Search Worlds Without End

A Meeting With Medusa:

In leading an expedition through the many-layered Jovian atmosphere in the hydrogen balloon craft Kon-Tiki, Captain Howard Falcon discovers a world where bioluminescent air plankton produce brilliant atmospheric sea-fire, predatory manta-ray creatures dominate the skies, and enormous jellyfish-like beings grow to be over a mile across.

Green Mars:

This is the original Novella that starts Robinson's Mars exploration and not the book of the same name.

This work is centered around climbing Olympus Mons, the tallest mountain on Mars (and the rest of the solar system).

Hardfought:

The Nebula award-winning short story by master SF writer Greg Bear.

Humans are engaged in a long war against an advanced alien race, the Senexi, but the possibility for peace may exist thanks to a young girl who learns the enemy's larger role and humanity's opportunity to evolve.

Cascade Point:

This Hugo award winning story is set in a Universe where the pilot of a star ship, as it travels between the stars, passes through "Cascade Points" where he or she will see a pattern of images showing how he or she might have appeared in a slightly different reality in which different major lifestyle choices had been made.

Born With The Dead:

His wife was among the rekindled dead now. He'd heard that she was on a plane to Zanzibar with five other rekindled dead. As a "warm" he was not really allowed to make contact with her. The dead liked to stay in their cold-cities. But he'd loved her so much when she was alive, he just had to try.

The Saliva Tree:

In the late nineteenth century, a modern-thinking young man and friend of H. G. Wells's resides in the old-fashioned town of Cottersall. When a meteor lands in a pond in the neighbouring farming district, the man decides to investigate the odd occurrences in the area, where the farmer family of his beloved comes into danger courtesy of the stranded alien(s).

Tango Charley and Foxtrot Remeo:

Lunar police officer Anna-Louise Bach helps save a girl surviving on a long-abandoned space station that is about to crash.

The Star Pit:

Space Travel is as easy as jumping on a ship - but only if you're golden...

No Truce With Kings:

Anderson's tale follows Colonel Mackenzie of the Army of the Pacific States of America as civil war breaks out in the wake of the President usurping power. Decades after a nuclear war, the inheritors of the United States of America - rather like the European kingdoms after Rome's fall - are feudal, vie for power, and hope to recapture the technological and, perhaps, political glories of the past.

But, with the Espers, a religion that promises the development of man's latent psychic powers, something new in human history may have been brought into the mix.

Ship of Shadows:

The setting is a spaceship; Spar is just a man who wants some teeth and better eyes. Old Doc says he may be able to use some old technology to give those to him. But then Spar gets involved with Crown, the local gangster. Oh, and people keep disappearing - maybe due to vampires.

Enemy Mine

Hugo- and Nebula-winning Novella which inspired the 20th Century Fox motion picture starring Dennis Quaid and Lou Gossett, Jr.

This is the story of a man, incomplete in himself, taught to be a human by his sworn enemy, an alien being who leaves with the human its most important possession: its future.

The time is the future and a savage war rages between Earth and the planet Dracon, which is inhabited by intelligent, lizard-like creatures. An earth pilot and a Dracon creature both crash-land on the fiery, barren planet Fyrine IV. The two sworn enemies can think only of destroying each other, until they come to realize the only way either will survive is for both to overcome their undying hatred.

Another Orphan

Hugo-nominated and Nebula-winning Novella

Patrick Fallon is an analyst working on the Chicago stock exchange. An ex 'longhair', the man found himself in need of real employment as the exigencies of life made their demands and the counter-culture movement drew to a close. Starting as a runner, Fallon worked his way up to stock analyst in a few years, and at the opening of the story is leading a standard yuppie life in the metro area with a girlfriend he's unsure he loves. Mundane to the max, Fallon feels little motivation or excitement in life, and moreover, is unaware of the lack.

Waking up on a whaling ship at sea in the opening pages, however, existence takes on a whole new dynamic - one he quickly realizes is a manifestation of Herman Melville's Moby Dick. The novel coming alive around him, life at sea in contrast to life in Chicago, and the questions which arise as a result, provide a context to existence Fallon never had. (synopsis by Speculiction)

Another Orphan can be read online for free here.

Screwtop:

In an alien prison, friends are the only chance you have to survive!

The Girl Who Was Plugged In:

The story takes place in the future, where almost everything is controlled by corporate interests, who control consumers through the celebrities they set up, and product placement. The protagonist, seventeen-year-old Philadelphia Burke is enlisted to become one of these celebrities. A suicide attempt lands her in a hospital where she comes to the attention of corporate scouts and is chosen to become a "Remote". A series of modifications and electronic implants allow her to use a sophisticated computer to control another body by remote control; a physically perfect fifteen-year-old girl. It is controlled through a satellite link by P. Burke's brain, which is still physically located in her original body.

The Nemesis From Terra:

Rick Urquahrt was going to conquer the turmoil-ridden planet of Mars. He was penniless and unknown, but there could be no doubt that he would rule the Red Planet - the ancient Martian mystic had made the prophecy, there was no way fate could cheat him of his prize.

But there were powerful interests on both Earth and Mars who didn't believe in prophecies - and they were going to undo Rick's future before it had a chance to begin.

Battle for the Stars:

A husband and wife find themselves at odds with each other when they become the center of a whirlpool of galactic intrigue.

The Ugly Little Boy:

A small Neanderthal boy is brought into the future for scientific experimentation. The nurse who takes care of him, starts to see him as something other than a experimental subject.

The [Widget], the [Wadget], and Boff:

Only Robin could really see the Aliens...

Sailing To Byzantium:

An Eternal party with the people of the future... in the cities of the past.

Seven American Nights:

The story unfolds with a diary of an Iranian visitor to the ruins of a future United States. The diary tells a story of an adventure in a land of mutants and ruined treasure for the taking.

Houston, Houston, Do You Read?:

The Astronauts had the "right stuff" to deal... with almost anything....

A US spacecraft with an all male crew is thrown forward in time to an Earth where all men have died from a plague.

Souls:

The Vikings Thought the sacking would be easy - but the Abbess was more than she seemed!

He Who Shapes:

Charles Render is a shaper, one of a small number of psychotherapists qualified, by his granite will and ultra-stability, to use the extraordinary device that enables him to to participate in, and control, his patients' dreams. But this is a dangerous therapy for the therapist and only his armour-plated integrity protects Render from too deep an involvement in the mental worlds of the damaged people he seeks to help. But then, Eileen Shallot, another therapist who is blind, asks him to help her 'see' by transferring from his mind to hers a world of colour and light. Render agrees but suddenly finds himself obsessed with Eileen and drawn into fantasies which, she controls.

The Infinity Box:

Suppose you could enter the mind of a beautiful woman; see what she sees, feel what she feels, and control her completely.

The Blind Geometer:

Sight and Insight are two very different things...

A blind mathematician in nearish-future Washington, DC, is approached by a colleague to aid in a strange puzzle in the shape of a woman who draws esoteric geometric diagrams and talks in jumbled phrases.

The New Atlantis:

The Saturn Game:

Imaginative roleplaying provides relief for some of the crew on the long, dull trip to Saturn. However their imaginary world becomes hazardously confused with the real one when a team begins the exploration of one of Saturn's moons.

Iceborn:

Pluto was the last place anyone expected to find life. That's why it's the last place they looked.

The Last Castle:

For 700 years the Meks served without complaint; they were indispensable, for no gentleman would demean himself with toil. But now they turn against the strongholds of civilization--Castle Halcyon, then Sea Island, Morninglight, and Maraval--one by one the proud castles of Earth fall; last standing is Castle Hagedorn.

Winner Nebula Award 1966, Hugo award 1967.

Nightwings:

A fabulous tale of pilgrimage and hope, betrayal and transformation by one of science fiction's greatest writers. Only at night on the winds of darkness can she soar. And it was Avluela the Flier's ebony and scarlet wings that lead the Watcher to the seven hills of the ancient city from which, in a moment of weakness, the Watcher failed his vigil, leaving the skies and deep space unguarded. The invaders came and conquered. With Avluela lost in the turmoil of conquest, the Watcher set out alone for the Holy City home of the Rememberers, keepers of the past. This is where the secret of Earth's salvation lay hidden in antiquity. On his journey the Watcher hoped to recapture his youth and find the soaring, beautiful woman he loved. But Avluela held more for the Watcher - and Earth - than love. Her wonder stretched beyond flight, for she knew the riddle that would free all men.

The Color of Neanderthal Eyes:

A space explorer finds a race of aquatic creatures that have no concept of war or fighting. He falls in love with one of their females. All is wonderful, until another species on the world begins attacking the peaceful creatures. The explorer has to teach them how to fight and how to wage a war, violating all his first-contact rules.

And Strange At Ecbatan the Trees:

A melancholic and allegorically inclined parable about a coming cataclysm that threatens a rigorously programmed (accomplished via genetic modification) and hierarchically rigid society.

Divide and Rule:

On a future Earth, where invading aliens have forced humanity to revert to a feudal society and conducting scientific research is punishable by death, it's good to be the heir to a duchy. Unless your brother has been burnt as punishment for heresy. And unless you intended to do something about it...

The Sword of Rhiannon:

Greed pulls the archaeologist Matt Carse into the forgotten tomb of the Martian god Rhiannon and plunges the unlikely hero into the Red Planet's fantastic past, when vast oceans covered the land and the legendary Sea-Kings ruled from terraced palaces of decadence and delight.

Vintage Season:

It's the most beautiful Spring the great metropolis has seen in modern memory. the sun-drenched air seems full of hope, of promise for a better tomorrow. But across the river, in the suburb on the ridge that overlooks the city, Oliver Wilson is perplexed. Who are those elegant, perfectly-poised, almost exotic people to whom he's rented his house? What impending event has drawn them here, to this sleepy suburb, as if it were the best seat in the house for the greatest show on Earth?

In Another Country:

For time-traveling tourists, the rule about affairs with the locals is clear--look but don't touch. To flout that rule is to invite endless paradoxes and complications--as the well-meaning Thimiroi finds out to his dismay, in this all-new tale by SF master Robert Silverberg, written especially for the Tor Doubles as a companion to C. L. Moore's famous original.

Ill Met In Lankhmar:

They are the two greatest heroes ever to walk the World of Nehwon: Fafhrd, the giant barbarian warrior from the Cold Waste; and the Gray Mouser, novice wizard, master thief, and swordsman unparalleled.

The Fair in Emain Macha:

The Pugnacious Peacemaker:

In this sequal to The Wheels of If, Park/Scoglund serves as a diplomat attempting to defuse a war between Tawantiinsuuju, his adopted world's still-existent Inca Empire and the Muslims who have colonized Brazil, known as the Emirate of the dar al-Harb in this timeline.

The Wheels of If:

New York lawyer Allister Park is inexplicably torn from his normal existence and thrust into a series of parallel universes. Each morning he discovers he has become someone else, in a world changed from his own, initially finding himself in worlds where the American Revolution failed and France won the Napoleonic Wars. Ultimately he finds himself a bishop in the alternate New York of New Belfast, in Vinland, a North America colonized by descendants of the Vikings and now divided between Norse-derived and native polities. He determines that this new world's differences from his own stem from two divergences in the course of history, relative to his own world.

Home is the Hangman::

A sentient space-exploration robot, lost years before, has apparently returned to Earth. One of its original designers has died under suspicious circumstances. Has the Hangman returned to kill its creators? The hero must find the Hangman and stop it, and time is running out.

We, In Some Strange Power's Employ, Move On A Rigorous Line:

This is the story of a group of futuristic outlaw bikers who don't want to join the world order symbolized by Global Power's electric grid.

Thieves' Carnival:

Prequeal to The Jewel of Bas.

The Jewel of Bas:

A quest to the Mountain of Life to save what remained by humanity from the machines that were bent on destroying them.

Riding The Torch:

Jofe D'mahl, a senso producer, is one of the chief entertainers aboard the generation torchship Brigadoon. Ego to the brim and the ship's main socialite, he has no time for the voidsuckers--the sullen men and women who go beyond the massive ship's hydrogen umbra to seek out new planets for its passengers to settle. Goaded into taking one such trip after a voidsucker news bulletin upstages his latest senso, however, D'mahl has the experience of his life. Cut off from all technology and social affairs of the Brigadoon, he is offered a new perspective on existence. Problem is, he also comes upon knowledge that unhinges his mindset regarding the Brigadoon's mission.

The Tin Soldier:

Can human love survive the distance between the Stars?

"Tin Soldier" tells the story of Maris, an ex-soldier who, following wounds sustained in battle, has received cybernetic implants that, as a side effect, slow his aging to "about five years for every hundred" (he is 115 years old as the story begins, though physically he looks "about twenty-five"), and Brandy (short for Branduin), a female starship crew member.

The novella follows the relationship that develops between these two people who fall in love, but through circumstances can only see each other for a few days every 25 years.

Elegy For Angels And Dogs:

A sequal to The Graveyard Heart: Decades later, the Set survives, still powerful, still glittery, still coolly apart from the common man. But history, all but unnoticed by these ageless celebrants, has brought war to the Solar System, along with incredible new scientific developments. Lamoral aspires to seize control of the Set, but how long can any of them afford to ignore the ever-changing future through which they dance?

The Graveyard Heart:

Decadent and aloof, the Part Set are the ultimate "in" crowd, cheating time via cryogenic cold-bunks, waking only for their spectacular entertainments and private scandals. What a way to live! Alvin Moore wants in, partly for the prestige, partly for the love of the beautiful Leota. But even as he schemes to win the approval of the Set, he has no idea of the intrigues, betrayals, and heartbreak that await him. For in a society without time, without want, the pursuit of pleasure can be a deadly business...

Fugue State:

Once you start forgetting, where do you stop?

The Death of Doctor Island:

A dreamy young boy, who is reading a SF novel modeled after The Island of Doctor Moreau.

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.

Eye for Eye:

Mick Winger is only seventeen -- and already he's killed over a dozen people. Not on purpose; he never meant to hurt anyone. But when Mick gets angry, people die, even the people he loves the most. Now he's on the run from his own terrible talent, and from those who would use his power for their own obscene purposes. But Mick is not alone. There are others like him. And if he will not join them, they will make him pay -- Eye for Eye.

The Tunesmith:

Erlin Baque is the last true musician on Earth. Commercial jingles have replaced real art. The Performers' Guild enforces mediocrity on pain of blacklisting. And the powerful overlords of business and industry are not about to let a lone tunesmith change this very profitable arrangement. But Basque has one weapon his enemies cannot resist: his music.

A Short Sharp Shock:

A man tumbles through wild surf, half drowned, to collapse on a moonlit beach. When he regains consciousness, he has no memory of who he is or where he came from. he know only that the woman who washed ashore with him has disappeared sometime in the night, and that he has awakened in a surreal landscape of savage beauty -- a mysterious watery world encircled by a thin spine of land. Aided by strange tribesmen, he will journey to the cove of the spine kings, a brutal race that has enslaved the woman and several of the tribesmen. That is only the beginning of his quest, as he struggles to find her identity in this wondrous and cruel land -- and seeks out the woman whose hold on his imagination is both unfathomable and unshakable.

The Dragon Masters:

The race of man is growing old, but it's not yet ready to die - not while there are dragons still to kill!

The cross-bred dragon armies of the Men of Aerlith are the most appalling horrors ever to threaten the sanity of our future:

Termagents ~ three hundred reptilian giants with six legs apiece, the most fecund breeders of them all

Jugglers ~ eighteen of them, growling amongst themselves, waiting for an opportunity to snap off a leg from any unwary groom

Murderers (striding and long-horned) ~ eighty-five of each, with scaly tails and eyes like crystals

Fiends ~ fifty-two powerful monsters, their tails tipped with spike steel balls

Blue Horrors, Basics, Spider Dragons...

Nanowire Time:

The Persistence of Vision:

In a 1990s buffeted with crises, the narrator, lacking any meaning to his life, finds a happy community of deaf-blinds. This story is a quest for the trancendant, couched in a questioning of whether physical disabilities can free people from the mundane.

THE LONGEST VOYAGE:

In search of the Aureate cities, Captain Rovic had brought the Golden Leaper halfway round the World. Weathering hurricanes and mutiny, he meant to do what no other ship's master had done: circumnavigate the glove and return to riches and glory. Then, on a distant, barbarous island, Rovic met a shipwrecked traveler who claimed to have come on an even longer voyage. But who could believe his tale - of a ship that sailed between the stars?

SLOW LIGHTNING:

A full-length original novel of alien contact, from a rising star of SF Ira and Gray found the egg on an abandoned ferryboat. It was wrinkled, with smears of red and yellow, and bigger than a basketball. They weren't sure why it was there, only that it must have been left there on purpose. The next day, the egg had grown ... Gray wouldn't guess what might be inside it, but Ira knew it had to be better than anything else he had on this rotten world. Then it hatched, and the real trouble began!

Naked to the Stars:

During an action on the third planet from Arcturus, soldier Cal Truent woke up in the hospital with a sixteen-hour hole in his memory. No one knows what it is that Cal has forgotten, but his superiors can't take the chance that it might be something deadly to his fellow soldiers -- and to Earth. Somehow Cal means to seek out whatever it is that his mind is resisting...

The Alien Way:

One man is mentally linked to an alien who is spearheading an invasion of Earth; a group of soldiers fight to win new space for Earth; and a small group of men fight against a machine that controls all life.

Run For The Stars:

The Kyben demolished Deald's World and their armada was heading for Earth. All that stood in their way was a man on Deald's World named Benno Tallant, about as lousy a candidate for hero as one could imagine: junkie, looter, coward, betrayer. The retreating Earth forces decide to make him the last man on Deald's World. They surgically implant a cataclysmic bomb in his body, turn him loose, and let the Kyben hunt him down.

See Benno Run. Run, Benno, Run Like Hell.

Echoes of Thunder:

No man, Mohawk or white, walks the high steel like John Stranger.

Bwana:

On the planet Kirinyaga, the descendants of the Kikuyu have resurrected the unspoiled ways of their African ancestors. And like their long-lost savannahs of ancient Earth, the grasslands of Kirinyaga harbor lethal beasts of prey. The chief, Koinnage, hires a hunter to reduce the swelling population of predatory hyena. But in the view of Koriba, aging mundumugu to the tribe, no beast of prey could pose a greater threat to the Kikuyu than the mighty offworld hunter brought in - over his strenuous objections - to slay those beasts.

Bully!:

In March 1909, Theodore Roosevelt went on a safari to central Africa. In this fictionalized account of that trip, Mike Resnick takes us on an amusing "what-if" with Roosevelt deciding to "liberate" the native Africans from Belgian rule and to set up a model democratic state in the heart of Africa.

Contents of Tor Double:

• 1 - Introduction: Beauty, Stupidity, Injustice, and Science Fiction - essay by Damon Knight (variant of Beauty, Stupidity, Injustice, and Science Fiction 1990)
• 19 - Rule Golden - (1954) - novella by Damon Knight
• 103 - Double Meaning - (1953) - novella by Damon Knight Note: An expanded version of this story was published under the title "The Rithian Terror" by Ace Books(1965).

Rule Golden:

As a newspaper publisher, Robert James Dahls found the news disconcerting; in fact, inexplicable. News items like two boxers simultaneously knocking each other out, prison guards sick and unable to guard the prisoners, policemen shooting fleeing culprits and collapsing themselves, battered wives with husbands suffering the same injuries that they inflicted.

Dahl catches wind of a large experimental facility that is being led by the U.S. Department of Defense. His suspicions coincide with the strange, beyond-coincidental behavior that he's been observing. For what's on the grounds of the facility is much more radical than anything that was claimed to be found in Roswell. Not just an alien but one that has a strange effect on the human race. Where the Golden Rule in reversed: Be done by as you do to others. How can we get along without conflict? What will happen to the human race? Dahl soon finds himself a fugitive helping a bizarre alien save or destroy the Earth!

Double Meaning:

A psychological thriller that follows an Earth security officer in the future who is racing against time to locate an alien spy.

First published in 1953, this is probably the first sci-fi book to feature a surveillance drone.

Silent Thunder:

A techno thriller. A unique mix of Sci-Fi and historic fiction. It's said to resonate with political events of the 1991 timeframe.

Universe:

This novelette was combined with its sequel, "Common Sense", to form "Orphans of the Sky" in 1963.

The gigantic, cylindrical generation ship Vanguard, originally destined for "Far Centaurus", is cruising without guidance through the interstellar medium as a result of a long-ago mutiny that killed most of the officers. Over time, the descendants of the surviving loyal crew have forgotten the purpose and nature of their ship and lapsed into a pre-technological culture marked by superstition. They come to believe the "Ship" is the entire universe, so that "To move the ship" is considered an oxymoron, and references to the Ship's "voyage" are interpreted as religious metaphor. They are ruled by an oligarchy of "officers" and "scientists". Most crew members are simple illiterate farmers, seldom or never venturing to the "upper decks" where the "muties" (an abbreviation of "mutants" or "mutineers") dwell. Among the crew, all identifiable mutants are killed at birth.

Conjure Wife:

Witchcraft. Norman Saylor considered it nothing but superstition, until he learned that his own wife was a practicing sorceress. Even still, he refuses to accept the truth that every woman knows... that in the secret occult warfare that governs our lives, witchcraft is a matter of life and death.

Our Lady of Darkness:

Middle-aged San Francisco horror writer Franz Westen is rediscovering ordinary life following a long alcoholic binge. The one day, peering at his apartment window from a top a nearby hill, he sees a pale, brown thing lean out his window... and wave.

This encounter sends Westen on a quest through ancient books and modern streets, for the dark forces and paramental entities that thrive amidst the towering skyscrapers... and, meanwhile, the entities are also looking for him.