Search Worlds Without End

It began like any other day....

Until Belinda Smith was abruptly snatched from the comforting surroundings of university life by her mysterious guardian and imprisoned in the solitary confines of Gorwing Keep. Suddenly, she was the reluctant heiress to her planets' largest fortune---and the unwilling bride-to-be of an alien prince.

But fate had still more surprises in store for the young woman. And soon Belinda, her unwanted fiancee, and a battered old robot would find themselves fleeing across the galaxy in search of a new life. Their destination: a real-life fountain of youth, found in only one spot in the entire universe... The fabled planet Earth... and its legendary resurrection station.

BORDER POST OF ETERNITY

Robotic minds made interstellar travel possible, but human minds still controlled the destination and purpose of such flight. Conflict develops only when a programmed brain cannot evaluate beyond what is visible and substantial, whereas the human mind is capable of infinite imagination - including that which is unreal.

Such was the problem at the singularity in space in which the ALTAIR STAR and a hundred other vessels had come to grief. At that spot, natiral laws seem subverted - and some other universe's rules impinged.

For Buchanan, the station meant a chance to observe and maybe rescue his lost vessel. For the robotic navigators of oncoming spaceships, the meaning was different. And at Singularity Station the only inevitable was conflict.

When an ultra-rich space tourist visits the orbiting International Space Station, NASA expects a $100 million win-win: his visit will bring in much needed funding and publicity. But the tourist venture turns into a scheme of terror. Together with an extremist cosmonaut, the tourist slaughters all the astronauts on board the million-pound ISS--and prepares to crash it into New York City at 17,500 miles an hour, causing more devastation than a hundred atomic bombs. In doing so, they hope to annihilate the world's financial system.

All that stands between them and their deadly goal is the lone survivor aboard the ISS, Kimberly Hasid-Robinson, a newly divorced astronaut who has barricaded herself in a secure area.

The final frontier ain't so final in these 12 tales of space exploration and adventure: each a timeless yarn told around the warm glow of a nuclear reactor just before it goes supernova. There's a story for everyone who's ever dreamed of traveling the stars.

From the lone stranger who flies into town to help a widow and her daughter to the alien rancher trying to pose as human, they are familiar, yet with completely new twists. Take the pair of mercenaries who sign on to stop a mining camp insurrection only to discover they might be on the wrong side of evolution, or the prospector who finds the strike of a lifetime but ends up stranded on a barren moon without hope of rescue. And if that's not enough to catch your fancy, then how about a cloned Doc Holliday making his way in a future where both sickness and gambling are ancient history?

Table of Contents:

• ix - Foreword: Is Space Actually the Final Frontier? - essay by David Boop
• 1 - Greenhorn - short story by Elizabeth Moon
• 19 - The Penultimate Stand of Pina Gracchi - novelette by Michael F. Haspil
• 43 - Showdown on Big Rock 27 - novelette by Gini Koch
• 67 - Hydration - short story by Alan Dean Foster
• 77 - Winner Takes All - short story by Alex Shvartsman
• 97 - Last Stand at Europa Station A - short story by David Boop
• 121 - Riders of the Endless Void - short story by J. R. Martin and Cat Rambo
• 139 - Seeds - short story by Patrick J. Swenson
• 155 - Riding the Storm Out - short story by Martin L. Shoemaker
• 177 - Incident at Raven's Rift - short story by Alastair Mayer
• 199 - Claim Jumped - short story by Jane Lindskold
• 221 - Doc Holiday 2.0 - novelette by Wil McCarthy

Ben Bova sets forth his vision of a future where conflicting military forces work together to colonize the stars. Driven by the desire to preserve world peace and eliminate economic need, these future settlers and soldiers represent the best of mankind.

Table of Contents:

• Foreword (Battle Station) - essay
• Battle Station - novella
• Space Weapons - (1985) - essay
• Nuclear Autumn - (1985) - shortstory
• Freedom from Fear - (1984) - essay
• Béisbol - (1985) - shortstory
• The Jefferson Orbit - (1985) - essay
• Isolation Area - (1984) - novelette
• Space Station - (1985) - essay
• Primary - (1985) - shortstory
• MHD - (1987) - essay
• Born Again - (1984) - shortstory
• Laser Propulsion - (1984) - essay
• The Sightseers - (1973) - shortstory
• Telefuture - (1985) - essay
• Foeman - (1969) - novella
• Symbolism in Science Fiction - (1984) - essay

In this Martian city, each stop along the monorail has a purpose behind its namesake. However, none are quite like the Station of the Twelfth, and if you decide to visit, you'll be sure to learn why.

Read the full story for free at Tor Reactor.

His journey began with the blast of a shotgun aimed at a gleaming nimbus of light. The tightening of his finger on the trigger was almost accidental; his punishment was almost merciful. But his journey has just begun, and when it is over Paul Eyre will no longer be human....

A collection of connected stories:

"The Two-Edged Gift" (1974)

"The Star-Touched" (1974)

"The Evolution of Paul Eyre" (1974)

"Passing On" (1975)

"Osiris on Crutches" (1976)

World Fantasy and Rhysling Award winning poem. It originally appeared in the anthology Invitation to Camelot (1988), edited by Parke Godwin. The poem can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Fantasy: Second Annual Collection (1988), edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, Nebula Awards 25 (1991), edited by Michael Bishop, and Christmas Stars (1992), edited by David G. Hartwell. It is included in the collection Heat of Fusion and Other Stories (2004).

Aeons ago, a super-scientific culture known as 'Angels' had left incomprehensible relics all over the galaxy. Among these phenomena were the Stations, whereby human spacecraft could jump instantly from one part of the galaxy to another. And from them the brilliant Angel technology could be explored and exploited. One of these stations orbits the planet Kaspar, where the only other known sentient species outside Earth has been meticulously allowed to continue evolving in its own world of primitive ignorance. But suddenly Kaspar's mysterious 'Citadel' has become the vital key to repelling the fast-approaching threat. At what cost, though, to its native inhabitants...and to the human residents of the orbiting Angel station?

To face the future, sometimes you need a little help from the past... An aging railway man facing the closure of his station and the sorrows of his past meets a mysterious young girl who brings an unexpected warmth to the old man's cold and empty days. A man who has seen the rough side of life finds comfort in the memory of a wife he never knew. A husband and wife struggle to recapture the love they once shared by visiting the movie theater where they met as children. And more... In these eight short stories by award-winning author Jiro Asada, flawed characters haunted by loss find love, reconciliation and redemption in the most unexpected places.

Contents:

• The Stationmaster (original title: Poppoya)
• Love Letter (original title: Rabu reta)
• Devil (original title: Akuma)
• In Tsunohazu (original title: Tsunohazu nite)
• Kyara (original title: Kyara)
• The Festival of Lanterns (original title: Urabon'e)
• No-Good Santa (original title: Rokudenashi no santa)
• Invitation from the Orion Cinema (original title: Orion-za kara no shotaijo)

Space exploration can be lonely and isolating.

Psychologist Dr Ophelia Bray has dedicated her life to the study and prevention of ERS -- a space-based condition most famous for a case that resulted in the brutal murders of twenty-nine people. When she's assigned to a small exploration crew, she's eager to make a difference. But as they begin to establish residency on an abandoned planet, it becomes clear that crew is hiding something.

While Ophelia focuses on her new role, her crewmates are far more interested in investigating the eerie, ancient planet and unraveling the mystery behind the previous colonizer's hasty departure than opening up to her.

That is, until their pilot is discovered gruesomely murdered. Is this Ophelia's worst nightmare starting -- a wave of violence and mental deterioration from ERS? Or is it something more sinister?

Terrified that history will repeat itself, Ophelia and the crew must work together to figure out what's happening. But trust is hard to come by... and the crew isn't the only one keeping secrets.

Persephone Station, a seemingly backwater planet that has largely been ignored by the United Republic of Worlds becomes the focus for the Serrao-Orlov Corporation as the planet has a few secrets the corporation tenaciously wants to exploit.

Rosie - owner of Monk's Bar, in the corporate town of West Brynner, caters to wannabe criminals and rich Earther tourists, of a sort, at the front bar. However, exactly two types of people drank at Monk's back bar: members of a rather exclusive criminal class and those who sought to employ them.

Angel - ex-marine and head of a semi-organized band of beneficent criminals, wayward assassins, and washed up mercenaries with a penchant for doing the honorable thing is asked to perform a job for Rosie. What this job reveals will effect Persephone and put Angel and her squad up against an army. Despite the odds, they are rearing for a fight with the Serrao-Orlov Corporation. For Angel, she knows that once honor is lost, there is no regaining it. That doesn't mean she can't damned well try.

An audacious, darkly glittering novel about art, fame, and ambition set in the eerie days of civilization's collapse, from the author of three highly-acclaimed previous novels.

One snowy night a famous Hollywood actor slumps over and dies onstage during a production of King Lear. Hours later, the world as we know it begins to dissolve. Moving back and forth in time—from the actor's early days as a film star to fifteen years in the future, when a theater troupe known as The Travelling Symphony roams the wasteland of what remains—this suspenseful, elegiac, spellbinding novel charts the strange twists of fate that connect five people: the actor, the man who tried to save him, the actor's first wife, his oldest friend, and a young actress with the Traveling Symphony, caught in the crosshairs of a dangerous self-proclaimed prophet. Sometimes terrifying, sometimes tender, Station Eleven tells a story about the relationships that sustain us, the ephemeral nature of fame, and the beauty of the world as we know it.

On the first day of spring, a train derails, causing numerous deaths. Two months later, rumors spread of a ghost at Nishiyuigahama Station with the power to send others back in time to the day of terrible accident. The story attracts a woman who lost her fiancé, a man who lost his father, and a boy who lost his unrequited love. A chance to go back, to see those dear to them, seems almost too good to be true. What will they do now that they have it?

This novelette originally appeared in the anthology The Starry Rift: Tales of New Tomorrows (2008), edited by Jonathan Strahan. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2009, edited by Rich Horton, and By Blood We Live (2009), edited by John Joseph Adams. The story is included in the collection To Hold the Bridge (2015).

Listen to the full story for free at EscapePod.

Dr Laura Reynolds had it all. A job she loved. The respect of her peers. Student debt she was slowly chipping away at. And one day, she lost everything.

She saw the wrong thing - a colleague's mistake. And to escape, he framed her. To avoid prison, Laura reluctantly agrees to join a secretive research project in Antarctica, where she hopes to keep practicing medicine and someday get her life back. But soon after arriving, she realizes that things at this advanced facility aren't what they seem. And perhaps something strange is happening in the world outside.

Nineteen stories by nineteen authors, all based on one unforgettable image in a song by Leslie Fish: "Carmen Miranda's Ghost is Haunting Space Station Three". Stories range from horror to romance to satire to...just plain silly. This volume would be a cult classic, if only a fitting cult could be found.

Table of Contents:

• bp - Carmen Miranda's Ghost - (1985) - poem by Leslie Fish
• 1 - Provisional Solution - short story by Brenda W. Clough [as by B. W. Clough]
• 5 - Basket Case; or, The Grapes of Wraith - novelette by Bruce B. Barnett
• 33 - The Entertainer - short story by Eric Blackburn
• 46 - Carmen Miranda and the Maracas of Death - short story by Julia Ecklar
• 66 - Shadows on the Wall - short story by Ron Robinson
• 71 - Confessional Booths - short story by Susan Shwartz
• 88 - If Madam Likes You... - short story by Anne McCaffrey
• 104 - The Carmen Miranda Gambit - novelette by Lisa A. Barnett and Melissa Scott
• 145 - That Souse American Way - short story by Shariann Lewitt [as by S. N. Lewitt]
• 163 - Rolling Down the Floor - short story by Amanda Allen
• 171 - The Never-Ending Battle - short story by L. D. Woeltjen
• 183 - The Man Who Travelled in Rocketships - short story by Don Sakers
• 193 - Bertocci's Proof - short story by Leslie Fish
• 212 - Wings - short story by C. J. Cherryh
• 220 - In the Can - novelette by Esther M. Friesner [as by Esther Friesner]
• 247 - Tarawa Rising - short story by Don Sakers
• 266 - And Now the News: - short story by Anne G. DeMaio and Betsy Marks
• 283 - La Vita Nuova (The New Life) - short story by Brenda W. Clough [as by B. W. Clough]
• 293 - The Pigeon Sisters on Space Station Three - short story by Mary L. Mand
• 301 - Carmen Miranda's Ghost Is Haunting Space Station Three: Afterword - essay by Don Sakers
• 306 - Carmen Miranda's Ghost [sheet music] - poem by Leslie Fish

PRISONER'S BASE...

Hawksbill Station, in the gray and utterly barren Cambrian era, was the ideal prison enclave for an authoritarian government too civilized to execute men for subversion, and too cowardly to allow them freedom. A billion years of impassable time was sufficient insulation for even the most dangerous ideas. But this exile was a ticket to despair and madness, with death the only pardon...

Then a newcomer dropped form the one-way time transit device that had deposited them all here---a man who knew nothing of the world he had come from and found out too much of the world he was in...

The stranger bore a threat to the very existence of HAWKSBILL STATION.

Hugo and Nebula Award nominated novella. It originally appeared in Galaxy Magazine, August 1967. The story can also be found in the anthologies Best SF: 1967 (1968), edited by Harry Harrison and Brian W. Aldiss, World's Best Science Fiction: 1968, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr, and Criminal Justice Through Science Fiction (1977), edited by Martin Harry Greenberg, Joseph D. Olander. It is included in the collections The Reality Trip and Other Implausibilities (1972), The Best of Robert Silverberg (1976) and To the Dark Star: 1962-69 (2007). Is is half of Tor Double #26: Press Enter/Hawksbill Station (1990). The novella was eventually expanded to the full novel Hawksbill Station (1968).

Enoch Wallace survived the carnage of Gettysburg and lived through the rest of the Civil War to make it home to his parents' farm in south-west Wisconsin. But his mother was already dead and his father soon joined her in the tiny family cemetery. It was then that Enoch met the being he called Ulysses and the farm became a way station for space travellers. Now, nearly a hundred years later, the US government is taking an interest in the seemingly immortal Enoch, and the Galactic Council, which set up the way station is threatening to tear itself apart.

Nebula Award nominated novelette. It was originally published by Giganotosaurus, November 1, 2011. The story is also included in Nebula Awards Showcase 2013, edited by Catherine Asaro.

Read the full story for free at Giganotosaurus.

From author Michael Swanwick -- one of the most brilliantly assured and darkly inventive writers of contemporary fiction -- comes the Nebula Award-winning masterwork of radically altered realities and world-shattering seductions.

The "Jubilee Tides" will drown Miranda beneath the weight of her own oceans. But as the once-in-two centuries cataclysm approaches, an even greater catastrophe threatens this dark and dangerous planet of tale-spinners, conjurers, and shapechangers. For Gregorian has come, a genius renegade scientist and bush wizard. With magic and forbidden technology, he plans to remake the rotting dying world in his own evil image -- and to force whom or whatever remains on its diminishing surface toward a terrifying, astonishing confrontation with death and transcendence.

Was his spaceship haunted - or only booby-trapped?

This novel was expanded from a novella published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, July 1960. It is half on Ace Double D-479 (1960).

This novella was first published in Analog Science Fiction & Fact, July/August 2021.

Read the full story for free at Analog.

Published by Semiotext(e) in 2005, Mark von Schlegell's debut novel Venusia was hailed in the sci-fi and literary worlds as a "breathtaking excursion" and "heady kaleidoscopic trip," establishing him as an important practitioner of vanguard science fiction. Mercury Station, the second book in Von Schlegell's System Series, continues the journey into a dystopian literary future.

It is 2150. Eddard J. Ryan was born in a laboratory off Luna City, an orphan raised by the Black Rose Army, a radical post-Earth Irish revolutionary movement. But his first bombing went wrong and he's been stuck in a borstal on Mercury for decades. System Space has collapsed and most of human civilization with it, but Eddie Ryan and his fellow prisoners continue to suffer the remote-control domination of the borstal and its condescending central authority, the qompURE MERKUR, programmed to treat them as adolescents.

Yet things could be worse. With little human supervision, the qompURE can be fooled. There's food and whiskey, and best of all, the girl of Eddie Ryan's dreams, his long-time friend and comrade Koré McAllister, is in the same prison. When his old boss, rich and eccentric chrononaut Count Reginald Skaw shows up in orbit with an entire interstation cruiser at his disposal, there's even the possibility of escape....back in time.

Like Venusia, Mercury Station tells a compelling story, drawn through a labyrinth of future-history sci-fi, medieval hard fantasy, and cascading samplings of high and low culture. The book is a brilliant literary assault against the singularity of self and its imprisonment in Einsteinian spacetime.

When a member of the terraforming crew on the hostile surface of the planet Gehenna apparently commits suicide, special agent Victor Lewin finds that the evidence points instead to murder. A blend of mystery and psychological suspense against a vivid alien landscape, this first novel is suitable for large sf collections.

ORPHANS OF DEEP SPACE

They're outlaws now. Created to serve a function grown obsolete, haunted by the holographic ghost of their father, Ubu and Maria have lived their entire lives skating along the edge of extinction. Now they and their ship Runaway are in flight, both from the law and from a predatory clan of competitors.

But what they find in the depths of space isn't wealth, but a secret so startling that Ubu and Maria will need every last reserve of guile, cunning, and intelligence just to survive.

Nebula Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in Lightspeed, March 2016. The story can also be found in the anthology The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017, edited by John Joseph Adams and Charles Yu.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

To the Tombaugh Station

Was his spaceship haunted - or only booby-trapped?

Earthman, Go Home!

Published as an Ace Double book (1960), cover code D-479, two short novels. Cover art by Ed Emshwiller , Ed Valigursky. "To The Tombaugh Station" was first published in "The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction," July 1960. "Earthman, Go Home!" is part of Anderson's "Ensign Flandry" series, and was serialized in Fantastic Stories (December 1960, January 1961) under the title "A Plague of Masters."

This novella is also part of Flandry of Terra (Dominic Flandry #6) as "The Plague of Masters".

Empire of the Atom

Atomic War had destroyed the world. History and records had been lost; the few war-shocked people who were left could not even recall what had started the destruction. But even these desperate circumstances could not change the basic nature of man.

Out of the still-smoking ruins came one who was stronger and more ruthless than the rest. From his plans to rule the universe grew the seeds of the last great war of all, the one that would finally wipe man off the face of Earth.

Space Station # 1

The Space Station floated up out of the Big Dark. Lieutenant Corriston had come to see its marvels, but he soon found himself trapped in unexpected terrors.

The grim reality was that an unknown, unsuspected outer space power had usurped control of the artificial moon. A beautiful woman had disappeared; passengers were being fleeced and enslaved; and, using fantastic disguises, imposters from - SOMEWHERE - were using the station for their own mysterious ends.

When race survival teetered in the balance...

Captain Absolom Bracer, with an artificial brainpan and synthetic eyes. Astrogation officer Gene O'Gwynn, a lady with a plastic face. Weapons officer Akin Darby and Communications officer Miss Cyanta, both with assorted prosthetic parts.

These were the officers of the Iwo Jima, one of the two heavy battle-cruiser starships protecting the vast cumbersome Rudolph Cragston, a hospital ship returning to Earth with thousands of wounded in cold sleep.

These brutally injured officers had been restored to temporary, artificial life to do this job because no intact man or woman could be spared from the main conflict.

But then Breakaway Station, a vital link with Earth, was suddenly threatened..

The Beyond started with the Stations orbiting the stars nearest Earth. The Great Circle the interstellar freighters traveled was long, but not unmanageable, and the early Stations were emotionally and politically dependent on Mother Earth. The Earth Company which ran this immense operation reaped incalculable profits and influenced the affairs of nations.

Then came Pell, the first station centered around a newly discovered living planet. The discovery of Pell's World forever altered the power balance of the Beyond. Earth was no longer the anchor which kept this vast empire from coming adrift, the one living mote in a sterile universe.

But Pell was just the first living planet. Then came Cyteen, and later others, and a new and frighteningly different society grew in the farther reaches of space. The importance of Earth faded and the Company reaped ever smaller profits as the economic focus of space turned outward. But the powerful Earth Fleet was sitll a presence in the Beyond, and Pell Station was to become the last stronghold in a titanic struggle between the vast, dynamic forces of the rebel Union and those who defended Earth's last, desperate grasp for the stars.

Table of Contents:

• Prologue and Interludes - short fiction by Bill Fawcett
• 4 - Facing the Enemy - novelette by David Drake
• 27 - Trading Up - short story by Barbara Delaplace and Mike Resnick
• 38 - Goblin's Children - novelette by Christopher Stasheff
• 83 - The Eyes of Texas - short story by Shariann Lewitt
• 109 - Starlight - short story by Jody Lynn Nye
• 133 - Comrades - short story by S. M. Stirling
• 151 - Gung Ho - poem by Judith R. Conly
• 153 - Blind Spot - novelette by Steve Perry
• 180 - The Stand on Luminos - novelette by Robert Sheckley
• 211 - Killer Cure - short story by Diane Duane
• 231 - A Transmigration of Soul - novelette by Janet Morris

Table of Contents:

• Prologue and Interludes - short fiction by Bill Fawcett
• 3 - Deadfall - novelette by Scott MacMillan
• 32 - Hearing - novelette by Christopher Stasheff
• 65 - Charity - short story by Shariann Lewitt
• 85 - Medic - novelette by Mercedes Lackey and Mark Shepherd
• 117 - Taken to the Cleaners - short story by Peter Morwood
• 126 - Imperatives - poem by Judith R. Conly
• 128 - You Can't Make an Omelet - short story by Esther M. Friesner
• 148 - Joint Ventures - novelette by Don John Dugas
• 178 - The Handmaiden - short story by Diane Duane
• 197 - Shooting Star - short story by Jody Lynn Nye
• 216 - Battle Offering - novelette by Katherine Kurtz
• 242 - Failure Mode - novelette by David Drake

Jeff Vaughan, a world-weary telepath employed by the spaceport on Bengal Station, discovers a sinister cult that worships a mysterious alien god. The Church of the Adoration of the Chosen One uses drugs to commune with the ultimate - and murder to silence those who oppose their beliefs. Together with Indian cop Jimmy Chandra, Vaughan's investigations take him to the colony planet of Verkerk's World and the terrible secret of the extraterrestrial Vaith....

Meanwhile, in Thailand, street-girl Sukara dreams of being reunited with her long-lost sister on Bengal Station. She meets Osborne, a telepath posing as a businessman with his own secrets, who promises to take her away from her life of prostitution in Bangkok. They travel to Bengal Station, and there Sukara learns of her sister's fate, and unwittingly leads Osborne to his target - Jeff Vaughan. The story follows Vaughan as his mistrust of his fellow humans is overturned by his growing feelings for Thai street-girl Sukara, one of the few good people he's ever encountered in a life of reading cynical, jaded minds.

Science fiction meets crime noir, as Jeff Vaughan, jaded telepath, employed by the spaceport authorities on Bengal Station, discovers a sinister cult that worships a mysterious alien god. We follow Vaughan as he attempts to solve the murders and save himself from the psichopath out to kill him. This is Eric Brown's triumphant return to hard SF.

Working for a telepathic detective agency, Vaughan investigates a series of murders linked to the colony world of Mallory, and the slaughter of innocent aliens there by a colonial organization.

Having been sent to Canopus VII to find out what happened to a lost crew, Necropath Jeff Vaughan finds himself drawn into a deepening mystery not only as to the fate of the crew but also the intentions of his benefactor.

At the remote end of Mircea's Wisp, far out on the galaxy's Perseid Arm, is the Purple Rose System--containing the three stars Lorca, Sing and Syrene. Around Syrene swings the spectacular planet Cadwal, which the now defunct Naturalist Society of Earth long ago chartered to forever protect from exploitation. Cadwal is administered from Araminta Station--where young Glawen Clattuc wonders what the future may hold for him in the hierarchic, constrained society of Cadwal. His budding relationship with the lovely Sessily Veder ends with her mysterious disappearance- casting Glawen into a strange adventure, and the unraveling of a potent conspiracy.

Araminta Station is part 1 of 3 of The Cadwal Chronicles.
Cadwal is a planet of extraordinary beauty. To protect it, the "Naturalist Society" has set up a Charter which allows only limited settlement on the planet in order to enforce the laws of the Conservancy. These laws forbid extensive human habitations, mining and other exploitation activities. Only six "Agents" and their staff are allowed to reside permanently on the planet: their main function is to prevent other humans from establishing residence, although tourists are allowed in specially designed lodges, overlooking sites of natural beauty and interest.

A worldwide diaspora has left a quarter of a million people at the foot of a space station. Cultures collide in real life and virtual reality. The city is a weed, its growth left unchecked. Life is cheap and data is cheaper.

When Boris Chong returns to Tel Aviv from Mars, much has changed. Boris's ex-lover Miriam is raising a strangely familiar child who can tap into the data stream of a mind with the touch of a finger. His cousin Isobel is infatuated with a robotnik--a cyborg ex-Israeli soldier who might well be begging for parts. Even his old flame Carmel--a hunted data-vampire--has followed him back to a planet where she is forbidden to return.

Rising above all is Central Station, the interplanetary hub between all things: the constantly shifting Tel Aviv; a powerful virtual arena, and the space colonies where humanity has gone to escape the ravages of poverty and war. Everything is connected by the Others, powerful entities who, through the Conversation--a shifting, flowing stream of consciousness--are just the beginning of irrevocable change.

The city known as Neom is many things to many beings, human or otherwise. It is a tech wonderland for the rich and beautiful; an urban sprawl along the Red Sea; and a port of call between Earth and the stars.

In the desert, young orphan Elias has joined a caravan, hoping to earn his passage off-world. But the desert is full of mechanical artefacts, some unexplained and some unexploded. Recently, a wry, unnamed robot has unearthed one of the region's biggest mysteries: the vestiges of a golden man.

In Neom, childhood affection is rekindling between loyal shurta-officer Nasir and hardworking flower-seller Mariam. But Nasu, a deadly terrorartist, has come to the city with missing memories and unfinished business. Just one robot can change a city's destiny with a single rose--especially when that robot is in search of lost love.

Lavie Tidhar's (Unholy Land, The Escapement) newest lushly immersive novel, Neom, which includes a guide to the Central Station-verse, is at turns gritty, comedic, transportive, and fascinatingly plausible.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology The Lowest Heaven (2013), edited by Anne C. Perry and Jared Shurin. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-First Annual Collection (2014), edited by Gardner Dozois.

Read or listen to the full story for free at Escapepod.

This short story originally appeared in Interzone, #244 January-February 2013, and was reprinted in Clarkesworld Magazine, #102 March 2015. The story can also be found in the anthologies The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Eight (2014), edited by Jonathan Strahan, and The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-First Annual Collection (2014), edited by Gardner Dozois.

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

This novelette originally appeared in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, September 2013, and was reprinted in Clarkesworld, #130, July 2017. The story can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2014, edited by Rich Horton. The story was incorporated in the novel Central Station (2016).

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

This short story originally appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine, #62 November 2011. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Ninth Annual Collection (2012), edited by Gardner Dozois, The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2012, edited by Rich Horton, and Clarkesworld: Year Six (2014), edited by Neil Clarke and Sean Wallace. The story appears in slightly rewritten form in the novel Central Station (2016).

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Robots: The Recent A. I. (2012), edited by Roich Horton and Sean Wallace, and was reprinted in Lightspeed, November 2016. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2013, edited by Rich Horton, and The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirtieth Annual Collection (2013), edited by Gardner Dozois. The story is in a slightly edited form incorporated in the novel Central Station (2016).

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

This short story originally appeared in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, September 2014. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Second Annual Collection (2015), edited by Gardner Dozois. The story was later incorporated in the fixup novel Central Station (2016).

Award-winning author Simon Morden joins Gollancz with a stunning SF quest across a vast world that mirrors every London ever built.

Instead of fire, there was water.

A wave slapped through the open doorway, and a gust of wind blew into the smoke-filled corridor, dragging a spiral of soot outwards and away.

MARY. One slip away from prison, fighting to build herself a future from nothing.

DALIP. The gentle son of a warrior tradition. A young man who must fight for independence from his family.

STANISLAV. A fierce and capable man carrying the wounds of a brutal war.

They left London in flames for a place where everything was different. A place that can uncover your secrets.

A place haunted by a man called Crows...

A radio operator receives a message from Venusians, warning of an impending invasion by Martians. The Martains are capable of transferring their minds, and would simply take over the bodies of people on Earth. The Martians begin by taking over a naval vessel, outfitting it with antigravity and advanced weaponry. Fortunately, the vessel is defeated and the invasion is repelled.

If he survives, hell just may freeze over.

The savage Hammer Worlds are not only near invincible but almost certain to win their war to crush the Federated Worlds and control humanspace--unless the Feds can find and destroy their secret antimatter warhead facility.

Only dreadnoughts, the lone Federated ships able to withstand antimatter missile attacks, can do the job, and only Lieutenant Michael Helfort has the skill to lead them. But skill may not be enough, because Helfort is more than the newly appointed captain: He's a hero, and this means that his own senior officers want him to fail--and that the enemy's kingpin wants him dead.

Helfort's early victories merely intensify everyone's determination. No action is too low, no price too high, to bring him down--with treachery, or betrayal, or an offer he can't refuse, even if it means selling out his own side.

The Basilisk System was a place to sweep incompetents, fools, and failures under the rug . . . or to punish officers with enemies in high places.

Commander Honor Harrington has enemies, and she's about to make more of them--because the people out to get her have made one mistake: They've made her mad.

After a devastating galactic war, disgraced veteran Ralston Muck ekes out a living as a bouncer at Last Stop Station's premier nightclub, A Curtain of Stars. Night after night he listens to the club's star performer, Siren, sing her memories and ease some of his aching loss. But when Siren goes missing, Muck finds himself drawn into a world of dirty cops, drug lords, and conspiracies that trace back to the war itself.

The only person he can trust isn't even human. Angel, Siren's personal AI, was ripped from the singer's mind the night Siren disappeared. With no idea what has happened to her human host, and pursued by a killer virus, Angel flees to Muck for answers.

Together they struggle to comprehend the conspiracy that entangles both their lives. Can Muck and the angel on his shoulder recover Siren before it's too late? Or will he lose everything that matters to him one more time?

Beneath the towering bleached ribs of a dead, ancient beast lies New Crobuzon, a squalid city where humans, Re-mades, and arcane races live in perpetual fear of Parliament and its brutal militia. The air and rivers are thick with factory pollutants and the strange effluents of alchemy, and the ghettos contain a vast mix of workers, artists, spies, junkies, and whores. In New Crobuzon, the unsavory deal is stranger to none not even to Isaac, a brilliant scientist with a penchant for Crisis Theory.

Isaac has spent a lifetime quietly carrying out his unique research. But when a half-bird, half-human creature known as the Garuda comes to him from afar, Isaac is faced with challenges he has never before fathomed. Though the Garuda's request is scientifically daunting, Isaac is sparked by his own curiosity and an uncanny reverence for this curious stranger.

While Isaac's experiments for the Garuda turn into an obsession, one of his lab specimens demands attention: a brilliantly colored caterpillar that feeds on nothing but a hallucinatory drug and grows larger and more consuming by the day. What finally emerges from the silken cocoon will permeate every fiber of New Crobuzon and not even the Ambassador of Hell will challenge the malignant terror it invokes...

The thrilling follow-up to The Hunt for Pierre Jnr. the Weave is left reeling after an explosion devastates the city of Busan. Who is behind it? What does it mean for the psis? Pete Lazarus has been taken captive and Colonel Pinter is discovering the joys of rejuvenation, while the most powerful telepath ever born marches steadily towards world domination, collecting subservient Citizens in his wake.

In this second instalment in the trilogy, following on from the Hunt for Pierre Jnr, David Henley immerses us into a world of ambiguity where the end does not always justify the means.

Homer Hunter escapes from the planet he was stranded on only to encounter war on the space station Aurelian.

What happens after the adventure of a lifetime? For Zen, it's a safe, comfortable life of luxury. But it's not what Zen wants. He misses the thrill of riding the rails, of dodging danger, and of breathing the air of different planets. Most of all of course he misses Nova ? lost to him forever in a distant world. But then one day a mysterious message arrives, and that's all Zen needs to head right off, ready for anything. Except that no one could be ready for what he finds...

Thrilling, thought-provoking, and breathtaking, this finale to the Railhead trilogy weaves a web of wonder, full of characters and events you will never forget.

PC Peter Grant is heading west.

THE FURTHEST STATION is Ben Aaronovitch's first PC Grant novella... and there's something going bump on the Metropolitan line. And when commuters start reporting encounters with ghosts up and down the track - encounters which they forget entirely within minutes - Peter Grant gets a call to investigate. And the very first interview leads to a ghost-hunting expedition...

Hospital Station is a 1962 science fiction book by author James White and is the first volume in the Sector General series. The book collects together a series of five short stories previously published in New Worlds magazine between 1957 and 1960.

Contents:

• 7 - Medic - [Sector General] - (1960) - novelette (variant of O'Mara's Orphan)
• 41 - Sector General - [Sector General] - (1957) - novelette
• 85 - Trouble With Emily - [Sector General] - (1958) - novelette
• 114 - Visitor at Large - [Sector General] - (1959) - novelette
• 151 - Out-Patient - [Sector General] - (1960) - novella

Two engineers hijack a spaceship to join some space pirates--only to discover the pirates are hiding from a malevolent AI. Now they have to outwit the AI if they want to join the pirate crew--and survive long enough to enjoy it.

Adda and Iridian are newly minted engineers, but aren't able to find any work in a solar system ruined by economic collapse after an interplanetary war. Desperate for employment, they hijack a colony ship and plan to join a famed pirate crew living in luxury at Barbary Station, an abandoned shipbreaking station in deep space.

But when they arrive there, nothing is as expected. The pirates aren't living in luxury--they're hiding in a makeshift base welded onto the station's exterior hull. The artificial intelligence controlling the station's security system has gone mad, trying to kill all station residents and shooting down any ship that attempts to leave--so there's no way out.

Adda and Iridian have one chance to earn a place on the pirate crew: destroy the artificial intelligence. The last engineer who went up against the AI met an untimely end, and the pirates are taking bets on how the newcomers will die. But Adda and Iridian plan to beat the odds.

There's a glorious future in piracy... if only they can survive long enough.

What begins as a sticky political problem soon evolves into full-scale chaos for Commander Sisko when a tomb of Cardassian soldiers is discovered on Deep Space Nine. While Sisko searches for a diplomatic way to return the soldiers to Cardassia, the "bodies" begin to pulsate with life, determined to seek revenge on the enemies now occupying the former Cardassian stronghold.

But as the soldiers launch their attack to cripple the station, and Sisko struggles to regain control, another old enemy plots to destroy the soldiers at any cost -- even if it means destroying Deep Space Nine as well!

Geordi LaForge and his fellow cadets are headed to Atlantis Station, the underwater research base located near a volcano in the Atlantic Ocean. Up until now Geordi has spent most of his life in space with his Starfleet officer parents and he is more than ready to explore this strange, new world deep underwater.

The first stop for the cadets is the above-ground complex on Isla del Fuego, where the students barely escape a small volcanic eruption. They finally arrive at the underwater station shaken and fighting among themselves, but determined to carry out their assignments.

Then suddenly an earthquake rocks the station and the cadets are trapped in their lab with tempers running high. Now, as debris blocks their path back to the aquashuttle, Geordi and the others, together, must race against time and the dangers of the freezing seawater to escape the station before it disappears into an underwater abyss.

Battlestations! Back on Earth, enjoying a well-deserved shore leave, Captain Kirk is rudely accosted by a trio of Starfleet security guards. It seems he is wanted for questioning in connection with the theft of transwarp -- the Federation's newest, most advanced propulsion system. Could Captain Kirk, Starfleet's most decorated hero, be guilty of stealing top-secret technology? With the aid of Mr. Spock, Lt. Comdr. Piper begins a desperate search for the scientists who developed transwarp -- a search that leads her to an isolated planet, where she discovers the real -- and very dangerous -- traitor!

A diamond-hard, visionary new SF thriller. Nailed-down cyberpunk ala William Gibson for the 21st century meets the vivid dark futures of Al Reynolds in this extraordinary debut novel.

With Earth abandoned, humanity resides on Station, an industrialised asteroid run by the sentient corporations of the Pantheon. Under their leadership a war has been raging against the Totality - ex-Pantheon AIs gone rogue.

With the war over, Jack Forster and his sidekick Hugo Fist, a virtual ventriloquist's dummy tied to Jack's mind and created to destroy the Totality, have returned home.

Labelled a traitor for surrendering to the Totality, all Jack wants is to clear his name but when he discovers two old friends have died under suspicious circumstances he also wants answers. Soon he and Fist are embroiled in a conspiracy that threatens not only their future but all of humanity's. But with Fist's software licence about to expire, taking Jack's life with it, can they bring down the real traitors before their time runs out?

Leila Fenech is dead. And so is her brother Dieter. But what's really pissing her off is how he sold his afterlife as part of an insurance scam and left her to pick up the pieces. She wants him back so she can kick his backside from here to the Kuiper Belt.

Station is humanity's last outpost. But this battle-scarred asteroid isn't just for the living. It's also where the dead live on as fetches: digital memories and scraps of personality gathered together and given life. Of a sort.

Leila won't stop searching Station until she's found her brother's fetch - but the sinister Pressure Men are stalking her every move. Clearly Dieter's got himself mixed up in something a whole lot darker than just some scam.

Digging deeper, Leila discovers there's far more than her brother's afterlife at stake. Could it be that humanity's last outpost is on the brink of disaster? Is it too late for even the dead to save it?

Nebula Award nominated novelette. It was originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, April 1980. In a slightly revised form, this story is included as the second chapter in the The Gunslinger (1982), the opening volume in King's Dark Tower series.

A new story set in the world of The Expanse. One day, Colonel Fred Johnson will be hailed as a hero to the system. One day, he will meet a desperate man in possession of a stolen spaceship and a deadly secret and extend a hand of friendship. But long before he became the leader of the Outer Planets Alliance, Fred Johnson had a very different name. The Butcher of Anderson Station.

This is his story.

Anrel Murau, a simple scholar, is secretly the notorious revolutionary Alvos the Orator--the Empire's most wanted man. On the run and nearly penniless, Anrel finds himself forced to seek refuge in the capital city's Pensioner's Quarter, a den of thieves, murderers, and con men. Barely scraping out an existence on the fringe of respectable society, Anrel never forgets his demands for justice, nor the love of the woman he left behind.

The civil unrest that has long been simmering in the Empire is beginning to boil over into violent protests and Anrel's enemy, Lord Allutar, continues to corrupt the Grand Council.

But Anrel's alter-ego, Alvos the Orator, has taken on a life of his own and many factions of the Grand Council seek a way to harness his followers' political might for their own ends. Which means they need Anrel to take on a surprising new role and gain access to one of the Empire's greatest secrets to stop the rampant evil.

The adventure of Alvos the Orator continues with more action, more intrigue, and more suspense than ever before as Anrel seeks to at last clear his name and seek retribution against his old enemy once and for all.

Amateur detective Mallory Viridian's talent for solving murders ruined her life on Earth and drove her to live on an alien space station, but her problems still follow her in this witty, self-aware novel that puts a speculative spin on murder mysteries, from the Hugo-nominated author of Six Wakes.

From idyllic small towns to claustrophobic urban landscapes, Mallory Viridian is constantly embroiled in murder cases that only she has the insight to solve. But outside of a classic mystery novel, being surrounded by death doesn't make you a charming amateur detective, it makes you a suspect and a social pariah. So when Mallory gets the opportunity to take refuge on a sentient space station, she thinks she has the solution. Surely the murders will stop if her only company is alien beings. At first her new existence is peacefully quiet... and markedly devoid of homicide.

But when the station agrees to allow additional human guests, Mallory knows the break from her peculiar reality is over. After the first Earth shuttle arrives, and aliens and humans alike begin to die, the station is thrown into peril. Stuck smack-dab in the middle of an extraterrestrial whodunit, and wondering how in the world this keeps happening to her anyway, Mallory has to solve the crime--and fast--or the list of victims could grow to include everyone on board...

Press Enter:

Victor Apfel, a troubled war vet, gets an odd, pre-recorded phone message, instructing him to go inside the house next door. He opens the door to find his neighbor shot through the head. But is it suicide - or murder? And is it possible that a computer is to blame?

Hawksbill Station:

In the mid-21st century, time travel is used to send political prisoners to Hawksbill Station, a prison camp in the late Cambrian Era. When the latest arrival suspiciously deflects questions about his crimes and knowledge of 'Up Front', the inmates decide to find out his secret.

Hugo- and Nebula-nominated Novella

For generations Prosper Station has thrived under the guidance of its Honoured Ancestress: born of a human womb, the station's artificial intelligence has offered guidance and protection to its human relatives.

But war has come to the Dai Viet Empire. Prosper's brightest minds have been called away to defend the Emperor; and a flood of disorientated refugees strain the station's resources. As deprivations cause the station's ordinary life to unravel, uncovering old grudges and tearing apart the decimated family, Station Mistress Quyen and the Honoured Ancestress struggle to keep their relatives united and safe. What Quyen does not know is that the Honoured Ancestress herself is faltering, her mind eaten away by a disease that seems to have no cure; and that the future of the station itself might hang in the balance...

A WORLD INSIDE

All Hiroto has ever known is a life on a tiny coastal speck of Japan. Much of the country has been swallowed by Yokohama Station, a mysterious, ever-growing series of buildings that's been around for as long as anyone can remember. The few who live outside its many entrances have never seen Inside and know only rumors and legends of the station's interior. That all changes when Hiroto is given an 18 Ticket, a mysterious item that lets him enter the massive complex for five days. The young man has always sought a purpose, but the one he finds may not be the sort he'd hoped for...

TALES FROM INSIDE

Welcome to Yokohama Station, a sprawling structure that has consumed most of Japan. This collection of short stories dives into more about the station and the people that live within and around it. An android's chance encounter with a man on an island reveals the origin of the rebellious Dodger Alliance. Meanwhile, two other androids go missing, and a third is dispatched to locate them, but do they want to be found? In Kumamoto, a mysterious death grips JR operatives who work to keep Yokohama Station from spreading. Lastly, a volcano threatens to erupt in Gunma, displacing hundreds of Insiders. How will the station react to this unprecedented danger?