Search Worlds Without End

Michael Blumlein is one of the most original and innovative contemporary writers of speculative fiction, and this new volume collects all his short fiction published between 1993 and 2016.

Contains:

• "Twenty-Two and You"
• "California Burning"
• "Paul and Me"
• "Revenge"
• "Snow in Dirt"
• "The Big One"
• "Hymenoptera"
• "Greedy for Kisses"
• "Fidelity: A Primer"
• "Isostasy"
• "Strategy for Conflict Avoidance: Memo to George W, Our Commander-in-Chief"
• "Bird Walks in New England"
• "The Roberts"
• "Know How, Can Do"
• "Bloom"
• "Success"
• "Choose Poison, Choose Life"

Tiptree nominated story originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, September 2000. Later anthologized in People of the Book: A Decade of Jewish Science Fiction & Fantasy, edited by Sean Wallace and Rachel Swirsky (2010) and collected in What the Doctor Ordered (2013), All I Ever Dreamed (2017) and Thoreau's Microscope (2018).

This short story originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, December 2001. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Nineteenth Annual Collection (2002), edited by Gardner Dozois, and Science Fiction: The Best of 2001 (2002), edited by Robert Silverberg and Karen Haber. The story is included in the collections What the Doctor Ordered (2013) and Thoreau's Microscope (2018)

Read the full story for free at the author's website (*.pdf).

Gunjita and Cav are in orbit.

R&D scientists for pharmaceutical giant Gleem Galactic, they are wealthy enough to participate in rejuvenation: rebooting themselves from old age to jump their bodies back to their twenties. You get two chances. There can never be a third.

After Gunjita has juved for the second and final time and Cav has not, questions of life, death, morality, and test their relationship. Up among the stars, the research possibilities are infinite and first contact is possible, but their marriage may not survive the challenge.

In the World Fantasy Award-nominated title story, a geneticist conflicted over his own sexuality, and the nature of male and female gender roles in general, proposes a drastic solution. The politically charged "Tissue Ablation and Variant Regeneration: A Case Report" describes in chilling detail a surgeon's evisceration of President Ronald Reagan. In "Bestseller," a struggling novelist unable to sell his books must sell something else unthinkably horrific in order to provide for his family. In these and the nine other startlingly original stories in this collection, Blumlein blurs the boundaries between horror, science fiction and fantasy, creating a strange and nightmarish world not unlike our own, where nothing is what it seems.

Contents:

• Introduction (The Brains of Rats) - (1990) - essay by Michael McDowell
• The Brains of Rats - (1986) - short story
• Tissue Ablation and Variant Regeneration: A Case Report - (1984) - short story
• The Domino Master - (1988) - short story
• Drown Yourself - (1988) - short story
• Interview with C. W. - (1988) - short story
• Shed His Grace - (1989) - short story
• Keeping House - (1990) - short story
• The Glitter and the Glamour - (1990) - short story
• The Promise of Warmth - (1988) - short story
• The Wet Suit - non-genre - (1990) - novelette
• The Thing Itself - (1988) - short story
• Bestseller - (1990) - novelette

World Fantasy Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in Interzone, #16 Summer 1986, and was reprinted in Lightspeed, March 2015. It can also be found in the anthologies Interzone: The 2nd Anthology (1987), edited by John Clute, David Pringle and Simon Ounsley, The Norton Book of Science Fiction: North American Science Fiction, 1960-1990 (1993), edited by Ursula K. Le Guin and Brian Attebery, and The Big Book of Science Fiction (2016), edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer. It is included in the collection The Brains of Rats (1990).

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

Payne is a member of a minority offshoot of humanity called Grotesques who have the ability to effect phenomenal healings, which makes them a valuable commodity in their world. Sadly, such gifted healers live a life somewhere between that of a possession and a slave. "The Healer" is a story of human life and death, human rites and rituals, seen through the eyes of an outsider, one who knows humans better, perhaps, than they know themselves.

This novelette originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, March-April 2012. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2013, edited by Rich Horton. The story is included in the collection What the Doctor Ordered (2013) and All I Ever Dreamed (2017).

Written over the course of three decades, these remarkable stories showcase the breadth and power of Michael Blumlein's vision. By turns prescient, poignant, haunting, and humorous, they consistently amaze and delight. They are celebrations: of science, of love, of partnership, of difference. They are odes to the joy of discovery, inside and out.

Frankie watched herself in the mirror as she danced in the strip joint--it was the only way to get through the act. But then the fat man came into the club, and the siren screamed, and Frankie's world shattered like a thousand shards of glass.

In the morning, she isn't Frankie any more. She doesn't remember who she is. She knows for certain only one solid truth: that she is a man. As for Terry, her boyfriend, he cannot understand what his little sex object is trying to tell him.

Frankie, trapped and livid, slowly learns to live as a captive in a woman's skin, and learns to rule over her poor lover. She makes him work for her. She makes him wait on her. She uses her stranger's body to torture him with his own desire.

They are an ordinary couple in a private hell. A man and a woman in changed places; a man and a woman exploring all the cruelty and darkness and horror that was once hidden between a woman and a man.

The politics and terrors of biotech, human engineering, and brain science are given startling fictional form in a selection of short stories with Michael Blumlein's signature mix of fantasy, science fiction, horror, and wicked humour. The title piece, 'Thoreau's Microscope,' is a stunning mix of hypothesis and history, in which the author inhabits Thoreau's last days to explore the politics of impersonal science and personal liberation - a journey as illuminating as it is disturbing. On a lighter note, 'Fidelity' coolly deconstructs adultery with the help of an exuberant tumour, a guinea pig, and a swimsuit. 'Y(ou)r Q(ua)ntifi(e)d S(el)f' will reset your Fitbit and your personal goals as well. 'Paul and Me' is a legendary love story writ extra-large; and in 'Know How, Can Do' a female Frankenstein brings romance to life in the cold light of the lab.

Table of Contents:

• Paul and Me - (1997) - short story
• Y(ou)r Q(ua)ntifi(e)d S(el)f - (2018) - short story
• A Preface (Thoreau's Microscope) - essay
• Thoreau's Microscope - essay
• Fidelity - (2000) - short story
• Know How, Can Do - (2001) - novelette
• "A Babe in the Woods" - interview by Terry Bisson