Search Worlds Without End

In a future world of extreme climate change, Perth, Western Australia's capital city, has been abandoned. Most people were evacuated to the East by the late '30s and organised infrastructure and services have gone.

A few thousand obstinate and independent souls cling to the city and to the southern towns. Living mostly by night to endure the fierce temperatures, they are creating a new culture in defiance of official expectations. A teenage girl stolen from her family as a child; a troupe of street actors who affect their new culture with memories of the old; a boy born into the wrong body; and a teacher who is pushed into the role of guide tell the story of The Nightside.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction by Marianne de Pierres
• The Painted Girl
• Nation of the Night
• Paper Dragons
• The Schoolteacher's Tale

Thousands of years ago, Julia Agrippina wrote the true history of her family, the Caesars. The document was lost, or destroyed, almost immediately. (It included more monsters than you might think.)

Hundreds of years ago, Fanny and Mary ran away from London with a debauched poet and his sister. (If it was the poet you are thinking of, the story would have ended far more happily, and with fewer people having their throats bitten out.)

Sometime in the near future, a community will live in a replica Roman city built in the Australian bush. It's a sight to behold. (Shame about the manticores.)

Further in the future, the last man who guards the secret history of the world will discover that the past has a way of coming around to bite you. (He didn't even know she had a thing for pointy teeth.)

The world is in greater danger than you ever suspected. Women named Julia are stronger than they appear. Don't let your little brother make out with silver-eyed blondes. Immortal heroes really don't fancy teenage girls. When love dies, there's still opera. Family is everything. Monsters are everywhere. Yes, you do have to wear the damned toga.

History is not what you think it is.

LOVE AND ROMANPUNK.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction by Helen Merrick
• Julia Agrippina's Secret Family Bestiary
• Lamia Victoriana
• The Patrician
• Last of the Romanpunks
• Afterword

Why are certain subjects so difficult to talk about?
What is justice?
Why do writers think that other people's lives are fair game?
And what do we really know about the first chemist?

A story about history, women, science (and also the demonic); a crime story, based upon a true crime; a realist satire of the supposedly sex-savvy; and a story exploring lies, and the space between the real and the unreal. Welcome to the worlds of Lucy Sussex, and to her many varied modes.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction by Karen Joy Fowler
• Alchemy
• Fountain of Justice
• The Story of O
• Thief of Lives

Hate superheroes?
Yeah. They probably hate you, too.

'There are two kinds of people with lawyers on tap, Mr Grey. The powerful and the corrupt.'
'Thank you.'
'For implying you're powerful?'
'For imagining those are two different groups.'

From Crawford Award nominee Deborah Biancotti comes this sinister short story suite, a pocketbook police procedural, set in a world where the victories are
only relative, and the defeats are absolute. Bad Power celebrates the worst kind of powers both supernatural and otherwise, in the interlinked tales of five people - and how far they'll go.

If you like Haven and Heroes, you'll love Bad Power.

Family drama can be found anywhere: in kitchens, in cafes. Derelict hotels, showground rides. Even dungeons far below ruined Hungarian castles. (Okay, especially in Hungarian dungeons.)

Old family fights can go on forever, especially if you're undead. If an opportunity came to save someone else's family, the way you couldn't save your own, would you take it?

Your family might include ghosts, or zombies, or vampires. Maybe they just have allergies. Nobody's perfect.

Family history can weigh on the present like a stone. But the thing about families is, you can't escape them. Not ever. And mostly, you don't want to.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction by Seanan McGuire
• Stalemate
• Thrall
• The Truth About Brains
• Showtime

From Bram Stoker Award nominee Kaaron Warren, comes Book 6 in the Twelve Planets collection series including the 2013 Shirley Jackson Award winning novella "Sky".

Country road, city street, mountain, creek. These are stories inspired by the beauty, the danger, the cruelty, emptiness, loneliness and perfection of the Australian landscape.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction by Gemma Files
• Mountain
• Creek
• Road
• Sky

A presence haunts an old dresser in an inner-city share house. Shining sun-people lure children from their carefree beachside lives. Sheela-na-gigs colonise a middle-aged man's outer and inner worlds. And a girl with a heavy conscience seeks relief in exile on the Treeless Plain.

These stories from four-time World Fantasy Award winner Margo Lanagan are all set in Australia, a myth-soaked landscape both stubbornly inscrutable and crisscrossed by interlopers' dreamings. Explore four littoral and liminal worlds, a-crackle with fears and possibilities.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction by Jane Yolen
• The Duchess Dresser
• Isles of the Sun
• Bajazzle
• Significant Dust

An Australian Air Force base patrolled by werewolves. A planet where wages are paid in luck. A future where copies are made of criminals to interpret their dark dreams. A medieval cavalry of mothers who are only permitted to take as many lives as they have created.

In every world, an imbalance of power. Something terribly askew between women and men, humans and wolves, citizens and constructs, light and dark.

In every world, asymmetry.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction by Nancy Kress
• After Hours
• Zadie, Scythe of the West
• Wish Me Luck
• Seven Days in Paris

An intimate, unsettling collection from award-winning author Kirstyn McDermott.

A creepy wooden dog that refuses to play dead.
A gifted crisis counsellor and the mysterious, melancholy girl she cannot seem to reach.
A once-successful fantasy author whose life has become a horror story - now with added unicorns.
An isolated woman whose obsession with sex dolls takes a harrowing, unexpected turn.

Four stories that will haunt you long after their final pages are turned.

'Kirstyn McDermott's prose is darkly magical, insidious and insistent. Once her words get under your skin, they are there to stay.' - Angela Slatter, British Fantasy Award-winning author of Sourdough and Other Stories

'The supernatural lurks in the shadows of Kirstyn McDermott's first collection, an ambiguous or mundane presence that keeps these four quasi-horror stories feeling palpably real ... McDermott's poignant stories defy genre labelling, being primarily about damaged people seeking solace, escape, or meaning. The otherworldly merely gives them a chance to find it, and makes these unflinching but touching stories even more evocative and irresistible.' - Aurealis, Issue 64

Table of Contents:

• Introduction by Kij Johnson
• What Amanda Wants
• Horn
• Caution: Contains Small Parts
• The Home for Broken Dolls

Secret lives, replete with possibilities. Elsewhere exists as a better place, in a better time, for a better life. The trick is how to get there from here. These stories give the answers. Share in the secret lives of books. Fly to Mars, the first stage, perhaps, in the onward journey to elsewhere. Hear the music of the heavenly spheres and be forever changed, providing the bad guys don't hear it first. Discover Gaia may not be quite what we think she is. Discover the universe is a rather big place. Embrace Utopia for women too, if only ...

Table of Contents:

• Introduction by L. Timmel Duchamp
• The Secret Lives of Books
• Kiddofspeed
• Qasida
• The Kairos Effect
• The Slut and the Universe

In The Female Factory, procreation is big business. Children are a commodity few women can afford.

Hopeful mothers-to-be try everything. Fertility clinics. Pills. Wombs for hire. Babies are no longer made in bedrooms, but engineered in boardrooms. A quirk of genetics allows lucky surrogates to carry multiple eggs, to control when they are fertilised, and by whom--but corporations market and sell the offspring. The souls of lost embryos are never wasted; captured in software, they give electronics their voice. Spirits born into the wrong bodies can brave the charged waters of a hidden billabong, and change their fate. Industrious orphans learn to manipulate scientific advances, creating mothers of their own choosing.

From Australia's near-future all the way back in time to its convict past, these stories spin and sever the ties between parents and children.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction by Amal El-Mohtar
• Vox
• Baggage
• All the Other Revivals
• The Female Factory

Tulliæn spans a fractured mountaintop, where the locals lie and the tourists come to die. Try the honey.

Briskwater crouches deep in the shadow of a dam wall. Ignore the weight of the water hanging overhead, and the little dead girl wandering the streets. Off with you, while you still can.

In Haverny Wood the birds drink blood, the dogs trade their coughings for corpses, the lost children carve up their bodies to run with the crows, and the townsfolk stitch silence into their spleens. You mustn't talk so wild.

The desert-locked outpost of Boundary boasts the famed manufacturers of flawless timepieces; those who would learn the trade must offer up their eyes as starting materials. Look to your pride: it will eat you alive.

Sooner or later, in every community, fate demands its dues -- and the currency is blood.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction by Kate Elliott
• Wages of Honey
• The Briskwater Mare
• The Miseducation of Mara Lys
• Cherry Crow Children of Haverny Wood