Search Worlds Without End

This short story originally appeared in Nature, March 31, 2005. It can also be found in the anthology Year's Best SF 11 (2006), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. The story is included in the collection Heliotrope (2011).

Read the full story for free at Nature.

On a world where science and magic are hard to tell apart, a stranger arrives in a remote town with news of political turmoil to come. And a young woman learns that she must free herself from the role she has accepted.

A collection of 16 stories by the Arthur C. Clarke Award finalist and best-selling UK writer Justina Robson. Includes the first print publication of "Dream of Mars", and the never-before-published title novella Heliotrope.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - essay by Adam Roberts
• Heliotrope - shortstory
• Body of Evidence - (2008) - shortstory
• The Adventurers' League - (2005) - novelette
• The Girl Hero's Mirror Says He's Not the One - (2007) - shortstory
• The Bull Leapers - (1996) - shortstory
• Deadhead - (1996) - shortstory
• Erie Lackawanna Song - (2009) - shortstory
• Cracklegrackle - (2009) - novelette
• No Man's Island - (1998) - shortstory
• Trésor - (1994) - shortstory
• The Seventh Series - (2001) - shortstory
• The Little Bear - (2005) - shortstory
• Legolas Does the Dishes - (2008) - shortstory
• Dreadnought - (2005) - shortstory
• An Unremarkable Man - (2006) - shortstory
• A Dream of Mars - shortstory

The map of everything you know everything you are everything you ever will be just got rewritten.

A novel of hard SF exploring the nature of identity both inherited and engineered, from one of Britains most acclaimed new talents. In the near future, when medical nanotechnology has made it possible to map a model of the living human brain, radical psychologist Natalie Armstrong sees her work suddenly become crucial to a cutting-edge military project for creating comprehensive mind-control. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, Jude Westhorpe, FBI specialist, is tracking a cold war defector long involved in everything from gene sequencing to mind-mapping. But his investigation has begun to affect matters of national securitythrowing Jude and Natalie together as partners in troubledeep trouble from every direction. This fascinating novel explores the nature of humanity in the near future, when the power and potential of developing technologies demand that we adapt ourselves to their existencewhatever the price.

When Ray Croft dies he leaves behind a mystery that can only be solved by Anjuli O'Connell who has the memory of a machine. It's a mystery whose solution brings into question what it really means to be human. And it will reveal who Ray really was. Will Anjuli go through with it?

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Constellations: The Best of New British SF (2005), edited by Peter Crowther, and was reprinted in Lightspeed, October 2011. It is included in the collection Heliotrope (2011).

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

This groundbreaking new novel from one of the genre's most respected authors is a thrilling mix of science, magic and politics.

In Harmony, only model citizens are welcome.

A perfect society must be maintained. The defective must be eradicated. For orphans like Nico and Twostar, this means a life that's brutal, regulated and short.

But Nico and Twostar are survivors, and when they're offered a way out of the slums, they take it.

Unfortunately, no one told Nico the deal included being sentenced to death for the murder of one of Harmony's most notorious gang leaders.

Or that to gain his freedom, first he must lose his mind.

The thrilling new fantasy adventure from the world of Adrian Tchaikovsky's Redemption's Blade.

The Tzarkomen necromancers sacrificed a thousand women to create a Bride for the Kinslayer so he would spare them in the war. But the Kinslayer is dead and now the creation intended to ensure his eternal rule lies abandoned by its makers in the last place in the world that anyone would look for it.

Which doesn't prevent someone finding her by accident.

Will the Bride return the gods to the world or will she bring the end of days? It all depends on the one who found her, Kula, a broken-hearted little girl with nothing left to lose.

IMAGINE A WORLD...

Half-human, half-machine, Voyager Isol was as beautiful as a coiled scorpionand just as dangerous. Her claim that shed found a distant but habitable earthlike planet was welcome news to the rest of the Forged. But it could mean the end of what was left of the humanity whod created and once enslaved them.

IMAGINE A FATE...

It was on behalf of the "unevolved" humans that Professor Zephyr Duquesne, cultural archaeologist and historian of Earths lost worlds, was chosen by the Gaiasol military authority to uncover the truth about this second "earth." And her voyage, traveling inside the body of Isol, will take her to the center of a storm exploding across a spectrum of space and time, dimension and consciousness.

IMAGINE THE IMPOSSIBLE...

On an abandoned planet, in a wrinkle of time, Isol and Zephyr will find a gift and a curse: a power so vast that once unlocked, it will change the universe forever. With civil war looming, Zephyrs perilous journey will lead her to a past where one civilization mysteriously vanished...and another may soon follow.

Where do you run when a world is out to get you?

AIs, Forged beings, superheroes, angels, and worlds that change in the blink of an eye - here is a richly imagined tale of ordinary redemption in an extraordinary world from one of the most provocative writers working today.

Francine is a young runaway looking to find a definition of love she can trust. In Sankhara, she finds a palace where rooms are made of bone, flowers, and the hearts of heroes. She finds a scientist mapping the territory of the human mind. She finds a boyfriend. And she finds Eros itself–incarnated in the androgynously irresistible form of Jalaeka.

But not everyone is in love with the god of love. Unity, for one, wants to assimilate Jalaeka along with every other soul in the universe. And contrary to what everyone always believes, love alone can't save the day. It will take something both more and less powerful than the human heart to save the worlds upon worlds at risk when gods collide.

"For Robson, world-building is a literary device like any other, useful for exposing buried fears and desires to the light of day, no matter how strange the sun." –New York Times Book Review

The Quantum Bomb of 2015 changed everything. The fabric that kept the universe's different dimensions apart was torn and now, six years later, the people of earth exist in uneasy company with the inhabitants of, amongst others, the elfin, elemental, and demonic realms. Magic is real and can be even more dangerous than technology. Elves are exotic, erotic, dangerous, and really bored with the constant Lord of the Rings references. Elementals are a law unto themselves and demons are best left well to themselves.

Special agent Lila Black used to be pretty, but now she's not so sure. Her body is more than half restless carbon and metal alloy machinery, a machine she's barely in control of. It goes into combat mode, enough weapons for a small army springing from within itself, at the merest provocation. As for her heart, well, ever since being drawn into a game by the elfin rockstar Zal (lead singer of the No Shows), who she's been assigned to protect, she's not even sure she can trust that any more either.

Book two of the Quantum Gravity series sees Lila Black drawn into the intoxicatingly dangerous demon realm. Capricious, in love with beauty, demons are best left to themselves. This is not easy when they can't resist tampering with humans.

Justina Robson's new series is a joyful melding of science fiction and fantasy brought together in the figure of the dangerously lovely Lila Black, a 21-year-old secret agent who's had much of her body replaced with weapon-and-armor-heavy intelligent metal and who isn't sure where her mind ends and her installed AI begins. Lila's world is one where demons, elves, and elementals live alongside people. And somehow Lila and the other agents of the security agency have to provide security for all and stay alive themselves.

Lila Black is off with the faeries . . .

Ever since the Quantum Bomb of 2015 things have been different; the dimensions have fused and suddenly our world is accessible to elves, demons, ghosts and elementals and their worlds are open to us. Things have been different for Special Agent Lila Black too: tortured and magic-scarred by elves, rebuilt by humans into a half-robot, part-AI, nuclear-fueled walking arsenal, and carrying the essence of a dead elfin necromancer in her chest, sometimes she has trouble figuring out who she is.

And a mission to the world of the fae may not help her work it out.

The fae are beautiful, glamorous, exotic, and talented. Their inventions make food taste better, make beer divine, and bring sparkle and mischief to the world but that's only the surface. And Lila is being sent in at the deep end, to the deepest, darkest levels of Faerie: on the primal level, nothing about the fae is glamorous at all.

In a winter-locked, raw, and primitive world, Lila has to deal with the fae at their most basic levels, as tricksters and dealmakers and the only deals worth making are bloody ones. If Lila's quest is to succeed, and if she is ever to escape Faerie, the right question must be asked, the right sacrifice must be made, and the right quarry must be hunted down on the winter solstice. All of which is difficult, when the only aides Lila brought to Faerie are her friends . . .

Lila Black returns in the fourth volume of high-octane, high-magic, high-tech adventures.

Ever since the Quantum Bomb of 2015 things have been different; the dimensions have fused and suddenly our world is accessible to elves, demons, ghosts and elementals and their worlds are open to us. Things have been different for Special Agent Lila Black too: tortured and magic-scarred by elves, rebuilt by humans into a half-robot, part-AI, nuclear-fueled walking arsenal, married to a demon and in love with a recently-deceased elf. It was confusing enough before she was catapulted fifty years into her own future.

Returning to the life of a guns-blazing secret agent, Lila finds herself having inherited all of her former boss's old offices and whatever mysteries they contain, as the elf has done a runner some fifty years previously. Appointed head of the new android division, she can see all too clearly what lies in store for her if the growth of the alien technologies in her cyborg body continue unchecked.

But there are more immediate concerns. Like resurrecting her lover, Zal. And her husband, the demon Teazle, is embroiled in a fatal plot in Demonia, and her magic sword is making itself happy as a pen whose writing has the power to affect other worlds. The world is off its rocker and most everyone is terrified of faeries.

And all the while, she hears the voices of the machine material projections of an immaterial form, The Signal. The Signal talks constantly if only she knew what it meant.

Chasing the Dragon is bright, fast moving and accessible SF that mixes in fantasy and a cool cult-lit sensibility to create a series that will appeal to all fans of Laurrell K. Hamilton and Peter Hamilton alike.

Lila Black faces her greatest challenge yet as she takes herself, her dead lover, and the AI in her head into death’s realm...

Lila Black is now a shape-shifting machine plugged into the Signal—the total dataset of all events in the known universe and all potential events; Zal, the elf rock star with a demon soul, is now a shadow form animated and given material actualization by firelight; Teazle the demon has taken up the swords of Death and is on the way to becoming an angel. To say this puts some pressure on their three-way marriage is an understatement.

Meanwhile the human world is seeing an inexplicable influx of the returning dead, and they’re not the only ones. Many old evils are returning to haunt the living following three harbingers of destruction created in the ancient past.

What seems epic is revealed as personal to all concerned as events unfold and that which cannot be escaped must be faced. Heroic destinies unravel as greater powers reveal themselves the true masters of the game.

Are humans to be trusted with the important things: the structure of society, governing their own lives, meting out justice, etc, or would an AI be better suited to the job? If an AI really cared about humanity, would it be willing to sit back and watch us bumble along, making a mess of things, or would it step in to help us, to make things better?

Despite the best of intentions, could such intervention ever work? After all, we humans are flawed, limited by our vision and by the dictates of the society that helped shape us, and an AI is limited by its programming, which is carried out by humans... At the end of the day, are any of us - human or AI - truly free?