Search Worlds Without End

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Chasing Shadows: Visions of Our Coming Transparent World (2017), edited by David Brin and Stephen W. Potts. It can also be found in the anthology The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Twelve (2018), edited by Jonathan Strahan.

This story can be found in Garnder Dozois' anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Second Annual Collection (2015)

Read the full story for free at Tor.com

This novelette originally appeared in the anthology Fast Forward 2 (2008), edited by Lou Anders. It can also be found in the anthologies Year's Best SF 14 (2009), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer, and Loosed Upon the World: The Saga Anthology of Climate Fiction (2015), edited by John Joseph Adams. The story is included in the Buckell collection Mitigated Futures (2016).

Young Rue Cassels of the Cycler Compact -- a civilization based around remote brown dwarf stars -- is running from her bullying brother, who has threatened to sell her into slavery. Fleeing in a shuttle spacecraft from the sparsely populated and austere comet-mining habitat she has lived in her whole life, she spots a distant, approaching object, and stakes a legal claim to it. It is not the valuable comet she hoped for but something even more wonderful, an abandoned Cycler starship.

Her discovery unleashes a fury of action, greed, and interstellar intrigue as many factions attempt to take advantage of the last great opportunity to revitalize - and perhaps control - the Compact.

This is the story of Rue's quest to visit and claim this ship and its treasures, set against a background of warring empires, strange alien artifacts, and fantastic science. It is a story of hope and danger, of a strange and compelling religion, Permanence, unique to this star-faring age, and of the re-birth of life and belief in a place at the edge of forever.

Sura Neelin is on the run from her creditors, from her past, and her father's murderers. She can't get a job, she can't get a place to live, she can't even walk down the street: the total surveillance society that is mid-21st century America means that every camera and every pair of smart glasses is her enemy.

But Sura might have a chance in the alternate reality of the games. People can disappear in the LARP game worlds, into the alternate economy of Notchcoin and blockchains. The people who build the games also program the surveillance networks -- she just needs an introduction, and the skills to play.

Turns out, she has very valuable skills, and some very surprising friends.

This novelette originally appeared in the anthology Reach for Infinity (2014), edited by Jonathan Strahan. It can also be found in the anthologies Loosed Upon the World: The Saga Anthology of Climate Fiction (2015), edited by John Joseph Adams, and The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Nine (2015), edited by Jonathan Strahan.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Engineering Infinity (2010), edited by Jonathan Strahan, and was reprinted in Clarkesworld Magazine, #100 January 2015. It can also be found in the anthologies Year's Best SF 17 (2012), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Kramer, and The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Ninth Annual Collection (2012), edited by Gardner Dozois.

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Tesseracts 8 (1999), edited by Candas Jane Dorsey and John Clute. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Seventeenth Annual Collection (2000), edited by Gardner Dozois. It is included in the collection The Engine of Recall (2005).

This novella originally appeared in the audio anthology METAtropolis (2008), edited by John Scalzi. It can also be found in the anthologies Year's Best SF 16 (2011), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer, and Twenty-First Century Science Fiction (2013), edited by David G. Hartwell and Patrick Nielsen Hayden.

Every thirty years, ten billion visitors overrun Earth during one month of madness: partying, polluting, and brawling. In between, the world is ruled by the Million; the inheritors and custodians of all of humanity's wealth and history, they lead unimaginable lives of privilege and wealth, and they see it as their due.

Gavin Penn-of-Chaffee is an illegal child--a visitor hidden among the Million. When the family that raised him in secret is torn apart, Gavin must impersonate a dead boy to survive. What he doesn't know is that his new identity is expected at the School of Auditors--the Million's feared police force, sworn to find and capture outcasts like him to keep the peace. In order to solve the murder of his adoptive father, Gavin must keep his disguise and his wits intact within the stronghold of those threatened by his very existence.

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.

Karl Schroeder returns to the same distant future in which Ventus was set, but employing a broader canvas, to tell the story of Teven Coronal, a ringworld with a huge multiplicity of human civilizations. Brilliant but troubled Livia Kodaly is Teven's only hope against invaders both human and superhuman who would destroy its fragile ecologies and human diversity.

After terrifying and titanic struggles, a godlike artificial intelligence gone rogue has finally been destroyed. But not before it scattered seeds of itself throughout the galaxy.

On the terraformed planet Ventus, benign AIs -- the godlike Winds – which shaped and guarded its transformation, have fallen silent. Calandria May is sent down to the surface where she quickly finds that an extension of the rogue AI, a cyborg called Armiger, has planted a strange and powerful device in a young man named Jordan Mason. Jordan has visions. He is desperate to find their meaning and source -- desperate enough to risk awakening the Winds, perhaps invoking the power that can destroy technology to protect the environment they created.

Ventus is an epic journey across a fascinating planet with two big mysteries -- why have the Winds fallen silent? And is Armiger, or Jordan, carrying a Resurrection Seed?

This novelette originally appeared in the anthology Eclipse Two: New Science Fiction and Fantasy (2008), edited by Jonathan Strahan. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Sixth Annual Collection (2009), edited by Gardner Dozois.

It is the distant future. The world known as Virga is a fullerene balloon three thousand kilometers in diameter, filled with air, water, and aimlessly floating chunks of rock. The humans who live in this vast environment must build their own fusion suns and towns that are in the shape of enormous wood and rope wheels that are spun for gravity.

Young, fit, bitter, and friendless, Hayden Griffin is a very dangerous man. Hes come to the city of Rush in the nation of Slipstream with one thing in mind: to take murderous revenge for the deaths of his parents six years ago. His target is Admiral Chaison Fanning, head of the fleet of Slipstream, which conquered Haydens nation of Aerie years ago. And the fact that Haydens spent his adolescence living with pirates doesnt bode well for Fannings chances.

Venera Fanning was last seen falling into nothingness at the end of Sun of Suns. Now, in Queen of Candesce, Venera finds herself plunging through the air between the artificial continents of Virga, far from home and her husband, who may or may not be alive. Landing in the ancient nation of Spyre, Venera encounters new enemies and new friends (or at least convenient allies). She must quickly learn who she can trust, and who she can manipulate in order to survive. Queen of Candesce is her story.

Return to Virga, a bubble universe artificially separated from our own future universe, and the setting of Sun of Suns and Queen of Candesce.

Chaison Fanning, the admiral of a fleet of warships, has been captured and imprisoned by his enemies, but is suddenly rescued and set free. He flees through the sky to his home city to confront the ruler who betrayed him. And perhaps even to regain his lovely, powerful, and subversive wife, Venera, who he has not seen since she fled with the key to the artificial sun at the center of Virga, Candesce.

Schroeder sets a whole new standard for hard SF space opera.

In an ocean of weightless air where sunlight has never been seen, only the running lights of the city of Sere glitter in the dark. One woman, Leal Hieronyma Maspeth, history tutor and dreamer, lives and dreams of love among the gaslit streets and cafés. And somewhere in the abyss of wind and twisted cloud through which Sere eternally falls, a great voice has begun speaking.

As its cold words reach even to the city walls—and as outlying towns and travelers’ ships start to mysteriously disappear—only Leal has the courage to try to understand the message thundering from the distance. Even the city’s most famous and exotic visitor, the sun lighter and hero named Hayden Griffin, refuses to turn aside from his commission to build a new sun for a foreign nation. He will not become the hero that Leal knows the city needs; so in the end, it is up to her to listen, and ultimately reply, to the worldwasp.

A world of endless sky, with no land, no gravity: this is Virga. Beginning in the seminal science fiction novel Sun of Suns, the saga of this striking world has introduced us to the people of stubborn pride and resilience who have made Virga their home; but also, always lurking beyond the walls of the world, to the mysterious threat known only as Artificial Nature. In The Sunless Countries, history tutor Leal Hieronyma Maspeth became the first human in centuries to learn the true nature of this threat. Her reward was exile, but now, in Ashes of Candesce, Artificial Nature makes its final bid to destroy Virga, and it is up to Leal to unite the quarrelling clans of her world to fight the threat.

Ashes of Candesce brings together all the heroes of the Virga series, and draws the diverse threads of the previous storylines together into one climactic conflict. Blending steampunk styling with a far-future setting and meditations on the posthuman condition, Ashes of Candesce mixes high adventure and cutting-edge ideas in a fitting climax to one of science fiction's most innovative series.