois. The story is included in the collection Sleeps with Angels (2015).

When Alex Dolan is hired by multibillionaire Stanislaw Clayton to write a book about the Sioux Crossing Supercollider, it seems like a dream job.

Then something goes wrong at the site. Very wrong.

After the incident, Dolan finds himself changed, and the only one who can stop the disaster from destroying us all.