Search Worlds Without End

America, one century on: a warmer climate is causing vast movements of people. Droughts, floods and hurricanes force entire populations to simply abandon their homes. Tensions are mounting between north and south, and some northern states are threatening to close their borders against homeless fellow-Americans from the south.

Against this backdrop, an ambitious young British-born publicist, Holly Peacock, meets a new client, the charismatic Senator Slaymaker, a politician whose sole mission is to keep America together, reconfiguring the entire country in order to meet the challenge of the new climate realities as a single, united nation. When he runs for President, Holly becomes his right hand woman, doing battle on the whisperstream, where stories are everything and truth counts for little.

But can they bring America together - or have they set the country on a new, but equally devastating, path?

South America, 1990. Ben Ronson, a British police officer, arrives in a mysterious forest to investigate a spate of killings of Duendes. These silent, vaguely humanoid creatures - with long limbs and black button eyes - have a strange psychic effect on people, unleashing the subconscious and exposing their innermost thoughts and fears.

Ben becomes fascinated by the Duendes, but the closer he gets, the more he begins to unravel, with terrifying results...

Beneath the World, A Sea is a tour de force of modern fiction - a deeply searching and unsettling novel about the human subconscious, and all that lies beneath.

This short story originally appeared in Interzone, #172 October 2001, and was reprinted in Lightspeed, July 2017. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Nineteenth Annual Collection (2002), edited by Gardner Dozois.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

Charles Bowen is an immigration officer with a difference: the migrants he deals with don't come from other countries but from other universes. Known as shifters, they materialize from parallel timelines, bringing with them a mysterious drug called slip which breaks down the boundary between what is and what might have been, and offers the desperate and the dispossessed the tantalizing possibility of escape.

When a shifter-led gang commits murder in the name of the old Norse pantheon and then uses slip to escape justice, Charles and his girlfriend Jaz decide to cross to another universe themselves in a bid to confront the problem at source and prevent their own society from degenerating into tyranny.

But is that Charles' real motive, or does he have reasons which even he can't clearly see?

This short story originally appreared in Interzone, #198 May-June 2005. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Third Annual Collection (2006), edited by Gardner Dozois. The story is included in the collection The Turing Test (2008).

Illyria is a scientific utopia, an enclave of logic and reason founded off the Greek coast in the mid-twenty first century as a refuge from the Reaction, a wave of religious fundamentalism sweeping the planet. Yet to George Simling, first generation son of a former geneticist who was left emotionally and psychically crippled by the persecution she encountered in her native Chicago, science-dominated Illyria is becoming as closed-minded and stifling as the religion-dominated world outside ...

The Holy Machine is Chris Beckett's first novel. As well as being a story about love, adventure and a young man learning to mature and face the world, it deals with a question that is all too easily forgotten or glibly answered in science fiction: what happens to the soul, to beauty, to morality, in the absence of God?

This short story originally appeared in Interzone, #153 March 2000. It can also be found in the anthology Year's Best SF 6 (2000), edited by David G. Hartwell. The story is included in the collection The Turing Test (2008).

Contents:

• Atomic Truth - (2009) - shortstory
• Day 29 - (2011) - novelette
• Greenland - (2008) - shortstory
• Johnny's New Job - (2010) - shortfiction
• Our Land - (2010) - shortstory
• Poppyfields - (2008) - shortstory
• Rat Island - (2008) - shortstory
• The Caramel Forest - (2012) - shortstory
• The Desiccated Man - (2010) - shortfiction
• The Famous Cave Paintings on Isolus 9 - (2009) - shortfiction
• The Peacock Cloak - (2010) - shortstory
• Two Thieves - (2011) - novelette

This short story originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, June 2010, and was reprinted in Clarkesworld, Issue 109, October 2015. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Eighth Annual Collection (2011), edited by Gardner Dozois. The story is included in the collection The Peacock Cloak (2013).

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

Contents:

• Introduction - essay by Alastair Reynolds
• The Turing Test - (2002) - shortstory
• The Warrior Half-and-Half - (2001) - shortfiction (1995)
• Monsters - (2003) - shortstory
• The Gates of Troy - (2000) - shortfiction
• The Perimeter - (2005) - novelette
• Valour - (1999) - shortstory
• Snapshots of Apirania - (2000) - shortfiction
• Piccadilly Circus - (2005) - shortstory
• Jazamine in the Green Wood - (1994) - shortstory
• Dark Eden - (2006) - novelette
• We Could be Sisters - (2004) - shortstory
• La Macchina - (1991) - shortstory
• Karel's Prayer - (2006) - shortfiction
• The Marriage of Sky and Sea - shortfiction (2000)

This novelette originally appeared in Interzone, #180 June-July 2002. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twentieth Annual Collection (2003), edited by Gardner Dozois.

'Tomorrow I'm going to begin my novel...'

A would-be author has taken time out from life in the city to live in a cabin by a river and write a novel. And not just any novel. A novel that will avoid all the pitfalls and limitations of other novels, a novel that will include everything.

At first these new surroundings are so idyllic that it's hard to find the motivation to get started. And then, in all its brutality, the outside world intervenes...

Ranging constantly backwards and forwards in time and space, Tomorrow becomes a restless search for meaning in a precarious and elusive world.

This short story originally appeared in Interzone, #141 March 1999. It can also be found in the anthology Year's Best SF 5 (2000), edited by David G. Hartwell. The story is included in the collection The Turing Test (2008).

You live in Eden. You are a member of the Family, one of 532 descendants of Angela and Tommy. You shelter beneath the light and warmth of the Forest's lantern trees, hunting woollybuck and harvesting tree candy. Beyond the forest lie the treeless mountains of the Snowy Dark and a cold so bitter and a night so profound that no man has ever crossed it. The Oldest among you recount legends of a world where light came from the sky, where men and women made boats that could cross between worlds. One day, the Oldest say, they will come back for you.

You live in Eden. You are a member of the Family, one of 532 descendants of two marooned explorers. You huddle, slowly starving, beneath the light and warmth of geothermal trees, confined to one barely habitable valley of a startlingly alien, sunless world. After 163 years and six generations of incestuous inbreeding, the Family is riddled with deformity and feeblemindedness. Your culture is a infantile stew of half-remembered fact and devolved ritual that stifles innovation and punishes independent thought. You are John Redlantern. You will break the laws of Eden, shatter the Family and change history. You will be the first to abandon hope, the first to abandon the old ways, the first to kill another, the first to venture in to the Dark, and the first to discover the truth about Eden.

Civilization has come to the alien, sunless planet its inhabitants call Eden.

Just a few generations ago, the planet's five hundred inhabitants huddled together in the light and warmth of the Forest's lantern trees, afraid to venture out into the cold darkness around them.

Now, humanity has spread across Eden, and two kingdoms have emerged. Both are sustained by violence and dominated by men - and both claim to be the favored children of Gela, the woman who came to Eden long ago on a boat that could cross the stars, and became the mother of them all.

When young Starlight Brooking meets a handsome and powerful man from across Worldpool, she believes he will offer an outlet for her ambition and energy. But she has no inkling that she will become a stand-in for Gela herself, and wear Gela's fabled ring on her own finger--or that in this role, powerful and powerless all at once, she will try to change the course of Eden's history.

Angie Redlantern is the first to spot the boats - five abreast with men in metal masks and spears standing proud, ready for the fight to come. As the people of New Earth declare war on the people of Mainground, a dangerous era has dawned for Eden. After generations of division and disagreement, the two populations of Eden have finally broken their tentative peace, giving way to bloodshed and slaughter. Angie must flee with her family across the pitch black of Snowy Dark to the place where it all started, the stone circle where the people from Earth first landed, where the story of Gela - the mother of them all - began.

It is there that Angie witnesses the most extraordinary event, one that will change the history of Eden forever. It will alter their future and re-shape their past. It is both a beginning and an ending.

It is the true story of Eden.

This short story originally appeared in Interzone, #46 April 1991. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Ninth Annual Collection (1992), edited by Gardner Dozois, and Robots (2005), edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois. The story is included in the collection The Turing Test (2008).