Search Worlds Without End

Nebula Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, January 1973. The story can also be found in the anthologies Nebula Award Stories Nine (1974), edited by Kate Wilhelm, Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year: Third Annual Collection (1974) edited by Lester del Rey, The Best of Analog (1978), edited by Ben Bova and The Oxford Book of Science Fiction Stories (1992), edited by Tom Shippey. It can also be found in the collections No Direction Home (1975) and The Star-Spangled Future (1979).

An epic novel of politics and sexuality in the far future Pacifica is a free world served by the Media. But forces are at work to use its very freedom to enslave the world!

Since its colonization by Earth, Pacifica has flourished. Now, under the guidance of Chairman Carlotta Madigan and her lover and Minister of Media, Royce Lindblad, it is the galaxy's supreme electronic democracy, a Utopian world where both sexes equally serve and are served the The Media.

But there are those who would have it otherwise, who have come to Pacifica to turn its very freedom into an instrument of its bondage, who have launched a devastating media war on Pacifica to divide... and conquer.

The Great Tyrant rules the solar system with absolute terror. Only one man dares to fight back.

The time is the 24th century. Humankind populates the entire solar system from icy Pluto to boiling Mercury. Great domed cities, humming factories, hordes of workers, all feed the power of the dictatorship that controls all life. Only a small group among the cowed population dares rebel in a struggle that pits democracy against tyranny.

But there is a third force at work as well. A mysterious band of assassins whose final solution to the problem of humanity's fate is as terrifying as it is irresistible - one of them is known as the AGENT OF CHAOS.

TV megastar Jack Barron hosts the wildly popular Bug Jack Barron, a phone-in show that listens to public gripes and puts politicians and bosses on the spot--live. Naturally Barron pulls his punches for safety's sake... until he tangles with paranoid billionaire Benedict Howards, peddler of cryonic immortality, and walks into a minefield of deadly cover-ups. Violence erupts. Howards believes he can buy anyone, even Barron's estranged wife, even Barron. Barron doesn't mind selling out if the coin is immortality.

About a hundred years from now, pollution, overpopulation, and ecological disasters have left the rich nations still rich, and the poor nations -- the Lands of the Lost -- slowly strangling in drought and pollution. New York City is below sea level, surrounded by a seawall. The climate in Paris is much like the twentieth-century climate of long-drowned New Orleans. And Siberia, Golden Siberia, is the crop-land of the world.

Still, for the international corporations and businesses who make a profit on technofixing the environment -- the Big Blue Machine -- it is business as usual: sell what you can where you can whenever you can. It is better to be rich. But it all may be coming to a terrible end: a scientist has predicted Condition Venus, the sudden greenhouse downfall of the entire planet--but she can't say when.

So now the attention of the world is focused for a week on a UN conference on the Environment in Paris, where all hell is about to break loose.

Hugo and Nebula Award nominated novella.

The Plague's origins were mysterious, but its consequences were all too obvious: quarantined cities, safe-sex machines, Sex Police, the outlawing of old-fashioned love. Four people hold the fate of humanity in their hands... A sexual mercenary condemned to death as a foot soldier in the Army of the Living Dead; a scientist who's devoted his whole life to destroying the virus and now discovers he has only ten weeks to succeed; a God-fearing fundamentalist on his way to the presidency before he accepts a higher calling; and a young infected coed from Berkeley on a bizarre crusade to save the world with a new religion of carnal abandon. Each will discover that the only thing more dangerous than the Plague is the cure.

The story originally appeared in Full Spectrum (1988), edited by Lou Aronica and Shawna McCarthy. It was published as a seperate novella in 1995. The story can aslo be found in the anthology After Armageddon (1990), edited by Jerry Pournelle.

An over-the-hill rock star, a Puerto Rican street kid, and two children of the electronic age discover strength in numbers when they take on the power of Musik, Inc., in a war of nerves, passion, and rock 'n' roll. Spinrad uses the violent, sexually explicit language of new wave SF to communicate an ultimately touching message of courage and humanity that breaks through the high-tech glitter of his medium.

This short story originally appeared in Nature, June 8, 2000. It can also be foudn in the anthology Year's Best SF 6 (2001), edited by David G. Hartwell.

Read the full story for free at Nature.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology New Worlds Quarterly 2 (1971), edited by Michael Moorcock. It can also be found in the anthologies The Best Science Fiction of the Year #1 (1971), edited by Terry Carr, Best SF: 1971, edited by Harry Harrison and Brian W. Aldiss, and Modern Science Fiction (1974), edited by Norman Spinrad. The story is included in the collections No Direction Home (1975) and The Star-Spangled Future (1979).

Contains:

• No Direction Home
• Heirloom
• The Big Flash
• The Conspiracy
• The Weed of Time
• A Thing of Beauty
• The Lost Continent
• Heroes Die But Once
• The National Pastime
• In the Eye of the Storm
• All the Sounds of the Rainbow

Spinrad examines one of his most compelling obsessions - the possible "futures" of America.

Street Meat: In New York City, streeties, zonies and subway cannibals are locked in a nighmarish scrabble for rat meat, sex - and survival.

The Lost Continent: group of African tourists visit the ruins of Space Age America - a surreal landscape of abandoned skyscrapers, empty streets and dead, rusted machinery.

World War Last: The hashish-smoking Sheik of Koram has a plan to trick America and Russia into war.

La Vie Continue: In Paris exiled science-fiction author Norman Spinrad ignores a lucrative - but dangerous - bidding war between the KGB and the CIA for the film rights to his story "Riding the Torch".

Hugo Award nominated novella. It originally appeared in the anthology Threads of Time (1974), edited by Robert Silverberg and was published as a chapbook in 1984. It is half of Tor Double #23: Riding The Torch/Tin Soldier (1990, with Joan D. Vinge).

Tired of his low-level job with the American space program, engineer Jerry Reed makes enemies of friends when he moves to Paris, where the EEC and the Soviet Union have joined to create a renaissance in space exploration.

No ordinary critic, Norman Spinrad explicates, celebrates, and sometimes excoriates science fiction from the privileged perspective of an artist armed with intimate knowledge of the craft of fiction and even of the writers themselves.

In these 13 essays, Spinrad urges science fiction as a genre to reach its potential. He divides the essays—new works written specifically for this book combined with those that appeared inIsaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine—into five sections: "Literature and Genre: A Critical Overview," in which Spinrad establishes his critical standards; "Alternate Media: Visual Translations," a discussion of comic books and books made into movies; "Modes of Content: Hard SF, Cyberpunk, and the Space Visionaries"; "Psychopolitics and Science Fiction: Heroes—True and Otherwise"; and "Masters of the Form: Careers in Profile," discussions of Sturgeon, Vonnegut, Ballard, and Dick.

Centuries after the big smash, the successor civilization of Aquaria more or less flourishes on the west coast of what was once the United States, a society built on White Science, following the "law of muscle, sun, wind and water."

Only the sorcerers of Space Systems, Inc., dare traffic in the "Black Sciences" of atomic, petroleum and physics which destroyed the old golden age of space, for they alone know of the higher destiny that awaits man in the abandoned Big Ear space station. For centuries, they have secretly infiltrated Aquarius through the gray town of La Mirage while crafting a spaceship capable of reaching the Big Ear and turning man's ears once more to the mysterious Songs from the Stars.

But when they finally confront the interstellar brotherhood of sentient beings, they find, each in his way, that The Galactic Way utterly transcends their hopes, wildest dreams and darkest fears.

How things really work in the art and commerce of publishing by a three-time SFWA President. It's hard enough for a writer just to get published. But even harder is--Staying Alive. This book is an indispensable guide to economic and psychological survival as a writer, with insights into how the publishing industry works and how to get and stay published.

Nebula Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared in the anthology Orbit 5 (1969), edited by Damon Knight. The story can also be found in World's Best Science Fiction: 1970, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr and The Road to Science Fiction 3: From Heinlein to Here (1979), edited by James Gunn. It is included in the collections No Direction Home (1975) and The Star-Spangled Future (1979).

"One of the greatest collections of science fiction short stories ever" -- Goodreads.com

"Norman Spinrad's finest, and most consistent, collection. There's not a bad story in the lot." -- Bud Webster

Table of Contents:

• Carcinoma Angels - (1967)
• The Age of Invention - (1966)
• Outward Bound - (1964)
• A Child of Mind - (1965)
• The Equalizer - (1964)
• The Last of the Romany - (1963)
• Technicality - (1966)
• The Rules of the Road - (1964)
• Dead End - (1969)
• A Night in Elf Hill - (1968)
• Deathwatch - (1965)
• The Ersatz Ego - (1970)
• Neutral Ground - (1966)
• Once More, with Feeling - (1969)
• It's a Bird! It's a Plane! - (1967)
• Subjectivity - (1964)
• The Entropic Gang Bang Caper - (1969)
• The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde - (1969)

All his life, Fraden had been in control, had bent situations, conditions, people, to his own will. He had stood solidly, reaching out to change men and events, but had never been changed by them. He had been booted out of Greater New York, he had taken and lost the Asteroid Belt, and he was still the same Bart Fraden. But on Sangre... something had been done to him. He had been tampered with. For the first time in his life, Bart Fraden felt himself moved by forces beyond his conscious control. Had he changed Sangre? Or had the planet changed him? For the first time in his life, Bart Fraden was afraid.

Contains:

• The Pleasure Garden of Felipe Sagittarius by Michael Moorcock
• Driftglass by Samuel R. Delany
• Sending the Very Best by Edward Bryant
• Going Down Smooth by Robert Silverberg
• The Garden of Delights by Langdon Jones
• Surface if You Can by Terry Champagne
• Masks by Damon Knight
• Pennies Off a Dead Man's Eyes by Harlan Ellison
• 198 - A Tale of Tomorrow by John Sladek
• Flight Uselesss, Inexorable the Pursuit by Thomas M. Disch
• The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde by Norman Spinrad
• Down the Up Escalation by Brian W. Aldiss
• Circularization of Condensed Conventional Straight-Line Word Images Structures by Michael Butterworth
• The Definition by Bob Marsden
• The Jungle Rot Kid on the Nod by Philip Jose Farmer

Norman Spinrad, a National Book Award finalist for his short fiction collection The Star-Spangled Future, has now written The People's Police, a sharp commentary on politics with a contemporary, speculative twist. Martin Luther Martin is a hard-working New Orleans cop, who has come up from the gangland of Alligator Swamp through hard work. When he has to serve his own eviction notice, he decides he's had enough and agrees to spearhead a police strike.

Brothel owner and entrepreneur J. B. Lafitte also finds himself in a tight spot when his whorehouse in the Garden District goes into foreclosure. Those same Fat Cats responsible for the real estate collapse after Katrina didn't differentiate between social strata or vocation.

MaryLou Boudreau, aka Mama Legba, is a television star and voodoo queen--with a difference. The loa really do ride and speak through her.

These three, disparate people are pulled together by a single moment in the television studio when Martin, hoping for publicity and support from the people against the banks, corporate fat cats, and corrupt politicians. But no one expects Papa Legba himself to answer, and his question changes everything.

"What do you offer?"

Earth was programmed for destruction in the mad war of the computer worlds - unless the Solarians could stop the machines! Three hundred years ago the Solarians retreated to the safety of their Fortress as Earth became embroiled in the first of the computer wars with the dread Duglaari Empire. The Solarians' final word to all humanity was a promise to reappear one day and bring it to victory. Suddenly, with Earth on the verge of becoming a helpless victim of the merciless Duglaars, the Solarians made contact with Fleet Commander Jay Palmer. It was an offer of aid. But the Solarians' plan was so cunning, so fraught with danger, that Jay faced the greatest decision of his life - and that of Earth's: Accept their ingenious strategy as a stroke of genius or reject it as a trick designed to destroy human life forever.

Contains:

• Carcinoma Angels
• All the Sounds of the Rainbow
• The Perils of Pauline
• The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde
• Holy War on 34th Street
• Blackout
• The National Pastime
• It's a Bird. It's a Plane!
• The Entropic Gang Bang Caper
• The Big Flash
• No Direction Home
• Sierra Maestra
• A Thing of Beauty
• The Lost Continent

This short story originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, April 1998. It can also be found in the anthology Year's Best SF 4 (1999), edited by David G. Hartwell.

This novella was first published in Asimov's Science Fiction, January/February 2023.

Table of Contents:

• Destiny Times Three - interior artwork by Freff
• Riding the Torch - interior artwork by Freff
• 7 - Destiny Times Three - (1945) - novel by Fritz Leiber
• 150 - Afterword (Destiny Times Three) - essay by Norman Spinrad
• 157 - Riding the Torch - (1974) - novella by Norman Spinrad
• 248 - Afterword (Riding the Torch) - essay by Fritz Leiber

Contents:

• Introduction - (1976) - essay by Thomas D. Clareson
• Foreword - (1974) - essay by Norman Spinrad
• Introduction - (1974) - essay by Norman Spinrad
• The Golden Age - (1974) - essay by Norman Spinrad
• Twilight - (1934) - shortstory by John W. Campbell, Jr.
• The Enchanted Village - (1960) - shortstory by A. E. van Vogt
• Helen O'Loy - (1938) - shortstory by Lester del Rey
• Nightfall - (1941) - novelette by Isaac Asimov
• The Postwar Awakening - (1974) - essay by Norman Spinrad
• The Star - (1955) - shortstory by Arthur C. Clarke
• Affair with a Green Monkey - (1957) - shortstory by Theodore Sturgeon
• Stranger Station - (1956) - novelette by Damon Knight
• The Cold Equations - (1954) - novelette by Tom Godwin
• The Marching Morons - (1951) - novelette by C. M. Kornbluth
• 5,271,009 - (1954) - novelette by Alfred Bester
• The Full Flowering - (1974) - essay by Norman Spinrad
• The Voices of Time - (1960) - novelette by J. G. Ballard
• The Pleasure Garden of Felipe Sagittarius - (1965) - shortstory by Michael Moorcock
• No Direction Home - (1971) - shortstory by Norman Spinrad
• Descending - (1964) - shortstory by Thomas M. Disch
• For a Breath I Tarry - (1966) - novelette by Roger Zelazny
• Don't Wash the Carats - (1968) - shortstory by Philip José Farmer
• Faith of Our Fathers - (1967) - novelette by Philip K. Dick
• Aye, and Gomorrah... - (1967) - shortstory by Samuel R. Delany
• At the Mouse Circus - (1971) - shortstory by Harlan Ellison
• In Entropy's Jaws - (1971) - novelette by Robert Silverberg
• Nine Lives - (1969) - novelette by Ursula K. Le Guin
• Additional Significant Works of Speculative Fiction - (1974) - essay by uncredited

"IF WAGNER WROTE SCIENCE FICTION THIS IS THE WAY HE WOULD DO IT." -- Harry Harrison

Renowned science fiction writer Adolf Hitler's Hugo Award winning novel!

Ferric Jaggar mounted the platform. A swastika of flame twenty feet high stood out in glory against the night sky behind him, bathing him in heroic firelight, flashing highlights off the brightwork of his gleaming black leather uniform, setting his powerful eyes ablaze. "I hold in my hand the Great Truncheon of Held. I dedicate myself to the repurification of all Heldon with blood and iron, and to the extension of the dominion of True Humanity over the face of the entire Earth! Never will we rest until the last mutant gene is swept from the face of the planet!"

Set in a post-nuclear holocaust world, a novel which traces the rise to power of one Feric Jaggar, an exile among mutants and mongrels to absolute rule in the Fatherland of Truemen.

With an afterword by James Sallis.

Taking aim at both Christian fundamentalists and corporate CEOs, Raising Hell is a rousing account of the fight to improve working conditions in Hell, a cause taken up by the likes of Jimmy Hoffa, John L. Lewis, and César Chávez. This volume also features "The Abnormal New Normal," an essay that casts a cold and critical eye on current trends in popular culture, showing how they reflect the domination of the one percent and suggesting a radical fix. The book closes with an Outspoken Interview, a mix of intimate revelation, celebrity gossip, insight, opinion, and outright lies.

Table of Contents:

• Raising Hell - novella by Norman Spinrad
• The Abnormal New Normal - essay by Norman Spinrad
• "No Regrets, No Retreat, No Surrender" - interview of Norman Spinrad by Terry Bisson
• The Author in 199 Words - essay by Terry Bisson

In the Second Starfaring Age, humans travel the universe via a technology they barely understand, propelled by a space drive consisting of mysteriously complex mechanisms and, symbiotically linked to it, a living woman, the Void Pilot. Pilots are rare, and the ability to be a Pilot also entails physical wasting and a shortened life.

But Pilots live only for the timeless moments of Transition, when their ships cross the emptiness of space in an instant. Now Void Pilot Dominique Alia Wu has begun to catch a glimpse of something more, something transcendent in that eternal moment... and she needs the cooperation of her Captain to achieve it permanently. Even at risk to the survival of the Ship.

In the exotic interstellar civilization of the Second Starfaring Age, youthful wanderers are known as Children of Fortune. This is the tale of one such wanderer, who seeks her destiny on an odyssey of self-discovery amid humanity's many worlds. Arresting and visionary, Child of Fortune is a science-fictional On the Road.

Riding The Torch:

Jofe D'mahl, a senso producer, is one of the chief entertainers aboard the generation torchship Brigadoon. Ego to the brim and the ship's main socialite, he has no time for the voidsuckers--the sullen men and women who go beyond the massive ship's hydrogen umbra to seek out new planets for its passengers to settle. Goaded into taking one such trip after a voidsucker news bulletin upstages his latest senso, however, D'mahl has the experience of his life. Cut off from all technology and social affairs of the Brigadoon, he is offered a new perspective on existence. Problem is, he also comes upon knowledge that unhinges his mindset regarding the Brigadoon's mission.

The Tin Soldier:

Can human love survive the distance between the Stars?

"Tin Soldier" tells the story of Maris, an ex-soldier who, following wounds sustained in battle, has received cybernetic implants that, as a side effect, slow his aging to "about five years for every hundred" (he is 115 years old as the story begins, though physically he looks "about twenty-five"), and Brandy (short for Branduin), a female starship crew member.

The novella follows the relationship that develops between these two people who fall in love, but through circumstances can only see each other for a few days every 25 years.