Search Worlds Without End

This unique collection of science fiction stories focuses on the human emotions that have no place in a world made unrecognizable by science and technology. Three stories that deal with the Kethani aliens--a group that has come to present-day Earth offering life after death via technological resurrection--are included, as is "The Children of Winter," a lucid tale of doomed love between alien species on a far-off world in the distant future. As characters are pushed to their moral thresholds, they attempt to deal with the unforseen consequences contained in fascinating new technologies.

Table of Contents:

• ix - Foreword (Threshold Shift) - essay by Stephen Baxter
• 3 - The Children of Winter - (2001) - novelette
• 26 - Thursday's Child - [Kéthani Stories] - (2002) - novelette
• 50 - Ascent of Man - (2001) - short story
• 58 - Ulla, Ulla - (2002) - short story
• 82 - The Kéthani Inheritance - [Kéthani Stories] - (2001) - novelette
• 102 - Instructions for Surviving the Destruction of Star-Probe X-11-57 - (2001) - short story
• 110 - Eye of the Beholder - (1997) - novelette
• 132 - The Touch of Angels - [Kéthani Stories] - (2006) - novelette
• 158 - The Spacetime Pit - (1996) - novelette by Stephen Baxter and Eric Brown
• 182 - Hunting the Slarque - [Tartarus - 7] - (1999) - novelette

He is not to open the door which leads to the strange time and place, nor to invite Him Who lurks at the threshold..." went the warning in the old family manuscript that Ambrose Dewart discovered when he returned to his ancestral home in the deep woods of rural Massachusetts. Dewart's investigations into his family's sinister past eventually lead to the unspeakable revelations of The Great Old Ones who wait on the boundaries of space and time for someone to summon them to earth.

Acclaimed cult horror writer H. P. Lovecraft's notes and outlines for this tale of uncanny terror were completed by August Derleth, his friend and future publisher. Of the many Lovecraft-Derleth "posthumous collaborations," The Lurker at the Threshold remains the most popular, having sold 50,000 copies in its previous edition alone.

Note: According to S. T. Joshi, of the novel's 50,000 words, only 1,200 were written by Lovecraft.

An Anthology of Soviet Fiction.

Table of Contents:

• Preface - (1970) - essay by Mirra Ginsburg
• Icarus and Daedalus - (1968) - shortstory by Genrikh Altov
• Erem - (1963) - shortstory by Gleb Anfilov
• Formula of Immortality - (1963) - novelette by Anatoly Dnieprov
• When Questions Are Asked - (1963) - shortstory by Anatoly Dnieprov
• The Horn of Plenty - (1969) - shortstory by Vladimir Grigoriev
• The Useless Planet - (1967) - novelette by Olga Larionova
• The Ultimate Threshold - (1970) - shortstory by German Maksimov
• Invasion - (1970) - shortstory by Roman Podolny
• When You Return - (1967) - novelette by Igor Rosokhovatsky
• "One Less" - (1966) - shortstory by Igor Rosokhovatsky
• "We Played Under Your Window" - (1966) - shortstory by Vladimir Shcherbakov
• Preliminary Research - (1970) - shortstory by Ilya Varshavsky
• He Who Leaves No Trace - (1963) - novelette by Mikhail Yemtsev and Yeremey Parnov

Just released from prison after serving time for a false drug charge, Aletha Kingman decamps to Telluride, Colorado, for a fresh start. One day when she's sketching an abandoned miner's shack, she encounters a young girl, Callie, who's been transported from the turn of the century. Aletha follows Callie back in time to the rough-and-tumble mining town where the impoverished girl faces a future of disrepute and her brother Bram is caught in the bloody conflict between hard-working miners and their bosses. Together with her newfound friend, the enigmatic Cree, Aletha is determined to use her foresight from the future to make a difference in the past.

Suffused with the social and political history of the American West, The Threshold crosscuts between the disparate worlds of glitzy modern-day Telluride and its past incarnation as a gritty, turbulent mining town, brilliantly posing the question of whether we can--or should--alter the course of history.

This short story originally appeared in Lightspeed, June 2017.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

Humankind is spread across three thousand light years in a myriad of worlds and habitats known as the Human Entelechy. Linked by a network of wormholes with Earth at its center, it is the world Captain RJ Stone awakens to after a twelve-thousand-year cryogenic suspension.

Stone soon finds himself commanding the maiden voyage of the first spacecraft to break the light speed barrier: the FTL Further. In search of extraterrestrial intelligence, the landing party explores a distant pulsar only to be taken prisoner by the bloodthirsty Iron Mass, a religious sect exiled from the Entelechy millennia before. Now Stone and his crew must escape while they try to solve the riddle of the planet's network of stone towers that may be proof of the intelligence they've come to find.

The first in critically acclaimed author Chris Roberson's scintillating new series, Further: Beyond the Threshold is a fascinating ride to the farthest reaches of the imagination.

Over the hot southern land of Ashdod looms the shadow of Threshold, a massive pyramid which the Magi of Ashdod are building to propel themselves into Infinity, a plane of existence that holds the promise of technological magics and supposedly unimaginable power. For decades, thousands of slaves have lost their lives in the construction of this edifice. Now that this construction is almost complete, the Magi need only to add the finishing touches, and they will let nothing stand in the way of achieving their desire.

The Master of the Magi, a young and ambitious man, ready to do anything for power, sees the glassworker slave Tirzah as a plaything, a trifle to relieve the tensions of the day. He senses that under her placid façade Tirzah is hiding something, but try as he may to see beneath her surface, she remains an enigma.

What he does not know is that her secret is the knowledge of forbidden magic. That she senses the inherent power in glass and can communicate with it-and that the glass in Threshold screams to her in pain.

For it knows what neither Tirzah nor any of the Magi suspect. That something waits in Infinity, watching, biding its time, and when the final glass plate is laid and the capstone cemented in blood, it plans to use Threshold to step from Infinity into Ashdod...

Threshold of Eternity

Because of a twist in the structure of Time, three strangers were brought unexpectedly together: Red Hawkins of California, Chantal Vareze of London and a man from the 41st Century. Their meeting seemed an impossible prank of a universe gone mad - but it turned out to be quite otherwise.

For it seemed there was a war going on throughout space and time. A war fought by men of different epochs, on planets of different cultures, but for a cause that all could acknowledge - the very continued existence of creation itself.

And the coming together of these three very unlikely people - a modern man, a lovely girl and a futurian soldier - was to prove the master stroke of a super-science strategy that had already brought humanity to the THRESHOLD OF ETERNITY.

The War of Two Worlds

The twenty-year Earth-Mars war was finally over. What was left of Earth - its crumbled cities, its ruined farmlands - were firmly and completely under the rule of the Martian Archon. And this powerful planetary ruler was taking no chances: he intended to reduce the Terrans to a society of primitive agricultural tribes in less than a generation!

But for David Arnfeld, ex-spaceman and Earth Base Commander, there was something in the whole set-up which did not ring true. Why had both sides muffed countless chances to end that awful war in the first year or two? And why had the two planets gone to war in the first place?

In the back of Arnfeld's mind an idea was growing...perhaps there was yet a chance to save the doomed population of Earth. But if his idea was true, and proof was available, he had to work fast. Too many people were involved in this War of the Two Worlds to let one man upset their plans.

When the strange fossil she'd discovered had ended up giving her a trip to Mars, Helen Sutter thought she'd gone about as far as any paleontologist would ever go in her lifetime. But when you've also married A.J. Baker, overconfident super- sensor expert for the only private agency in space--the Ares Corporation--and your best friend Madeline Fathom Buckley is a former secret agent who's just signed on as the chief of security for the newly created and already embattled Interplanetary Research Institute of the United Nations, there's always somewhere farther to go.

The newest discoveries will take her, A.J., and their friends Jackie, Joe, and Madeline to the mysterious asteroid Ceres--and beyond, in a desperate race to Jupiter's perilous miniature system of radiation- bombarded moons. The next gold rush is on--for alien technology, hidden in lost bases around the system. And there are people willing to do anything to get it--even plan the first interplanetary war, four hundred million miles from home!

Chance Matthews is drawn into a battle between angels and monsters because of something in her possession-a fossil of a creature that couldn't possibly have ever existed. But it did. And still does.

They call them the "rat-catchers." They're the crew of the spaceship Daedalus, which an economically destitute Earth has dispatched on a mission to re-establish contact with its far-flung, long-lost colonies in space. Alex Alexander, the ship's biologist, together with his staff, must help solve the mysteries of human and alien ecosystems that he encounters light-years from home.

Dendra is a stable world, covered by a huge, unchanging forest--except that nothing living can really be free of change. The planet has no seasons, but its animal life still undergoes life-cycles involving birth, maturation, metamorphosis, and death. The Earth colony sent to tame the world has failed, at least in the terms expected of it, and seems beyond redemption; but the crew of the Daedalus still has to find out exactly why and how the program has gone wrong. Provided, of course, that they can survive the investigation itself!

In the final book of the #4 New York Times best-selling Neverwinter Saga, Drizzt Do'Urden navigates a winding path littered with secrets and lies. Tangled up in his companion Dahlia's dark secrets, the ties that once held her close to Drizzt threaten to tear as her bonds to his former foe, Artemis Entreri, continue to grow. Meanwhile, in the caverns of Gauntlgrym, the drow Tiago Baenre enlists the help of Bregan D'aerthe in his quest to destroy Drizzt. While making promises they may not keep, the agents of the elite drow mercenary group hide plans of their own. Determined to stand for what's right in the Realms once again, Drizzt forges a new road north--toward Icewind Dale. Will his new companions follow? Can he fight the darkness alone? Either way, he knows now where he's headed--back to the only place that's ever felt like home.

Maya's family has just moved from Idaho to Spores Ferry, Oregon. She's nervous about starting middle school and making new friends, but soon that's the last thing on her mind. First, a fairy flies into her room. Then it turns out that the kids in the apartment building next door do magic, and their basement is full of portals to other worlds. She's bursting with new experiences and delight... and secrets, because she can't breathe a word to her family, not even when she winds up taking care of an alien!

Imagine the family in Ingrid Law's Savvy seen through the eyes of a young Ray Bradbury. Cross the Threshold!

The first in a six-volume series, Volume 1: Threshold contains all of Zelazny's short works from his early years through the mid 1960s--a period of experimentation and growth that flowered into gems such as "A Rose for Ecclesiastes," "The Graveyard Heart," "The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth," and "He Who Shapes." The stories in this series are enriched by editors' notes and Zelazny's own words, taken from his many essays, describing why he wrote the stories and what he thought about them in retrospect.

Threshold is a space habitat between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter with a population of a quarter million. Run by a latter-day United Nations, one of its duties is to keep humans off of Earth, now a preserve.

Thousands of Muslim pilgrims from other systems are not pleased at being kept from Mecca. Their leader's daughter decides to experience Threshold's decadent (to her) society with the heir to a powerful exploration corporation, who is also smuggling illegal life forms into the habitat, thus threatening the stability of a conference on the rights of nonhuman races and ALIs - Artificial Living Individuals which the Muslims treat as they do their women: like property.

Captain Joseph South, on a test flight through interstellar spongespace, is translated 500 years into our future to arrive at Threshold just as all this is occurring. He has strange memories of a fly-by of system X-3, which match up with visions from an artifact brought to Threshold by a prospector.

This second novel of the Threshold trilogy has broken new ground - a military science fiction thriller on the high-tech cutting edge. Trust Territory returns to the grand hotel in space, where an alien force proposes an alliance to the humans.

In the grand conclusion to the high-tech Threshold trilogy, test pilot Joe South returns from a prolonged visit with The Unity - a wiser, older coalition of lifeforms. But the "benevolent" aliens have a perplexing request that will pit human political factions against each other.

Padlocked doors. Strange light fixtures. Mutant cockroaches.

There are some odd things about Nate's new apartment.

Of course, he has other things on his mind. He hates his job. He has no money in the bank. No girlfriend. No plans for the future. So while his new home isn't perfect, it's livable. The rent is low, the property managers are friendly, and th eodd little mysteries don't nag at him too much.

At least not until he meets Mandy, his neighbor across the hall, and notices something unusual about her apartment. And Xela's apartment. And Tim's, And Veek's.

Because every room in this old Los Angeles brownstone has a mystery or two. Mysteries that stretch back over a hundred years. Some of them are in plain sight. Some are behind locked doors. And all together these mysteries could mean the end of Nate and his friends.

Or the end of everything...

STEP INTO THE FOLD.

IT'S PERFECTLY SAFE.

The folks in Mike Erikson's small new England town would say he was just your average, everyday guy. And that's exactly how Mike likes it. Sure, the life he's chosen isn't much of a challenge to someone with his unique gifts, but he's content with his quiet and peaceful existence.

That is, until an old friend presents him with an irresistable mystery, one that Mike is uniquely qualified to solve: far out in the California desert, a team of DARPA scientist has invented a device they affectionately call the Albuquerque Door. Using a cryptic computer equation and magnetic fields to "fold" dimensions, it shrinks distances so a traveler can travel hundreds of feet in a single step.

The invention promises to make mankind's dreams of teleportation a reality. And, the scientists insist, travelling through the Door is completely safe.

Yet evidence is mounting that this miraculous machine isn't quite what it seems -- and that its creators are harboring a dangerous secret.

As his investigation draws him deeper into the puzzle, Mike begins to fear there is only one answer that makes sense, And if he's right, it may be only a matter of time before the project destroys... everything.

In the year 2243, the Moon belongs to the dead.

The largest graveyard in the solar system, it was the perfect solution to the overcrowding and environmental problems that had plagued mankind for centuries. And the perfect place for Cali Washington to run away from her past.

But when a mysterious meteor crashes into one of the Moon's cemeteries, Cali and her fellow Caretakers find themselves surrounded by a terrifying enemy force that outnumbers them more than a thousand to one. An enemy not hindered by the lack of air or warmth or sustenance.

An enemy that is already dead.

Now Cali and her compatriots must fight to survive. Because if they don't, everyone on the Moon may be joining the dead.

And maybe everyone on Earth, too....

Handsome, successful and fabulously wealthy Peter Cory had always assumed he'd make his own good fortune--until a strangely beautiful woman from a distant world revealed the truth.

The Visitors' next nefarious plot involves going below the edge of hearing, below the limits of Human vision... can they decimate the Human race by using our own physical attributes against us...?