Search Worlds Without End

An omnibus of Malzberg's fiction about science fiction and science fiction writing. Includes the novels Dwellers of the Deep, Gather in the Hall of the Planets, and Herovit's World, along with ten shorter works.

This collection contains over 170,000 words of some of the funniest and most biting science fiction ever written-science fiction stories that question the very values and dreams of the field.

"It was the stories that comprise this book that made Malzberg the center of controversy... even more than his award-winning Beyond Apollo." --Mike Resnick, in the introduction to this collection

Contents:

• Introduction by Mike Resnick
• Dwellers of the Deep (1970)
• Gather in the Hall of the Planets (1971)
• July 24, 1970 (1969)
• Notes Toward a Useable Past (1994)
• A Question of Slant (1971)
• A Galaxy Called Rome (1975)
• A Delightful Comedic Premise (1974)
• January 1975 (1975)
• Prose Bowl (1979) with Bill Pronzini
• Another Goddamned Showboat (1990)
• Herovit's World (1973)
• Corridors (1982)
• The Passage of the Light (1993)
• Afterword by Anthony R. Lewis

When the Guardian of the West Passage died in her bed, the women of Grey Tower fed her to the crows and went back to their chores. No successor was named as Guardian, no one took up the fallen blade; the West Passage went unguarded.

Now, snow blankets Grey in the height of summer, foretelling the coming of the Beast. The too-young Mother of Grey House and the Guardian's unnamed squire set out to save their people.

Their narrow shoulders bear a heavy burden. Before them lies the West Passage, home to horrors and delights that defy imagining. None can say if they'll reach their destinations, but one thing is for sure: the world is about to change.

Ayla and Jondalar leave the safety of the lands of the Mammoth Hunters and embark on a seemingly impossible journey across an entire continent. Their goal is the Cro-Magnon settlement in what is now southern France where Jondalar lived as a young man. Accompanied by the half-tame Wolf, the superb stallion, Racer, and the mare, Whinney, they brave both savage enemies and the elemental dangers of weather and terrain in their search for the place that will become Home. Jean Auel's imaginative reconstruction of pre-historic life, rich in detail of language, culture, myth and ritual, has become a set text in schools and colleges around the world.

"It happened fast. Thirty-two minutes for one world to die, another to be born."

First, the unthinkable: a security breach at a secret U.S. government facility unleashes the monstrous product of a chilling military experiment. Then, the unspeakable: a night of chaos and carnage gives way to sunrise on a nation, and ultimately a world, forever altered. All that remains for the stunned survivors is the long fight ahead and a future ruled by fear-of darkness, of death, of a fate far worse.

As civilization swiftly crumbles into a primal landscape of predators and prey, two people flee in search of sanctuary. FBI agent Brad Wolgast is a good man haunted by what he's done in the line of duty. Six-year-old orphan Amy Harper Bellafonte is a refugee from the doomed scientific project that has triggered apocalypse. He is determined to protect her from the horror set loose by her captors. But for Amy, escaping the bloody fallout is only the beginning of a much longer odyssey-spanning miles and decades-towards the time and place where she must finish what should never have begun.

With The Passage, award-winning author Justin Cronin has written both a relentlessly suspenseful adventure and an epic chronicle of human endurance in the face of unprecedented catastrophe and unimaginable danger. Its inventive storytelling, masterful prose, and depth of human insight mark it as a crucial and transcendent work of modern fiction.

At the end of The Passage, the great viral plague had left a small group of survivors clinging to life amidst a world transformed into a nightmare. In the second volume of this epic trilogy, this same group of survivors, led by the mysterious, charismatic Amy, go on the attack, leading an insurrection against the virals: the first offensives of the Second Viral War.

To do this, they must infiltrate a dozen hives, each presided over by one of the original Twelve. Their secret weapon: Alicia, transformed at the end of book one into a half human, half viral—but whose side, in the end, is she really on?

The world we knew is gone. What world will rise in its place?

The Twelve have been destroyed and the terrifying hundred-year reign of darkness that descended upon the world has ended. The survivors are stepping outside their walls, determined to build society anew--and daring to dream of a hopeful future.

But far from them, in a dead metropolis, he waits: Zero. The First. Father of the Twelve. The anguish that shattered his human life haunts him, and the hatred spawned by his transformation burns bright. His fury will be quenched only when he destroys Amy--humanity's only hope, the Girl from Nowhere who grew up to rise against him.

One last time light and dark will clash, and at last Amy and her friends will know their fate.

MATHER'S DILEMMA

Soldier of fortune Eric Mathers has signed on to help in a war among the European nations that resembles what in our timestream is called World War I. But this war continues in the 1970's, and involves an army called the American Colonial Forces--said to be subjects of Britain's King George X!

The non-human Kriths, whom Eric worked for, tell him they are altering history to forestall a time-wide catastrophe that their hypertechnology has told them is inevitable. But then the anti-Krith forces Eric encounters tell him his whole rationale for his life as a Krith soldier is false.

On Eric's resolution of this dilemma hangs the existence of all civilizations in all timestreams--hangs, in fact, the existence of existence itself. Or so it seems...