Search Worlds Without End

Nebula Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared in the anthology Epoch (1975), edited by Roger Elwood and Robert Silverberg. It is included in the collections Blooded on Arachne (1982) and The Door Gunner and Other Perilous Flights of Fancy: A Michael Bishop Retrospective (2012).

Table of Contents:

• Preface - (1982) - essay
• Among the Hominids at Olduvai - (1978) - poem
• Blooded on Arachne - (1975) - novelette
• Cathadonian Odyssey - (1974) - shortstory
• Effigies - (1978) - novelette
• The House of Compassionate Sharers - (1977) - novelette
• In Chinistrex Fortronza the People Are Machines or, Hoom and the Homunculus - (1976) - shortstory
• Leaps of Faith - (1977) - shortstory
• On the Street of the Serpents or, The Assassination of Chairman Mao, as Effected by the Author in Seville, Spain, in the Spring of 1992, a Year of No Certain Historicity - (1974) - novelette
• Piñon Fall - (1970) - shortstory
• Rogue Tomato - (1975) - shortstory
• Spacemen and Gypsies - (1971) - shortstory
• The White Otters of Childhood - (1973) - novella
• For the Lady of a Physicist - (1978) - poem

Originally published in 1990, this is among the vanguard of the "cyberpunk" novels, hailed by The Boston Globe as a "cyberpunk classic." Carly Nolan, a fast-track young lawyer conducting trials at lightning speed in telespace, is suddenly plagued by terrifying "bug" in her telelink. In her search for a cure, she becomes the protege of a corrupt older attorney whose own career is spiraling out of control and the patient of Pr. Spinner, a robot therapist who covets the metaprogram of life. Fast and fun, ARACHNE explores what it means to be a sentient lifeform.

Carly Quester was once a professional telelinker with a powerful and corrupt mediation firm. Now she lives as an outlaw among the underground in San Francisco, wanted by the authorities for dubious crimes against Data Control. But with a new assignment from a mysterious sengine--and the help of a standalone AI entity, Pr. Spinner--she seeks the fast-track back into public telespace and the Prime Time.

Her assignment, however, comes with sticky strings attached. For it has made Carly the target of a ruthless mercenary ultra, the love obsession of the young shaman of a savage urban tribe--and a possible pawn of the Silicon Supremacists plotting no less than the annihilation of humankind.

Cyberweb is the sequel to Lisa Mason's classic cyberpunk, Arachne.