Search Worlds Without End

This novelette originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, October-November 2002, and was reprinted in Clarkesworld Magazine, #102 March 2015. The story can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twentieth Annual Collection (2003), edited by Gardner Dozois, and The Eagle Has Landed: 50 Years of Lunar Science Fiction (2019), edited by Neil Clarke.

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

Halloween Night, 1954. A young, film-obsessed scriptwriter has just been hired at one of the great studios. An anonymous investigation leads from the giant Maximus Films backlot to an eerie graveyard separated from the studio by a single wall. There he makes a terrifying discovery that thrusts him into a maelstrom of intrigue and mystery -- and into the dizzy exhilaration of the movie industry at the height of its glittering power.

Table of Contents:

• Reaching for the Moon: An Introduction - essay by Isaac Asimov
• from The Man in the Moone, or A Discourse of a Voyage Thither by Domingo Gonsales The Speedy Messenger (excerpt) - shortstory by Francis Godwin
• from The Discovery of a New World, ... with a Discourse Concerning the Possibility of a Passage Thither (excerpt) - shortstory by John Wilkins
• from The Comical History of the States and Empires of the World of the Moon (excerpt) - shortstory by Cyrano de Bergerac
• from A Voyage to Cacklogallinia (excerpt) - shortstory by Captain Samuel Brunt
• from The Life and Astonishing Transactions of John Daniel . . (excerpt) - shortstory by Ralph Morris
• A Journey Lately Performed Through the Air, in an Aerostatic Globe ... To the Newly Discovered Planet, Georgium Sidus - (1784) - shortstory by Vivenair
• Hans Pfaall--A Tale - (1835) - shortstory by Edgar Allan Poe (variant of Hans Phaall--A Tale)
• from Great Astronomical Discoveries Lately Made by Sir John Herschel ... at the Cape of Good Hope (excerpt) - shortstory by Richard Adams Locke
• The Great Steam-Duck - (1841) - shortstory by unknown

It makes people positively ache with happiness. It puts the roses back in their cheeks and the itch back in their blood. "It" is the Scholes Virus - proper medical term for what used to be called, out of mawkish ignorance but with uncanny prescience, the "love bug".

Professor Trevor Scholes has discovered, isolated and classified every variety of the infection that now bears his name. One variety, B79/K, is so rare that the odds are fifty thousand to one against two compatible carriers meeting.

So of course Giles Cranston and Tamsin McGillivray meet....

Jack has been widowed for close to a year, and his behavior has his friends worried. Arrested for public indecency, Jack insists that he was meeting a moon goddess of desire named Lily. Furthermore, he claims that she can only find him if he waits outside, naked under a full moon. To prevent further troubles with the law, Jack's friends begin taking him to a cabin in the woods each full moon. But one at a time, they are each touched by Lily and forced to deal with their desires before they can truly know their hearts.

The powerful Peace Eternal corporation has a solution to Earth's staggering overpopulation problem: a government-supported program of clean, efficient mass murder.

Billionaire philanthropist Michael Dore has a better way - Lamplighter, a remarkable process that will enable safe colonization of Jupiter's moons. But Dore has been set up to be tried for treason before a kangaroo lunar court. And Quentin Thomas, a patent lawyer with astonishing telekinetic abilities, is to handle the defense.

Unfortunately, the Moon's corrupt Lord Chancellor and his bought jury have already sentenced the accused and his attorney to death - unless Jupiter catches fire... within twenty-four hours.

Contents:

• ABCs in Zero-G
• A Delicate Adjustment
• If Nudity Offends You
• Too Wet to Plow
• Gut Feelings
• Gravesite Revisited
• Just Another Day at the Weather Service
• The Generic Rejuvenation of Milo Ardry
• New World Symphony
• Those Who Walk in Darkness

This novelette first appeared in Beth Meacham's anthology Terry's Universe (1988) and Asimov's Mid-December 1988. It has been reprinted numerous times, most recently in the collection The Best of Kim Stanley Robinson (2010), the John Joseph Adams anthology Brave New Worlds: Dystopian Stories (2011), and the Neil Clarke anthology The Eagle Has Landed: 50 Years of Lunar Science Fiction (2019).

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

John Sladek's hilarious SF satires may show a world riddled with shambolic flaws, but this (he pointed out) is actually the good news: "My own small ray of hope concerns human frailty. All conspiracies, no matter how monstrous, are ultimately the work of mere imperfect people, whose irresolution or bad judgement or even bad conscience works against the system. They get bunions, their cars break down, their children run away -and all this grit gets into the smooth-running gears of their world domination plans. I hope."

Table of Contents:

• The Last of the Whaleburgers
• Great Mysteries Explained!
• Red Noise
• Guesting
• Absent Friends
• After Flaubert
• The Brass Monkey
• White Hat
• The Island of Dr Circe
• Answers
• Breakfast with the Murgatroyds
• The Next Dwarf
• An Explanation for the Disappearance of the Moon
• How to Make Major Scientific Discoveries at Home in Your Spare Time
• The Kindly Ones
• Fables
• Ursa Minor
• Calling All Gumdrops!

The Towers of Toron

The Lord of the Flames was loose on Earth once more--this deadly alien entity had nearly destroyed the Empire of Toromon with its first attack. Its return now would mean a new era of chaos and conflict for the remnants of humanity. Somehow mankind must defeat this strangest of all enemies--an enemy that could be anywhere or anyone, an enemy that would reduce the human race to primitive savagery...

The Lunar Eye

Beware: Spies from space!

Imagine becoming a best-selling novelist, and almost immediately famous and wealthy, while still in college, and before long seeing your insufferable father reduced to a bag of ashes in a safety-deposit box, while after American Psycho your celebrity drowns in a sea of vilification, booze, and drugs.

Then imagine having a second chance ten years later, as the Bret Easton Ellis of this remarkable novel is given, with a wife, children, and suburban sobriety—only to watch this new life shatter beyond recognition in a matter of days. At a fateful Halloween party he glimpses a disturbing (fictional) character driving a car identical to his late father’s, his stepdaughter’s doll violently “malfunctions,” and their house undergoes bizarre transformations both within and without. Connecting these aberrations to graver events—a series of grotesque murders that no longer seem random and the epidemic disappearance of boys his son’s age—Ellis struggles to defend his family against this escalating menace even as his wife, their therapists, and the police insist that his apprehensions are rooted instead in substance abuse and egomania.

Lunar Park confounds one expectation after another, passing through comedy and mounting horror, both psychological and supernatural, toward an astonishing resolution—about love and loss, fathers and sons—in what is surely the most powerfully original and deeply moving novel of an extraordinary career.

Imagine becoming a best-selling novelist, and almost immediately famous and wealthy, while still in college, and before long seeing your insufferable father reduced to a bag of ashes in a safety-deposit box, while after American Psycho your celebrity drowns in a sea of vilification, booze, and drugs.

Then imagine having a second chance ten years later, as the Bret Easton Ellis of this remarkable novel is given, with a wife, children, and suburban sobriety—only to watch this new life shatter beyond recognition in a matter of days. At a fateful Halloween party he glimpses a disturbing (fictional) character driving a car identical to his late father’s, his stepdaughter’s doll violently “malfunctions,” and their house undergoes bizarre transformations both within and without. Connecting these aberrations to graver events—a series of grotesque murders that no longer seem random and the epidemic disappearance of boys his son’s age—Ellis struggles to defend his family against this escalating menace even as his wife, their therapists, and the police insist that his apprehensions are rooted instead in substance abuse and egomania.

Lunar Park confounds one expectation after another, passing through comedy and mounting horror, both psychological and supernatural, toward an astonishing resolution—about love and loss, fathers and sons—in what is surely the most powerfully original and deeply moving novel of an extraordinary career.

When the first moon-bound rocket blasted off from the Earth's space station in 1983, it was as ready for every eventuality as scientists and engineers could make it. But neither the crew nor the authorities were prepared for the last-minute switch in the ship's complement that upset carefully planned replacement schedules. Instead of a highly trained Air Force Academy graduate as the fifth man in the pioneering crew, the inaugural rocket headed into space with teen-age Ted Baker, an Academy senior.

Around a tragic misunderstanding, Richard Marsten has traced a tale of high excitement from the Earth's gleaming satellite space station to the ragged surface of a hostile Moon. His story of how a teen-ager crash lands a crippled ship on the Moon, far from its base of supplies, is not only an unexcelled description of space flight but a tense personal drama of a young man who proves his worth to a hostile crew.

A thousand-mile trek on foot across the face of the Moon, the discovery of organic matter on the planet's airless surface, the slow depletion of irreplaceable supplies, the effect of the Sun on a planet that lacks atmosphere, stud this story of a strained relationship between stranded crew members with fascinating detail. Climaxed with a rocket blastoff that vindicates the judgment of one young earthling, ROCKET TO LUNA is as gripping a flight into space and the future as any contemporary author has written.

A mesmerising Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter, novel

'You don't volunteer for slugfests with vampires. It shortens your life expectancy.'

And you don't fall in love with a werewolf. It interferes with your work. Especially when you're a preternatural expert, like me. My name is Anita Blake. My business brings me up close and personal with all shapes and sizes of monsters. And not all of them want to kill me.

Take, for instance, the local pack of lycanthrops - they're werewolves to you. A number of them are missing, and they've come to me for help. Maybe because I'm dating the leader of the pack. I've survived a lot - from jealous vampires to killer zombies - but this love thing may kill me yet.

Iter Lunare; Or, A Voyage to the Moon, Containing Some Considerations on the Nature of That Planet, the Possibility of Getting Thither, with Other Pleasant Conceits About the Inhabitants, Their Manners, and Customs.

Originally published in 1703, Iter Lunaire is one of the first books to discuss the real possibility of exploring space, the methods of doing so and what might be found there.

Taking Cyrano De Bergerac's classic "Comic History" Voyage to the Moon (1657) and Francis Godwin's novel The Man in the Moone (1638) as jump-off points, author Russen discusses the pros and cons of the French writer's fanciful methods of space travel... and adds some of his own, including what may be the most unusual method of traveling to the Moon ever suggested. Along the way, Russen anticipates such modern scientific developments as the germ theory of disease and hyperlinked reference books.

Crater Trueblood has to rescue his ex-girlfriend... and the entire human race.

Maria Medaris is the 21-year-old matriarch of the most powerful family on the moon--gorgeous, powerful, and high-maintenance. When she is kidnapped by green-lipped, gene-splicing scientists, Maria's only hope turns out to be the very man she once spurned: Crater Trueblood.

Crater and the Lunar Rescue Company must rescue Maria before she joins forces with the lunatics who have taken her hostage and aim to make her queen.

Turns out more than Maria is at stake: the planet Earth, majestically hanging over the lunar horizon, is in the crosshairs of an asteroid engineered by Maria's abductors. If Crater can't stop it, humanity on Earth will be destroyed.

The fate of two worlds hangs in the balance... and the clock is ticking.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Meeting Infinity (2015), edited by Jonathan Strahan, and was reprinted in Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 145, October 2018. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Third Annual Collection (2016), edited by Gardner Dozois.

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

The Fifth Dragon is about a pair of new moon workers, Achi and Adriana, who find comfort in this alien place in one another's company, only to learn that their time together is strictly limited. 'The Fifth Dragon' flies back and forth between their first days as a pair and their final moments as friends, underscoring that the end of everything is inevitable.

The story originally appeared in Jonathan Strahan's Reach for Infinity (2014). It is also included in The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of the Year: Volume Nine (2015), edited by Jonathan Strahan, The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Second Annual Collection (2015), edited by Gardner Dozois, and The Eagle Has Landed: 50 Years of Lunar Science Fiction (2019), edited by Neil Clarke.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

Remember: Lady Luna knows a thousand ways to kill you, but family is what you know. Family is what works.

Cariad Corcoran has a new sister who is everything she is not: tall, beautiful, confident. They're unlikely allies and even unlikelier sisters, but they're determined to find the moon's first footprint, even if the lunar frontier is doing its best to kill them before they get there.

The Moon wants to kill you. Whether it's being unable to pay your per diem for your allotted food, water, and air, or you just get caught up in a fight between the Moon's ruling corporations, the Five Dragons. You must fight for every inch you want to gain in the Moon's near feudal society. And that is just what Adriana Corta did.

As the leader of the Moon's newest "dragon," Adriana has wrested control of the Moon's Helium-3 industry from the Mackenzie Metal corporation and fought to earn her family's new status. Now, at the twilight of her life, Adriana finds her corporation, Corta Helio, surrounded by the many enemies she made during her meteoric rise. If the Corta family is to survive, Adriana's five children must defend their mother's empire from her many enemies... and each other.

A Dragon is dead.

Corta Helio, one of the five family corporations that rule the Moon, has fallen. Its riches are divided up among its many enemies, its survivors scattered. Eighteen months have passed .

The remaining Helio children, Lucasinho and Luna, are under the protection of the powerful Asamoahs, while Robson, still reeling from witnessing his parent's violent deaths, is now a ward--virtually a hostage-- of Mackenzie Metals. And the last appointed heir, Lucas, has vanished of the surface of the moon.

Only Lady Sun, dowager of Taiyang, suspects that Lucas Corta is not dead, and more to the point--that he is still a major player in the game. After all, Lucas always was the Schemer, and even in death, he would go to any lengths to take back everything and build a new Corta Helio, more powerful than before. But Corta Helio needs allies, and to find them, the fleeing son undertakes an audacious, impossible journey--to Earth.

In an unstable lunar environment, the shifting loyalties and political machinations of each family reach the zenith of their most fertile plots as outright war erupts.

Luna: Wolf Moon continues Ian McDonald's saga of the Five Dragons.

The continuing saga of the Five Dragons, Ian McDonald's fast-paced, intricately plotted space opera pitched as Game of Thrones meets The Expanse

A hundred years in the future, a war wages between the Five Dragons--five families that control the Moon's leading industrial companies. Each clan does everything in their power to claw their way to the top of the food chain--marriages of convenience, corporate espionage, kidnapping, and mass assassinations.

Through ingenious political manipulation and sheer force of will, Lucas Cortas rises from the ashes of corporate defeat and seizes control of the Moon. The only person who can stop him is a brilliant lunar lawyer, his sister, Ariel.

Witness the Dragons' final battle for absolute sovereignty in Ian McDonald's heart-stopping finale to the Luna trilogy.

Mirror, mirror, on the wall. Who is the Fairest of them all?

Pure evil has a name, hides behind a mask of deceit, and uses her "glamour" to gain power. But who is Queen Levana? Long before she crossed paths with Cinder, Scarlet, and Cress in The Lunar Chronicles, Levana lived a very different story?a story that has never been told... until now. New York Times bestselling author Marissa Meyer reveals the story behind her fascinating villain in Fairest, an unforgettable tale about love and war, deceit and death. This extraordinary book includes a special full-color image of Levana's castle and an excerpt from Winter, the exciting conclusion to The Lunar Chronicles.

The enchantment continues....

The universe of the Lunar Chronicles holds stories - and secrets - that are wondrous, vicious, and romantic. How did Cinder first arrive in New Beijing? How did the brooding soldier Wolf transform from young man to killer? When did Princess Winter and the palace guard Jacin realize their destinies?

With six stories - two of which have never before been published - and an exclusive never-before-seen excerpt from Marissa Meyer's novel, Heartless, about the Queen of Hearts from Alice in Wonderland, Stars Above is essential for fans of the bestselling and beloved Lunar Chronicles.

Contents:

• The Keeper
• Glitches
• The Queen's Army
• Carswell's Guide to Being Lucky
• After Sunshine Passes By
• The Princess and the Guard
• The Little Android
• The Mechanic
• Something Old, Something New

Humans and androids crowd the raucous streets of New Beijing. A deadly plague ravages the population. From space, a ruthless lunar people watch, waiting to make their move. No one knows that Earth's fate hinges on one girl....

Cinder, a gifted mechanic, is a cyborg. She's a second-class citizen with a mysterious past, reviled by her stepmother and blamed for her stepsister's illness. But when her life becomes intertwined with the handsome Prince Kai's, she suddenly finds herself at the center of an intergalactic struggle, and a forbidden attraction. Caught between duty and freedom, loyalty and betrayal, she must uncover secrets about her past in order to protect her world's future.

Cinder, the cyborg mechanic, returns in the second thrilling installment of the bestselling Lunar Chronicles. She's trying to break out of prison--even though if she succeeds, she'll be the Commonwealth's most wanted fugitive.

Halfway around the world, Scarlet Benoit's grandmother is missing. It turns out there are many things Scarlet doesn't know about her grandmother or the grave danger she has lived in her whole life. When Scarlet encounters Wolf, a street fighter who may have information as to her grandmother's whereabouts, she is loath to trust this stranger, but is inexplicably drawn to him, and he to her. As Scarlet and Wolf unravel one mystery, they encounter another when they meet Cinder. Now, all of them must stay one step ahead of the vicious Lunar Queen Levana, who will do anything for the handsome Prince Kai to become her husband, her king, her prisoner.

In this third book in Marissa Meyer's bestselling Lunar Chronicles series, Cinder and Captain Thorne are fugitives on the run, now with Scarlet and Wolf in tow. Together, they're plotting to overthrow Queen Levana and prevent her army from invading Earth.

Their best hope lies with Cress, a girl trapped on a satellite since childhood who's only ever had her netscreens as company. All that screen time has made Cress an excellent hacker. Unfortunately, she's being forced to work for Queen Levana, and she's just received orders to track down Cinder and her handsome accomplice.

When a daring rescue of Cress goes awry, the group is splintered. Cress finally has her freedom, but it comes at a higher price than she'd ever expected. Meanwhile, Queen Levana will let nothing prevent her marriage to Emperor Kai, especially the cyborg mechanic. Cress, Scarlet, and Cinder may not have signed up to save the world, but they may be the only hope the world has.

Don't miss the thrilling final chapter of Marissa Meyer's Lunar Chronicles series.

Princess Winter is admired for her grace, kindness and beauty, despite the scars on her face. She's said to be even more breath-taking than her stepmother, Queen Levana...

When Winter develops feelings for the handsome palace guard, Jacin, she fears the evil Queen will crush their romance before it has a chance to begin.

But there are stirrings against the Queen across the land. Together with the cyborg mechanic, Cinder, and her allies, Winter might even find the power to launch a revolution and win a war that's been raging for far too long.

Can Cinder, Scarlet, Cress, and Winter claim their happily ever afters by defeating Levana once and for all?

Years ago, in a cave beneath the dense forests and streams on the surface of the moon, a gargantuan spider once lived. Its silk granted its first worshippers immense faculties of power and awe.

It's now 1923 and Veronica Brinkley is touching down on the moon for her intake at the Barrowfield Home for Treatment of the Melancholy. A renowned facility, Dr. Barrington Cull's invasive and highly successful treatments have been lauded by many. And they're so simple! All it takes is a little spider silk in the amygdala, maybe a strand or two in the prefrontal cortex, and perhaps an inch in the hippocampus for near evisceration of those troublesome thoughts and ideas.

But patients aren't the only ones with trouble on their minds, and although the spider's been dead for years, its denizens are not. Someone or something is up to no good, and Veronica just might be the cause.

A tale of subversion and riot on a moon-based mining operation. The author also wrote "Orbital Decay", "Clarke County" and "Space".

Now married with three rambunctious children, Steve and Ginny once again find themselves fighting for their country as they try to stop a plot to sabotage America's first manned mission to the moon (in an alternate history timeline, that is). But they will need help from a loyal cadre of magical allies if they hope to avert a catastrophe...

Hurled from her ancient orbit by a nuclear holocaust, the Moon has become an interstellar wanderer. In their search for a new home planet, the personnel of Moonbase Alpha must now explore every possibility, no matter how bizarre or dangerous it might appear.

When the red planet glowed on the black velvet pad of Main Mission's big scanner, their hopes were raised again. But as approach and reconnaissance procedures were begun, three alien ships in tight formation streaked into view -- bringing a message of doom from their mothership, a mobile arsenal capable of blasting the entire Moon to dust.

The revelations on Mars -- a half-million year-old legacy of the vanished star-traveling Builders -- have fed the flames of catastrophic war. A beleaguered United States and its Russian and Japanese allies struggle to hold their own against the indomitable forces of the enemy United Nations. The bloody conflict that has swept over the home planet now rages across the blackness of space -- with the U.S. Marine Corps in the vanguard, leading the charge as always.

But Mars is not the sole repository of alien wonders. The Earth's moon hides unsettling mysteries of its own-and dangerous secrets pointing toward an unstoppable threat advancing from somewhere beyond the solar system. And as scientists on both sides ract to utilize technology they have only barely begun to comprehend, the UN makes the opening move in a gambit that could end the hostilities quickly and decisively by bringing about the death of millions...without the aid of alien-inspired weaponry.

A bad situation worsens by the nanosecond. And that means it's time to call in the Marines -- to make a life or death stand on the gray shores of Luna.

Ten years have passed since the war that destroyed the Sazi Council and inflicted a horrible "cure" on thousands of Sazi, robbing them of their ability to shapeshift.

Luna Lake, isolated in Washington State, started as a refugee camp for Sazi orphans. Now it's a small town and those refugees are young adults, chafing at the limits set by their still-fearful guardians.

There's reason to fear: Sazi children are being kidnapped. Claire, a red wolf shifter, is sent to investigate. Held prisoner by the Snakes during childhood, Claire is distrusted by those who call Luna Lake home.

Before the war, Alek was part of a wolf pack in Chicago. In Luna Lake he was adopted by a parliament of Owls, defying Sazi tradition. The kidnappings are a painful reminder that his little sister disappeared a decade ago.

When Claire and Alek meet, sparks fly -- but the desperate race to find the missing children forces them to set aside their mutual attraction and focus on the future of their people.

In Cathy Clamp's Illicit, when a border dispute between two bear clans destabilizes shapeshifter relations throughout Europe and threatens to reveal their existence to humans, the Sazi High Council orders both sides to the negotiation table. The peace talks take place in Luna Lake, the American community where all shifter species--wolf, cat, bird, bear, and more--live in harmony.

Diplomats, their families, and security personnel stream into town, among them Dalvin Adway, a Wolven agent. Dalvin is startled to find Rachel Washington in Luna Lake. The last time he saw her, they were children in Detroit. Then she was kidnapped and, he thought, murdered. But Rachel became an owl-shifter as a result of the attack and has avoided family and old friends ever since, knowing they would not understand her . She's stunned to see Dalvin and learn that he, too, is an owl-shifter.

Their wary friendship is on the brink of becoming something more when conspiracy and betrayal cause the peace talks to break down. The fight between the bear clans will be settled through a form of traditional challenge--a risky tactic that might lead to full-blown war. Rachel is determined to prevent that, even if it means taking up the challenge herself!