Search Worlds Without End

Bluebeard's wife is told by her husband to never go into his dungeon. When she does, she finds the mutilated corpses of his previous wives--and Pandora. With the help of Pandora's magical box, the two travel through time and space, searching out other women who are instructed "don't do that" and do it anyway... and seeking Bluebeard's wife's lost name.

1886. Two young boys disappear in the Sounds. Their mother grieves, all the music cut out of her heart; their father wanders the coast for a year, wanting and not wanting to find any part of them left behind. And their brother Ern, faced with a problem to which no solution can be found, returns to his laboratory - and to the smell of salt, soft voices in his ear, wet footprints welling seawater in the darkness.

Octavia Cade weaves together time and memory, physics and mystery, in this story inspired by Ernest Rutherford's life and research.

This story originally appeared as one of six novellas written by New Zealanders in Short Cuts: Track 1, edited by Marie Hodgkinson.

IN A DYING WORLD, GRIEF HAS A LIFE OF ITS OWN...

With the collapse of ecosystems and the extinction of species comes the Grief: an unstoppable melancholia that ends in suicide. When Ruby's friend, mourning the loss of the Great Barrier Reef, succumbs to the Grief, the letters she leaves behind reveal the hidden world of the resurrected dead. The Tasmanian tiger, brought back from extinction in an isolated facility, is only the first... but rebirth is not always biological, and it comes with a price. As a scientist, Ruby resists the Grief by focusing her research on resilient jellyfish, but she can't avoid choosing which side she's on. How can she fight against the dead and the forces behind them when doing so risks her home, her life, and the entire biosphere?

We talk about the tyranny of distance a lot in this country. That distance will not save us.

With governments denying climate science, scientists from affected countries and organisations are forced to traffic data to ensure the preservation of research that could in turn preserve the world. From Antarctica, to the Chihuahuan Desert, to the International Space Station, a fragile network forms. A web of knowledge. Secret. But not secret enough.

When the cold war of data preservation turns bloody - and then explosive - an underground network of scientists, all working in isolation, must decide how much they are willing to risk for the truth. For themselves, their colleagues, and their future.

Murder on Antarctic ice. A university lecturer's car, found abandoned on a desert road. And the first crewed mission to colonise Mars, isolated and vulnerable in the depths of space.

How far would you go to save the world?

Read the beginning of this book for free at Clarkesworld.

This is a short novel of approximately 45,000 words, so within the tolerance for Hugo Novella.

In a world where experience is currency, Rosemary is the owner of a very special library--a library of memory, where scented coins transfer personal experience from one individual to another. When she trades away the sole memory of her grandmother's final concerto, family opposition, in the form of her daughter Ruth, forces Rosemary to go on a quest to try and recover the lost coin. Yet having to trade away her own memories to get it back, how much of Rosemary will survive the exchange?

All our monsters are mirrors. And when Mary Shelley's monster -- built from her life rather than her pen, born out of biography instead of blood -- outlives its mother, that monster goes looking for a substitute. But all the monster really knows of women is that women write, and so the search for a replacement takes it first to Katherine Mansfield, and then to other women who know what mutilated things can be made from ink and mirrors...