Search Worlds Without End

This short story originally appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine, #14 November 2007. It can also be found in the anthologies Wilde Stories 2008: The Best of the Year's Gay Speculative Fiction, edited by Steve Berman, and Realms 2: The Second Year of Clarkesworld Magazine (2010), edited by Sean Wallace and Nick Mamatas.

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

In these stories Rebecca Ore explores the question of what it means to be alien: the unknown equation, the mysterious that can never be taken for granted, never be seen as "ordinary." She confronts us with visions of what it might mean to be the alien--the alien from outside and the alien within. The journey takes the reader to the heart of our oldest fears: from the terror of first contact to the power of the unknown, the very nature of intelligence to the exploration of what it means to be alive. And what we think of as most human might be the most alien of all.

Table of Contents:

• Alien Bootlegger - (1993) - novella
• The Tyrant That I Serve - (1986) - novelette
• Ice-Gouged Lakes, Glacier-Bound Times - (1988) - novelette
• Giant Flesh Holograms Keep My Baby's Eyes Warm - novelette
• Farming in Virginia - (1993) - shortstory
• Projectile Weapons - (1986) - novelette
• Aliens and the Artificial Other - (1993) - essay

Centuries Ago and Very Fast is a collection of linked stories by Rebecca Ore, author of Gaia's Toys, Time's Child, Slow Funeral, and other well-received novels.

The stories in this collection relate tales from the life of Vel, a gay immortal born in the Paleolithic who jumps time at will. We encounter him hunting mammoths, playing with reindeer tripping on hallucinogenic mushrooms, negotiating each successive wave of invaders to keep his family and its land intact, living as the minor god of a spring, witnessing the hanging of mollies in seventeenth-century London as well as the Stonewall riots in twentieth-century New York City. Vel has had more lovers than he can remember and is sometimes tempted to flirt with death. Centuries Ago and Very Fast offers fascinating, often erotic glimpses of the life of a man who has just about seen it all.

A tale of eco-terrorism set in a dystopian near future of gene-manipulation, medical nanotechnology, and environmental damage; an examination of the risks of overpopulation and uncontrolled technological expansion. This action adventure story is filled with theoretical political ideas. The main characters are a collection of misfits whose lives are linked together through a scientist's experiments in ecological reconstruction: a species of giant mantises that treat their anxiety stressed human companions with tranquilizing pheromones; and bioengineered wasps drawn to human anger and conflict in order to sting the offenders into a sleep state. Humans manipulate earth's creatures as if they were toys while the bio-altered creatures transform us.

In as gray, industro-technical future of protective shackles and slowed ideas, Jayne wants to be respectable and conform. But conformity means accepting a limited destiny and the hollow entertainments that are brutally enforced as "news". And to be respectable, she must gain back her virginity and give up an eye. Jayne's life is out of control-her reality has teeth and educational drugs and binding tools- and the only cures for her growing dissatisfaction with a bleak, repressive status quo seem to be madness or legal suicide. Or rebellion. Jayne cannot, will not, be rehabilitated. So instead, she will live her life between lines, illegally encouraging the otherness of the lowly, the renegades, the crazies, the virtual whores, as she dedicates herself to the dangerous cause of outlaw education. There are many pitfalls built into the road Jayne has chosen to walk: failure, betrayal, terror, arrest, cyberia. But her courage and determination could be the catalyst for a new future.

This short story originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, June 1997, and was reprinted in Lightspeed, October 2014.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

Bracken County, nestled in the Blue Ridge region of the American South, is like no other place on Earth. Behind its facade of small-town southern life, magic works and corrupts all it touches. Maude Fuller has been running from her witch destiny for a long time. Now Maude's grandmother is dying and she must go home--and she'll try anything to save granny's soul.

In the not-too-distant future, 2067, human cloning is a part of everyday life. But it is a bizarre form of cloning; not actually the direct copying of a humans, but rather the construction of custom-made reproductions of humans using animal DNA. The CIA uses these so-called "chimeras" for various undercover operations, and one of their technicians, Simon Boyle, has a sideline making illegal copies: chimeras based on famous criminals, for rent. His Billy the Kid, a creation unable to comprehend or sometimes even recognize the sorts of things that didn't exist before the 1880s, is quite popular for a night of historically convincing passion with rich women, particularly the part where Boyle (as sheriff Pat Garrett) guns him down. As the story progresses, Billy the Kid starts remembering things from his previous lives. One of Boyle's clients sets Billy loose into the mean streets of the 21st century, where he struggles to seize control of the myths in his ROM.

Time and Robbery features the protagonist of Ore's Centuries Ago and Very Fast, Vel, a gay immortal born in Paleolithic who jumps time at will. Unless Vel can help out his younger self, Vel's tribe's descendants--a big chunk of the 21st-century British population--will be eliminated from the timeline. Present-day Vel, though, has problems of his own, so he takes a chance and outs himself (and his talented teen-aged daughter Quince) to Joe Tavistock, a subcontractor on the weak end of the plausible deniability chain dangling off British intelligence, making it Joe's problem. Joe's superiors are dubious, and Joe doesn't know who to trust. The stakes are high not just for Vel, but for everyone involved.

Earth, 2308. Multiple pandemic plagues have ravaged the earth beyond recognition. Working desperately, the Philadelphia National Archives uses a mysterious time machine to bring key members of the past into the future, to save humanity from destroying itself.

Pulled from Renaissance Italy, former peasant Benedetta brings a friendship with master artist Leonardo da Vinci... and an unprecedented ability to change destiny, aided by her new partner, the Viking Ivar. But it is not easy to reconcile the past and the present, and the time refugees have their own plans for their new world.

Weaving together time travel, quantum mechanics, Templars, and outlaws, acclaimed author Rebecca Ore delivers a powerful tale of intrigue and possibility, and the fight to be free.

In Franklin County, when times get tough, people often to turn to bootlegging. But that's a perilous way to make a living, since bootlegging is both illegal and tightly regulated by distributors like Dennis DeSpain. So when the mysterious and scary alien who calls himself "Turk" openly sets up as an independent operator, flouting both the law and the distributors, all hell breaks loose. In it up to their necks and pursuing their own agendas are: ex-activist Lilly, the alien's lawyer; Berenice, an aging '60s radical with a past; Orris, DeSpain's smart, ambitious wife who believes in doing whatever it takes to achieve the objective; and DeSpain's ex-lover Marie, a chemical-engineering student who loves working with machines and whose grandmother was a midwife, bootlegger in the Forties, and notorious for having killed a man.

This novella originally appeared in the collection Alien Bootlegger and Other Stories (1993). It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Eleventh Annual Collection (1994), edited by Gardner Dozois.

Living on a chicken farm in backwater America, forced to help his older brother run an illegal drug operation, Tom was going nowhere fast. Then an extraterrestial ship crashed on his farm, and he managed to save one alien from the wreck - Mica, a cadet of the multi-species Federation.

Communicating largely through pictures, the two form an odd friendship and Tom decides to become a Federation cadet -- a test case to see if humans could ever be considered for membership. As the lone human among the alien race, Tom's survival was not assured. And if he fell prey to fear and prejudice, Earth would be condemned to eternal quarantine.

Plucked from Appalachian poverty by the Interstellar Federation of Sapients, trained as a diplomatic cadet on their artificial planet Karst, Tom Red-Clay has grown up in the galaxy. Now, in the stunning sequel to BECOMING ALIEN, Tom must return to Earth on a secret mission for the Federation. His marching orders: "Three goals, two obligatory, one optional: research japan, go to dinner with two humans, find a wife."

Set down in Berkeley, California, a world indeed no less strange to him than Karst, Tom must decipher the intrigues of humans and aliens alike - with the fate of Earth itself riding on his every move.

After being abducted from rural Virginia by aliens, Tom Red-Clay is returned to Earth and given the task of convincing his fellow humans to join the galaxy-spanning Federation of Sapients.