Search Worlds Without End

A collection of short stories originally published under the author's previous name Alan DeNiro.

A wide-ranging and assured, surprising, and funny debut collection. Alan DeNiro's gently surreal stories use a toolbox of genres (including science fiction and fantasy) to grapple with issues of identity, family, gender, and politics.

• The Fourth - short story
• Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead - short story
• If I Leap I Shall Fall Into My Hands - short story
• Our Byzantium - short story
• The Centaur - short story
• Cuttlefish - short story
• The Caliber - short story
• The Excavation - short story
• A Keeper - short story
• Fuming Woman - short story
• The Friendly Giants - short story
• Quiver - novelette
• Child Assassin - short story
• Salting the Map - short story
• The Exchanges - novelette

Sturgeon Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, October-November 2013. The story can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2014, edited by Rich Horton. It is included in the collection Tyrannia and Other Renditions (2013).

I remember the first time I began to understand that things might not be the same again.

What's a girl to do when her world is invaded by warriors from the ancient world? That's the problem faced by sixteen-year-old Macy, who sees her quiet, normal life in suburban Minnesota turned upside down when things that should never be possible begin to transform the landscape all around her. The cable stops working, the phone lines die – and then the horsemen come to town. It's not the same America that she last went to sleep in.

Ticketed to a refugee camp by the marauding Scythian armies, Macy and her family come to believe that heading down the Mississippi by boat is their one escape from the encroaching madness. But as they make their way downriver, Macy's world just keeps getting stranger, and the wooden submarines, wasp-borne plagues, and talking dogs are the least of her problems: For in this upside-down world, old identities warp and family bonds are sorely tested.

In these 11 stories – and the weird spaces in between – people of all kinds struggle to free themselves from conventions and constraints both personal and political. Places ranging from the farthest reaches of outer space to the creepy abandoned farmhouse in the middle of nowhere become battlegrounds for change and growth – sometimes at a massive cost.

Tyranny takes many forms, some more subtle than others, and it is up to the reader to travel along with the characters, who improvise and create their own renditions of freedom.

DeNiro uses language like no other. This second collection of stories explores our relationship to art, history, and looks at how everyday events, personal and political, never cease to leave us off balance.

Table of Contents:

• Tyrannia - (2009)
• A Rendition - (2013)
• Cudgel Springs - (2013)
• (*_*?) ~ ~ ~ ~ (-_-) : The Warp and the Woof - (2009)
• Plight of the Sycophant - (2007)
• Dancing in a House - (2013)
• Highly Responsive to Prayers - (2013)
• Walking Stick Fires - (2011)
• The Flowering Ape - (2012)
• Moonlight is Bulletproof - (2013)
• The Wildfires of Antarctica - (2013)
• Tyrannia (II) - (2013)
• The Philip Sidney Game - (2013)

This short story originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, June 2011. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2012, edited by Rich Horton. The story is included in the collection Tyrannia and Other Renditions (2013).

The City doesn't let certain people inside its walls. It's a place where emotions can become visible, but it flees the approach of a makeshift army who want to enter. Two of the trans women in this army forge a deep, complicated, and at times contentious friendship spanning thirty years. They must deal with not only the City's literal and figurative gatekeeping, but also other, even more sinister forces that use necromancy against them.

As the narrator and her friend's lives are sundered apart, they must come to terms with what it means to not have a home, and what it means to be queer and aching for such a home.