Search Worlds Without End

This short story originally appeared in Postscripts, Summer 2008. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Sixth Annual Collection (2009), edited by Gardner Dozois. The story is included in the collection A Very British History (2013).

This novella originally appeared in Subterranean Online, Spring 2009. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2010, edited by Rich Horton, and The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Seventh Annual Collection (2010), edited by Gardner Dozois.

Read the full story for free at Subterranean.

Sturgeon Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, February 2011 and was reprinted in Lightspeed, January 2015. The story can also be found in the anthologies:

• The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Six (2012), edited by Jonathan Strahan
• 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
• Not One of Us: Stories of Aliens on Earth (2018), edited by Neil Clarke

It is included in the collections A Very British History (2013).

This short story originally appeared in Arc 1.2: Post Human Conditions. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirtieth Annual Collection (2013), edited by Gardner Dozois, Aliens: Recent Encounters (2013), edited by Alex Dally MacFarlane, and More Human Than Human: Stories of Androids, Robots, and Manufactured Humanity (2017), edited by Neil Clarke.

The aliens are here. And they want to help. The extraordinary new project from one of the country's most acclaimed and consistently brilliant SF novelists of the last 30 years.

The Jackaroo have given humanity 15 worlds and the means to reach them. They're a chance to start over, but they're also littered with ruins and artifacts left by the Jackaroo's previous clients.

Miracles that could reverse the damage caused by war, climate change, and rising sea levels. Nightmares that could for ever alter humanity - or even destroy it.

Chloe Millar works in London, mapping changes caused by imported scraps of alien technology. When she stumbles across a pair of orphaned kids possessed by an ancient ghost, she must decide whether to help them or to hand them over to the authorities. Authorities who believe that their visions point towards a new kind of danger.

And on one of the Jackaroo's gift-worlds, the murder of a man who has just arrived from Earth leads policeman Vic Gayle to a war between rival gangs over possession of a remote excavation site.

Something is coming through. Something linked to the visions of Chloe's orphans, and Vic Gayle's murder investigation. Something that will challenge the limits of the Jackaroo's benevolence...

The Jackaroo, those enigmatic aliens who claim to have come to help, gave humanity access to worlds littered with ruins and scraps of technology left by long-dead client races. But although people have found new uses for alien technology, that technology may have found its own uses for people. The dissolute scion of a powerful merchant family, and a woman living in seclusion with only her dog and her demons for company, have become infected by a copies of a powerful chunk of alien code. Driven to discover what it wants from them, they become caught up in a conflict between a policeman allied to the Jackaroo and the laminated brain of a scientific wizard, and a mystery that spans light years and centuries. Humanity is about to discover why the Jackaroo came to help us, and how that help is shaping the end of human history.