Search Worlds Without End

This is a collection of speculative fiction short stories by Elizabeth Bonesteel published between 2014 and 2019.

Table of Contents:

• "About Time" (2018) - A haunted clock brings together a shy computer programmer and a struggling artist.
• "Factory Reset" (2019) - A routine terraformer salvage job proves more complicated than anticipated.
• "Overlay" [Better Worlds] (2019) - A father must rescue his teenaged son from a clandestine mission gone wrong. (video based on this story)
• "Single Point of Failure" (2018) - An epidemic of accidents on Mercury Station is not what it seems.
• "Thinking Inside the Box" (2018) - A prisoner hopes to earn his freedom working with an alien artifact that can tell the future.
• "Friends Like These" (2014) - Sometimes you need a little help disposing of the corpse in your front yard.
• "Govi" [Central Corps] (2015) - Elena undertakes a hazardous rescue in a toxic alien ocean. (This story takes place about 2 weeks before Breach of Containment and contains mild spoilers for earlier books.)

Download this collection for free from the author's website.

The first interstellar starship, John Glenn, fled a Solar System populated by rogue AIs and machine/human hybrids, threatened by too much nanotechnology and rife with political dangers. The John Glenn's crew intended to terraform the nearly pristine planet Ymir, in hopes of creating a utopian society that will limit intelligent technology.

But by some miscalculation they have landed in another solar system, and extremely low on the antimatter needed to continue to Ymir, they must shape the nearby planet Harlequin's moon, Selene, into a new, temporary home. Their only hope of ever reaching Ymir is to rebuild their store of antimatter through decades of terraforming the moon.

Gabriel, the head terraformer, must lead this nearly impossible task, with all the wrong materials. His primary tools are the uneducated and nearly illiterate children of the original colonists, born and bred to build Harlequin's moon into a virtual antimatter factory. With no concept of the future and with life defined as duty, one girl, Rachel Vanowen, begins to ask herself the question: what will become of the children of Selene once the terraforming is complete.

Welcome to Tvibura and Tviburi, the richly imagined twin planets that stand at the center of Greg Egan's extraordinary new novella, Phoresis.

These two planets--one inhabited, one not--exist in extreme proximity to one another. As the narrative begins, Tvibura, the inhabited planet, faces a grave and imminent threat: the food supply is dwindling, and the conditions necessary for sustaining life are growing more and more erratic. Faced with the prospect of eventual catastrophe, the remarkable women of Tvibura launch a pair of ambitious, long-term initiatives. The first involves an attempt to reanimate the planet's increasingly dormant ecosphere. The second concerns the building of a literal "bridge between worlds" that will connect Tvibura to its (hopefully) habitable sibling.

These initiatives form the core of the narrative, which is divided into three sections and takes place over many generations. The resulting triptych is at once an epic in miniature, a work of hard SF filled with humanist touches, and a compressed, meticulously detailed example of original world building. Most centrally, it is a portrait of people struggling--and sometimes risking everything--to preserve a future they will not live to see. Erudite and entertaining, Phoresis shows us Egan at his formidable best, offering the sort of intense, visionary pleasures only science fiction can provide.

A century after the Martian war of independence, a group of kids are sent to Earth as delegates from Mars, but when they return home, they are caught between the two worlds, unable to reconcile the beauty and culture of Mars with their experiences on Earth.

This genre-bending novel is set on Earth in the wake of a second civil war... not between two factions in one nation, but two factions in one solar system: Mars and Earth. In an attempt to repair increasing tensions, the colonies of Mars send a group of young people to live on Earth to help reconcile humanity. But the group finds itself with no real home, no friends, and fractured allegiances as they struggle to find a sense of community and identity, trapped between two worlds.

Hugo-nominated and Nebula-winning Novella

The year is 2035. After ecological disasters nearly destroyed the Earth, 26 survivors-the last of humanity-are trapped by an alien race in a sterile enclosure known as the Shell. Fifteen-year-old Pete is one of the Six-children who were born deformed or sterile and raised in the Shell. As, one by one, the survivors grow sick and die, Pete and the Six struggle to put aside their anger at the alien Tesslies in order to find the means to rebuild the earth together. Their only hope lies within brief time-portals into the recent past, where they bring back children to replenish their disappearing gene pool.

Meanwhile, in 2013, brilliant mathematician Julie Kahn works with the FBI to solve a series of inexplicable kidnappings. Suddenly her predictive algorithms begin to reveal more than just criminal activity. As she begins to realize her role in the impending catastrophe, simultaneously affecting the Earth and the Shell, Julie closes in on the truth. She and Pete are converging in time upon the future of humanity-a future which might never unfold. Weaving three consecutive time lines to unravel both the mystery of the Earth's destruction and the key to its salvation, this taut adventure offers a topical message with a satisfying twist.

Hugo- and Nebula-nominated, Sturgeon Award-winning Novella

Mars terraforming expert Dr Leah Hamakawa is inexplicably invited to Venus by the rich child who has inherited ownership of most of the planet's habitable floating cities. Her colleague David Tinkerman, who is secretly in love with her, convinces her to allow him to accompany her on the trip. But upon their arrival, Tinkerman finds himself bizarrely shunted aside as the child satrap attempts to woo his co-worker into marriage, despite the huge difference in their ages.

Left to his own devices, Tinkerman decides to explore the floating cities in the beautiful-but-toxic atmosphere - only to stumble upon a mysterious plot which is far more sinister than a January-December courtship.

Listen to an audio reading of this story online for free at StarShipSofa: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

An alien AI has been sent to the solar system as representative of three advanced species. Its mission is to save the Earth's ecosystem - and the biggest threat to that is humanity. But we are also part of the system, so the AI must make a choice. Should it save mankind or wipe it out? Are we worth it?

The AI is all-powerful, and might as well be a god. So it sets up some conditions. Violence is now impossible. Large-scale destruction of natural resources is impossible. Food and water will be provided for those who really, truly need them. You can't even bully someone on the internet any more. The old way of doing things is gone. But a certain thin-skinned US president, among others, is still wedded to late-stage capitalism. Can we adapt? Can we prove ourselves worthy? And are we prepared to give up free will for a world without violence?

And above it all, on a hidden spaceship, one woman watches. A science fiction writer, she was abducted from the middle of the street in broad daylight. She is the only person the AI will talk to. And she must make a decision.

2026: Something is growing in the Pacific Ocean, a strange fungus-like organism that may threaten our entire food chain. Christened "the slick," the bizarre phenomenon is quickly the subject of intense, top-secret analysis-which rapidly reveals that it contains DNA unlike that of any other life on the planet.

Where is it from? A Chinese mission to Mars is rumored to have discovered life beneath the Martian icecap, but the Chinese aren't talking. Dr. Mariella Anders is recruited by NASA to join an urgent mission to the Red Planet to find out. Brilliant and committed to science, Mariella wants only the truth, but others' motives are less noble. Faced with corporations, activist groups, and superpowers, each with their own secret agendas, Mariella is on a perilous quest for knowledge... and she's about the discover the high price of truth.

Destry's life is dedicated to terraforming Sask-E. As part of the Environmental Rescue Team, she cares for the planet and its burgeoning eco-systems as her parents and their parents did before her.

But the bright, clean future they're building comes under threat when Destry discovers a city full of people that shouldn't exist, hidden inside a massive volcano.

As she uncovers more about their past, Destry begins to question the mission she's devoted her life to, and must make a choice that will reverberate through Sask-E's future for generations to come.

THE COMPANY BUILDS PLANETS.

Kin Arad is a high-ranking official of the Company. After twenty-one decades of living, and with the help of memory surgery, she is at the top of her profession. Discovering two of her employees have placed a fossilized plesiosaur in the wrong stratum, not to mention the fact it is holding a placard which reads, 'End Nuclear Testing Now', doesn't dismay the woman who built a mountain range in the shape of her initials during her own high-spirited youth.

But then came discovery of something which did intrigue Kin Arad. A flat earth was something new...

The year is 2312. Scientific and technological advances have opened gateways to an extraordinary future. Earth is no longer humanity's only home; new habitats have been created throughout the solar system on moons, planets, and in between. But in this year, 2312, a sequence of events will force humanity to confront its past, its present, and its future.

The first event takes place on Mercury, on the city of Terminator, itself a miracle of engineering on an unprecedented scale. It is an unexpected death, but one that might have been foreseen. For Swan Er Hong, it is an event that will change her life. Swan was once a woman who designed worlds. Now she will be led into a plot to destroy them.

On the North Pole of Pluto there stands an enigma: a huge circle of standing blocks of ice, built on the pattern of Earth's Stonehenge--but ten times the size, standing alone at the farthest reaches of the Solar System. What is it? Who came there to build it?

In Kim Stanley Robinson's Icehenge,the secret lies, perhaps, in the chaotic decades of the Martian Revolution, in the lost memories of those who have lived for centuries.

Nebula-nominated Novella

On an alien planet where the atmosphere has frozen, humans must continually mine the icy air simply to survive. But for Chicka, a young man struggling with the death of his identical twin brother, survival isn't enough. He wants to understand both the rigid nature of their harsh society and why his brother was killed for questioning their place in the universe.

John DeNardo of SF Signal gave Sublimation Angels "five stars" and called the novella "A captivating story about freedom, rebellion, and seeking the truth." Science fiction author Colin Harvey said this is "One of the best novellas of the year, written by a writer whose reputation grows with each story."

Sublimation Angels was a finalist for the Nebula Award for Best Novella, won the Interzone Readers' Poll for best story in 2010, and was longlisted for the British Fantasy Award.

A thousand years in the future, the earth has been conquered by an alien race and covered by a single sea. Dovirr Stargan, who is disgusted with the servility of his life on the floating city of Vythain, longs to become one of the Sea-Lords, who roam the sea as powerful protectors of the cities. Dovirr gets his wish, but the return of the alien race brings unexpected and critically dangerous crises to his new life as he learns the real, sometimes terrible, significance of power.

King Kragen has ruled a sea-covered world since human colonists arrived twelve generations before. A monstrous water creature with gluttonous appetites, King Kragen demands a payoff in return for protection- and to appease him has become a way of life. To anger King Kragen means certain death, but Sklar Hast is fed up with slavery and sacrifice. In a world without weapons, the fight won't be easy--particularly when the unwilling treat Sklar Hast as the enemy!

Humanity's last hope of survival lies in space... but will a random death doom the venture?

Our planet is dying and the world's remaining nations have pooled their resources to build a seed ship that will carry colonists on a multi-generational journey to a distant planet.

Everything is set for a bright adventure... and then someone is found hanging dead just weeks before the launch. Fear and paranoia spread as the death begins to look more and more like a murder. The authorities want the case settled quickly and quietly so as not to cause panic... and to prevent a murderer from sabotaging the entire mission.

A captured human officer leads his fellows in an escape from an alien-dominated prison planet.

When a giant meteor crashes into the earth and destroys all life, the small group of human survivors manage to leave the barren planet and establish a new home on the moon. From Tycho Base, men and woman are able to observe the devastated planet and wait for a time when return will become possible.

Generations pass. Cloned children have had children of their own, and their eyes are raised toward the giant planet in the sky which long ago was the cradle of humanity. Finally, after millennia of waiting, the descendants of the original refugees travel back to a planet they've never known, to try and rebuild a civilization of which they've never been a part.

The fate of the earth lies in the success of their return, but after so much time, the question is not whether they can rebuild an old destroyed home, but whether they can learn to inhabit an alien new world--Earth.

Back in print for the first time in more than a decade, Gene Wolfe's The Fifth Head of Cerberus is a universally acknowledged masterpiece of science fiction by one of the field's most brilliant writers.

Far out from Earth, two sister planets, Saint Anne and Saint Croix, circle each other in an eternal dance. It is said a race of shapeshifters once lived here, only to perish when men came. But one man believes they can still be found, somewhere in the back of the beyond.

In The Fifth Head of Cerberus, Wolfe skillfully interweaves three bizarre tales to create a mesmerizing pattern: the harrowing account of the son of a mad genius who discovers his hideous heritage; a young man's mythic dreamquest for his darker half; the bizarre chronicle of a scientists' nightmarish imprisonment. Like an intricate, braided knot, the pattern at last unfolds to reveal astonishing truths about this strange and savage alien landscape.

Rebels of the Red Planet

MARS FOR THE MARTIANS! Dark Kensington had been dead for twenty-five years. It was a fact; everyone knew it. Then suddenly he reappeared, youthful, brilliant, ready to take over the Phoenix, the rebel group that worked to overthrow the tyranny that gripped the settlers on Mars.

The Phoenix had been destroyed not once, not twice, but three times! But this time the resurrected Dark had new plans, plans which involved dangerous experiments in mutation and psionics.

And now the rebels realized they were in double jeopardy. Not only from the government's desperate hatred of their movement, but also from the growing possibility that the new breed of mutated monsters would get out of hand and bring terrors never before known to man.

200 Years to Christmas

For almost two centuries the huge spaceship had speared its way through the stars, bound for another 200 hundred years of travel before it would put down on a new planet, a new home for the Earth people.

On board the metal-enclosed worldlet were four hundred people: the last survivors of Earth. It was up to them to start life anew, to correct the mistakes their ancestors had made.

But as the tenth generation neared maturity, the idle passengers found themselves face to face with these same problems--and this time there was no place to run and hide or to postpone their answers. For their miniature society was changing faster and faster. And the spaceship suddenly seemed destined to end as a star-bound coffin.

Ex-government assassin turned bounty-hunter, Nyx, is good at solving other people's problems. Her favorite problem-solving solution is punching people in the face. Then maybe chopping off some heads. Hey?it's a living.

Nyx's disreputable reputation has been well earned. After all, she's trying to navigate an apocalyptic world full of giant bugs, contaminated deserts, scheming magicians, and a centuries-long war that's consuming her future. Managing her ragtag squad of misfits has required a lot of morally-gray choices. Every new job is another day alive. Every new mission is another step toward changing a hellish future?but only if she can survive.

Table of Contents:

• The Body Project
• The Heart is Eaten Last
• Soulbound
• Crossroads at Jannah
• Paint it Red

Nyx had already been to hell. One prayer more or less wouldn t make any difference...

On a ravaged, contaminated world, a centuries-old holy war rages, fought by a bloody mix of mercenaries, magicians, and conscripted soldiers. Though the origins of the war are shady and complex, there's one thing everybody agrees on--

There's not a chance in hell of ending it.

Nyx is a former government assassin who makes a living cutting off heads for cash. But when a dubious deal between her government and an alien gene pirate goes bad, Nyx's ugly past makes her the top pick for a covert recovery. The head they want her to bring home could end the war--but at what price?

The world is about to find out.

Sturgeon Award winning novella.

From the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro, an alien force begins to spread, turning the land into an unrecognizable alien landscape. Tendeléo is nine years old when this first package comes down, and before she reaches adulthood the Chaga will change her life forever.

The story originally appeared as a chapbook. It can also be found in the anthologies:

• Futures (2001), edited by Peter Crowther
• The Year's Best Science Fiction: Eighteenth Annual Collection (2001), edited by Gardner Dozois
• Best of the Best Volume 2: 20 Years of the Year's Best Short Science Fiction Novels (2007), edited by Gardner Dozois
• Not One of Us: Stories of Aliens on Earth (2018), edited by Neil Clarke.

It is included in the collection The Best of Ian McDonald (2016).

WHO WILL INHERIT THIS NEW EARTH?

The last remnants of the human race left a dying Earth, desperate to find a new home among the stars. Following in the footsteps of their ancestors, they discover the greatest treasure of the past age - a world terraformed and prepared for human life.

But all is not right in this new Eden. In the long years since the planet was abandoned, the work of its architects has borne disastrous fruit. The planet is not waiting for them, pristine and unoccupied. New masters have turned it from a refuge into mankind's worst nightmare.

Now two civilizations are on a collision course, both testing the boundaries of what they will do to survive. As the fate of humanity hangs in the balance, who are the true heirs of this new Earth?

The modern classic of space opera that began with Children of Time continues in this extraordinary novel of humanity's battle for survival on a terraformed planet.

Earth failed. In a desperate bid to escape, the spaceship Enkidu and its captain, Heorest Holt, carried its precious human cargo to a potential new paradise. Generations later, this fragile colony has managed to survive, eking out a hardy existence. Yet life is tough, and much technological knowledge has been lost.

Then strangers appear. They possess unparalleled knowledge and thrilling technology -- and they've arrived from another world to help humanity's colonies. But not all is as it seems, and the price of the strangers' help may be the colony itself.

On the verge of extinction, only the gravest imaginable crime against humanity can save it...

A bold new plan seeks to ignite a new Sunspot over Greenhouse, saving the habitat domes crucial to the survival of the Solacian people. But a secret clouds this symbol of much-needed hope: human space is contracting at a startling rate, threatening to wipe out all living worlds including Earth.

The only answer lies in the hands of the founder of the planet Solace: Oskar DeSilvo, seemingly returned from the dead to save the worlds his frauds had doomed to destruction. But as the work begins, agents of the Chronologic Patrol step in to prevent interference with the past even at the risk of dooming humanity.

Thwarted at every turn, DeSilvo and his onetime nemesis, Anton Koffield, propose one last wildly grandiose idea one final, desperate gamble. But if the only choice lies between madness and certain catastrophe is there any choice at all?

It all began 30 years ago on Mars, with a greenperson, but by the time it all finished, the town of Desolation Road had experienced every concievable abnormality from Adam Black's Wonderful Travelling Chataqua to the Astounding Tatterdemalion Air Bazaar.

"The most thrilling and tingling kind of science fiction story."--Kirkus Reviews

"Heinlein found his true direction.... The Martian setting is logically constructed and rich in convincing detail [while] the characters are engaging and the action develops naturally."--Jack Williamson

Marking the first appearance of the Martian elder race that played such a prominent role in Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein's iconic Red Planet tells the story of Jim Marlowe and Frank Sutton's journey to the Lowe Academy boarding school on Mars, and the discoveries they make there that could impact the future of their entire colony.

While on their way to the prestigious school, Jim and Frank, along with Jim's volleyball-sized native pet, Willis the Bouncer, meets one of the sentient Martians, Gekko, when they wander into forbidden territory. Joining in a ritual called "growing together" and sharing water with the three-legged Martian, making them "water friends," the boy's eyes are opened to the wonders of the planet they call home and are curious about how protective the Martians are over Willis, who chooses to stay with Jim, despite the gentle urgings of the larger aliens.

Finally enrolled in school, Jim's independent nature and impulsive tendency to speak his mind gets him into trouble with the authoritarian headmaster, Mr. Howe, who confiscates Willis, claiming it is against school rules to have pets. When the boys go to rescue him, they get more than they are bargained for when the little Bouncer's eidetic memory for sounds--which he can accurately reproduce like a recording--reveals the colonial administrator of Mars' nefarious plan for the colony, which he overheard during his confinement.

The implications of this newfound knowledge, as well as their need to protect Willis from the unscrupulous Mr. Howe, prompt the boys to run away from school, to warn their parents and the rest of their colony. What they encounter along the way not only has them questioning everything they know, about Willis and the mysterious Martian race, but the ramifications of their actions are more profound in this edition of Red Planet, which has restored the ending Robert A. Heinlein had originally intended to be published.

The Earth is crowded and food is rationed, but a colony on Ganymede, one of the moons of Jupiter, offers an escape for teenager Bill Lermer and his family. Back on Earth, the move sounded like a grand adventure, but Bill soon realizes that life on the frontier is dangerous, and in an alien world with no safety nets, nature is cruelly unforgiving of even small mistakes.

Bill's new home is a world of unearthly wonders and heartbreaking tragedy. He will face hardships, survive dangers, and grow up fast, meeting the challenge of opening up a new world for humanity and finding strengths within himself that he had never suspected existed.

On Inferno the tensions between Spacer and Settler are as strong as ever, but now the majority of robots are working on terraforming rather than as personal servants. Governor Alvar Kresh is content to have his wife give support to the renegade robot leaders she has created, but is not so keen to advertise the fact. Caliban and Prospero, New Law robots, and their fellows have settled in Valhalla, a city in the northern Utopia region. What they are unaware of is that in order to bring the climatic changes essential for further terraforming, the Governora and his political colleagues are planning to bring down the Comet Grieg on Utopia causing massive devastation and creating an artificial sea.

The Earth is long dead, blasted apart, and the human survivors who settled on Venus live in huge citadels beneath the Venusian seas in an atrophying, class-ridden society ruled by the Immortals - genetic mutations who live a thousand years or more. Sam Reed was born an immortal, born to rule those with a normal life-span, but his deranged father had him mutilated as a baby so that he wouldn't know of his heritage. And Sam grew up on the wrong side of the tracks and the law, thinking of the Immortals as his enemies. Then he reached the age of eighty, understood what had happened to him and went looking for revenge - and changed his decaying world forever.

Pierson's puppeteers, strange, three-legged, two-headed aliens, have discovered an immense structure in a hitherto unexplored part of the universe. Frightened of meeting the builders of such a structure, the puppeteers set about assembling a team consisting of two humans, a puppeteer and a kzin, an alien not unlike an eight-foot-tall, red-furred cat, to explore it. The artefact is a vast circular ribbon of matter, some 180 million miles across, with a sun at its centre - the Ringworld. But the expedition goes disastrously wrong when the ship crashlands and its motley crew faces a trek across thousands of miles of the Ringworld's surface.

When seventeen-year-old Toby McGonigal finds himself lost in space, separated from his family, he expects his next drift into cold sleep to be his last. After all, the planet he's orbiting is frozen and sunless, and the cities are dead. But when Toby wakes again, he's surprised to discover a thriving planet, a strange and prosperous galaxy, and something stranger still - that he's been asleep for 14,000 years.

Welcome to the Lockstep Empire, where civilization is kept alive by careful hibernation. Here cold sleeps can last decades and waking moments mere weeks. Its citizens survive for millenia, traveling asleep on long voyages between worlds. Not only is Lockstep the new center of the galaxy, but Toby is shocked to learn that the Empire is still ruled by its founding family: his own.

Toby's brother Peter has become a terrible tyrant. Suspicious of the return of his long-lost brother, whose rightful inheritance also controls the lockstep hibernation cycles, Peter sees Toby as a threat to his regime. Now, with the help of a lockstep girl named Corva, Toby must survive the forces of this new Empire, outwit his siblings, and save human civilization.

Hugo and Nebula Award nominated novella. It originally appeared in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, September 1985. The story can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Third Annual Collection (1986) and form half of Tor Double #1: A Meeting With Medusa/Green Mars (1988 , whith Arthur C. Clarke). It is included in the collection The Martians (1999).

A glorious companion volume to Robinson's world-wide bestselling trilogy.

All Colours Mars

Red Mars. Green Mars. Blue Mars...

The Mars trilogy has rapidly assumed the status of modern science fiction classic, capturing the imagination of hundreds of thousands of readers around the world. Now, with The Martians, comes Kim Stanley Robinson essential companion to the Mars series. New novellas and short stories head the collection, featuring many of the trilogy's central characters in events previously only hinted at in the novels. Added to this are works on Martian mythology, poetry, character histories, alternative scenarios to the events that actually took place in the trilogy and finally various pieces which the author omitted in the final edit.

In short, The Martians is a unique collection of previously unpublished fiction, a fascinating addition to Robinson's oeuvre, and a must for all lovers of the red planet.

Contents:

• Michel in Antarctica
• Exploring Fossil Canyon
• The Archaea Plot
• The Way the Land Spoke to Us
  • The Great Escarpment
  • Flatness
• Maya and Desmond
• Four Teleological Trails
  • Wrong way
  • Mistakes can be good
  • You can't lose the trail
  • The natural genius
• Coyote Makes Trouble
• Michel in Provence
• Green Mars
• Arthur Sternbach Brings the Curveball to Mars
• Salt and Fresh
• The Constitution of Mars
• Some Worknotes and Commentary on the Constitution, by Charlotte Dorsa Brevia
• Jackie on Zo
• Keeping the Flame
• Saving Noctis Dam
• Big Man in Love
• An Argument for the Deployment of All Safe Terraforming Technologies
• Selected Abstracts from The Journal of Areological Studies, vols. 56-64
• Odessa
• Sexual Dimorphism
• Enough Is as Good as a Feast
• What Matters
• Coyote Remembers
• Sax Moments
• A Martian Romance
• If Wang Wei Lived on Mars and other poems
  • Visiting
  • After a Move
  • Canyon Colour
  • Vastitas Borealis
  • Night Song
  • Desolation
  • The Names of the Canals
  • Another Night Song
  • Six Thoughts on the Uses of Art
    • What's in My Pocket
    • In the Finale of Beethoven's Ninth
    • Reading Emerson's Journal
    • The Walkman
    • Dreams Are Real
    • Seen While Running
  • Crossing Mather Pass
  • Night in the Mountains
    • Camp
    • The Ground
    • Writing by Starlight
  • Invisible Owls
  • Tenzing
  • The Soundtrack
  • A Report on the First Reported Case of Areophagy
  • The Reds' Lament
  • Two Years
  • I Say Goodbye to Mars
• Purple Mars

For eons, sandstorms have swept the barren desolate landscape of the red planet. For centuries, Mars has beckoned to mankind to come and conquer its hostile climate. Now, in the year 2026, a group of one hundred colonists is about to fulfill that destiny.

John Boone, Maya Toitavna, Frank Chalmers, and Arkady Bogdanov lead a mission whose ultimate goal is the terraforming of Mars. For some, Mars will become a passion driving them to daring acts of courage and madness; for others it offers and opportunity to strip the planet of its riches. And for the genetic "alchemists, " Mars presents a chance to create a biomedical miracle, a breakthrough that could change all we know about life... and death.

The colonists place giant satellite mirrors in Martian orbit to reflect light to the planets surface. Black dust sprinkled on the polar caps will capture warmth and melt the ice. And massive tunnels, kilometers in depth, will be drilled into the Martian mantle to create stupendous vents of hot gases. Against this backdrop of epic upheaval, rivalries, loves, and friendships will form and fall to pieces--for there are those who will fight to the death to prevent Mars from ever being changed.

Winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel

Kim Stanley Robinson's classic trilogy depicting the colonization of Mars continues in a thrilling and timeless novel that pits the settlers against their greatest foes: themselves.

Nearly a generation has passed since the first pioneers landed on Mars, and its transformation to an Earthlike planet is under way. But not everyone wants to see the process through. The methods are opposed by those who are determined to preserve their home planet's hostile, barren beauty. Led by the first generation of children born on Mars, these rebels are soon joined by a handful of the original settlers. Against this cosmic backdrop, passions, partnerships, and rivalries explode in a story as spectacular as the planet itself.

The red planet is red no longer, as Mars has become a perfectly inhabitable world. But while Mars flourishes, Earth is threatened by overpopulation and ecological disaster. Soon people look to Mars as a refuge, initiating a possible interplanetary conflict, as well as political strife between the Reds, who wish to preserve the planet in its desert state, and the Green "terraformers". The ultimate fate of Earth, as well as the possibility of new explorations into the solar system, stand in the balance.

On the distant planet of Mirabile, a settlement of human colonists from Earth is jeopardized by genetic mutants of Earth plants and animals, and it is up to ecological troubleshooter Mama Jason to destroy the menacing mutants

Table of Contents:

• The Loch Moose Monster - (1989)
• The Return of the Kangaroo Rex - (1989)
• The Flowering Inferno - (1990)
• Getting the Bugs Out - (1990)
• Raising Cane - (1991)
• Frankenswine - (1991)
• Afterword: Author's Note - (1991)

The very far future: The Galaxy is a drifting wreck of black holes, neutron stars, chill white dwarfs. The age of star formation is long past. Yet there is life here, feeding off the energies of the stellar remnants, and there is mind, a tremendous Galaxy-spanning intelligence each of whose thoughts lasts a hundred thousand years. And this mind cradles memories of a long-gone age when a more compact universe was full of light...

The 27th century: Proxima Centauri, an undistinguished red dwarf star, is the nearest star to our sun - and (in this fiction), the nearest to host a world, Proxima IV, habitable by humans. But Proxima IV is unlike Earth in many ways. Huddling close to the warmth, orbiting in weeks, it keeps one face to its parent star at all times. The 'substellar point', with the star forever overhead, is a blasted desert, and the 'antistellar point' on the far side is under an ice cap in perpetual darkness. How would it be to live on such a world? Needle ships fall from Proxima IV's sky. Yuri Jones, with 1000 others, is about to find out...P ROXIMA tells the amazing tale of how we colonise a harsh new eden, and the secret we find there that will change our role in the Universe for ever.

Finalist in Asimov's 30th Annual Readers' Award Poll; selected for three 2015 Year's Best anthologies

This novella is set in the Retrieval Artist universe, as part of the background for the Anniversary Day saga.

Detective Noelle DeRicci is called in when the body of a woman is discovered in a waste crate in Armstrong, the largest dome on the Moon -- found by the owner just before the crate's contents were sent to the Growing Pits to be made into compost. The coroner she has summoned identifies the body as the nanny to the child of a local crime boss named Luc Deshin, who subsequently tells DeRicci he had fired the victim that day because she was not affectionate enough with his infant son.

Originally published in Asimov's Science Fiction, March 2015. The story can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Third Annual Collection (2016), edited by Gardner Dozois, and The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Novellas 2016, edited by Paula Guran.

Read this story online for free at Asimov's Science Fiction.

The starship Ariel is on a mission of the utmost secrecy, upon which the fate of thousands of lives depend. Though the ship is a mile long, its six crew are crammed into a space barely large enough for them to stand. Five are officers, geniuses in their field. The other is Will Kuno-Monet, the man responsible for single-handedly running a ship comprised of the most dangerous and delicate technology that mankind has ever devised. He is the Roboteer.

In a future in which the colonization of the stars has turned out to be anything but easy, and civilization on Earth has collapsed under the pressure of relentless mutual terrorism, small human settlements cling to barely habitable planets. Without support from a homeworld, they have had to develop ways of life heavily dependent on robotics and genetic engineering. Then out of the ruins of Earth's once great empire, a new force arises -- a world-spanning religion bent on the conversion of all mankind to its creed. It sends fleets of starships to reclaim the colonies. But the colonies don't want to be reclaimed. Mankind's first interstellar war begins. It is dirty, dangerous and hideously costly.

Will is a man bred to interface with the robots that his home-world Galatea desperately needs to survive. He finds himself sent behind enemy lines to discover the secret of their newest weapon. What he discovers will transform their understanding of both science and civilization forever... but at a cost.

The Dreel was a hive-mind, composed of trillions of virus-sized units, which infected intelligent beings like a disease and took over their minds. It was on its way to conquering the entire galaxy - until those whose minds were still free fought back, using a weapon so powerful that it wrought havoc with the Well World, the ancient planet-sized supercomputer that a vanished super-race called the Markovians built to maintain the form of the entire universe.

If the Well World's control of time and space could not be restored, the universe could vanish like a blown-out candle flame. Only a Markovian could go to the Well World and repair the damage, but only one Markovian was still known to survive. He had last been seen in human form, going by the name of Nathan Brazil. No one knew where he was now, what name he was using, or even if he still appeared human. Finding him, somewhere in the immensity of the galaxy, seemed an impossible task.

So the task fell to someone who had done the impossible over and over: Mavra Chang, one of the few beings ever to escape from the Well World, and owner of Obie, who just might be the second most powerful computer in the universe. With those two on his trail, Nathan Brazil could run-but could he hide?

Trained since childhood in advanced biocyph seed technology by the all-powerful Crib empire, Edie's mission is to terraform alien worlds while her masters bleed the outlawed Fringe populations dry. When renegade mercenaries kidnap Edie, she's not entirely sure it's a bad thing . . . until they leash her to a bodyguard, Finn-a former freedom fighter-turned-slave, beaten down but never broken. If Edie strays from Finn's side, he dies. If she doesn't cooperate, the pirates will kill them both.

But Edie's abilities far surpass anything her enemies imagine. And now, with Finn as her only ally as the merciless Crib closes in, she'll have to prove it or die on the site of her only failure . . . a world called Scarabaeus.

The crib is everywhere . . .

Edie Sha'nim believes she and her bodyguard lover, Finn, could find refuge from the tyranny of the Crib empire by fleeing to the Fringe worlds. But Edie's extraordinary cypherteck ability to manipulate the ecology of evolving planets makes her far too valuable for the empire to lose. Recaptured and forced to cooperate-or else she will watch Finn die-Edie is shocked to discover the Crib's new breed of cypherteck: children. She cannot stand by while the oppressors enslave the innocent, nor can she resist the lure of Scarabaeus, the first world she tried to save, when researchers discover what appears to be an evolving intelligence.

But escape-for Edie, for Finn, and for the exploited young-will require the ultimate sacrifice . . . and a shocking act of rebellion.

Admiral James T. Kirk and the crew of the starship USS Enterprise face off against the genetically-engineered tyrant Khan Noonien Singh, a character who first appeared in the 1967 Star Trek television series episode "Space Seed".

When Khan escapes from a 15-year exile to exact revenge on Kirk, the crew of the Enterprise must stop him from acquiring the powerful Genesis terraforming device and turning it into a horrifying weapon. But the price they must pay to prevent galaxy-wide destruction by Khan might be more than they can bear...

In the conclusion to this epic interstellar adventure by Nebula Award nominee Wil McCarthy, humanity stands at a crossroads as the heroes who fashioned a man-made heaven must rescue their descendants from eternal damnation....

TO CRUSH THE MOON

Once the Queendom of Sol was a glowing monument to humankind's loftiest dreams. Ageless and immortal, its citizens lived in peaceful splendor. But as Sol buckled under the swell of an immorbid population, space itself literally ran out....

Conrad Mursk has returned to Sol on the crippled starship Newhope. His crew are the frozen refugees of a failed colony known as Barnard's Star. A thousand years older, Mursk finds Sol on the brink of rebellion, while a fanatic necro cult is reviving death itself. Now Mursk and his lover, Captain Xiomara "Xmary" Li Weng, are sent on a final, desperate mission by King Bruno de Towaji–one of the greatest terraformers of the ages–to literally crush the moon. If they succeed, they'll save billions of lost souls. If they fail, they'll strand humanity between death–and something unimaginably worse...

Twenty-third century Earth, ravaged by climate change, looks backwards to the holy ideal of a pre-industrial Eden. Political power has been grabbed by a few powerful families and their green saints. Millions of people are imprisoned in teeming cities; millions more labour on Pharaonic projects to rebuild ruined ecosystems.

On the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, the Outers, descendants of refugees from Earth's repressive regimes, have constructed a wild variety of self-sufficient cities and settlements: scientific utopias crammed with exuberant creations of the genetic arts; the last outposts of every kind of democratic tradition. The fragile detente between the Outer cities and the dynasties of Earth is threatened by the ambitions of the rising generation of Outers, who want to break free of their cosy, inward-looking pocket paradises, colonise the rest of the Solar System, and drive human evolution in a hundred new directions.

On Earth, many demand pre-emptive action against the Outers before it's too late; others want to exploit the talents of their scientists and gene wizards. Amid campaigns for peace and reconciliation, political machinations, crude displays of military might, and espionage by cunningly wrought agents, the two branches of humanity edge towards war...

A whisperjewel summoned him to Worlorn, and a love he thought he'd lost. But Worlorn isn't the world Dirk t'Larien imagined, and Gwen Delvano is no longer the woman he once knew. She is bound to another man, and to a dying planet that is trapped in twilight, forever falling toward night. Amid this bleak landscape is a violent clash of cultures in which there is no code of honor - and the hunter and the hunted are often interchangeable.

Caught up in a dangerous triangle, Gwen is in need of Dirk's protection, and he will do anything to keep her safe, even if it means challenging the barbaric man who has claimed her - and his cunning cohort. But an impenetrable veil of secrecy surrounds them all, and it's becoming impossible for Dirk to distinguish between his allies and his enemies. While each will fight to stay alive, one is waiting for escape, one for revenge, and another for a brutal, untimely demise.

Haviland Tuf is an honest space-trader who likes cats. So how is it that, in competition with the worst villains the universe has to offer, he's become the proud owner of a seedship, the last remnant of Earth's legendary Ecological Engineering Corps? Never mind; just be thankful that the most powerful weapon in human space is in good hands--hands which now have the godlike ability to control the genetic material of thousands of outlandish creatures.

Armed with this unique equipment, Tuf is set to tackle the problems that human settlers have created in colonizing far-flung worlds: hosts of hostile monsters, a population hooked on procreation, a dictator who unleashes plagues to get his own way... and in every case, the only thing that stands between the colonists and disaster is Tuf's ingenuity--and his reputation as a man of integrity in a universe of rogues.

Iris Angharads, a determined, independent woman, sets herself one massive goal: to make the poison-filled atmosphere of Venus hospitable to humans. She works day and night to realize her dream, with only one person sharing her passion, Liang Chen. It seems impossible to make Venus, with its intolerable air and waterless environment, into a paradise, but Iris succeeds. And in doing so, she also creates a powerful dynasty, beginning with her first born, Benzi Liangharad.

With the human population ravaged by a series of devastating plagues, the alien Chtorr arrive to begin the final phase of their invasion. Even as many on Earth deny their existence, the giant wormlike carnivores prepare the world for the ultimate violation--the enslavement of humanity for food!