Search Worlds Without End

This short story originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, October-November 2002. It can also be found in the anthology Year's Best SF 8 (2003), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer.

The eerie thing about Paige Adolpha wasn't how she turned up right when I was reading about her in the paper. It wasn't her fame as the star witness in the local werewolf trial. What brought on the gooseflesh, first time I saw her, was she's the spitting image of her murdered identical twin.

This novelette can also be found in the anthology Worlds Seen in Passing: Ten Years of Tor.com Short Fiction (2018), edited by Irene Gallo.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

"The Color of Paradox", by A. M. Dellamonica, is a science fiction story about one of a series of time travelers sent back to the past in order to buy more time for the human race, which in the future is on the verge of extinction.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

This short story originally appeared in Lightspeed, July 2012. It can also be found in the anthology Imaginarium 2013: The Best Canadian Speculative Writing, edited by Samantha Beiko and Sandra Kasturi.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

This short story originally appeared on Strange Horizons, 21 and 28 august 2006. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fourth Annual Collection (2007), edited by Gardner Dozois.

Read the full story for free at Strange Horizons - Part 1 - Part 2.

The Future--and the planet Paradise is ruptured by war. Trans-Temporal Agent Alyx is specially transported from the past to guide eight VIPs to safety. Tough, resourceful and experienced in the hard hand-to-hand fighting of Earth's barbaric past, she is ideal for the assignment.

But the greatest hazards to the trip lie not within the mysterious forces that clash around them, but at the heart of the group itself...

Contents:

• Introduction - essay by Samuel R. Delany
• Picnic on Paradise - (1968) - novel
• The Second Inquisition - (1970) - novelette
• The Barbarian - (1968) - novelette
• Bluestocking - (1967) - novelette (variant of The Adventuress)
• I Thought She Was Afeard Till She Stroked My Beard - (1967) - novelette (variant of I Gave Her Sack and Sherry)

Nebula Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared in the anthology Orbit 6 (1970), edtied by Damon Knight. The story can also be found in the anhologies Nebula Award Stories Six (1971), edited by Clifford D. Simak and More Women of Wonder (1976), edited by Pamela Sargent. It is included in the collection The Adventures of Alyx (1976).

Ah, love. A many splendored thing. Here is a rather unusual love story, sweet and strange as could only happen in the post-magical reality of the Indigo Springs "event."

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

Indigo Springs is a sleepy town where things seem pretty normal... until Astrid's father dies and she moves into his house. She discovers that for many years her father had been accessing the magic that flowed, literally, in a blue stream beneath the earth, leaking into his house. When she starts to use the liquid "vitagua" to enchant everyday items, the results seem innocent enough: a "'chanted" watch becomes a charm that means you're always in the right place at the right time; a "'chanted" pendant enables the wearer to convince anyone of anything...

But as events in Indigo Springs unfold and the true potential of vitagua is revealed, Astrid and her friends unwittingly embark on a journey fraught with power, change, and a future too devastating to contemplate. Friends become enemies and enemies become friends as Astrid discovers secrets from her shrouded childhood that will lead her to a destiny stranger than she could have imagined...

This powerful sequel to the A.M. Dellamonica's Sunburst Award-winning contemporary fantasy Indigo Springs starts in the small town in Oregon where Astrid Lethewood discovered an underground river of blue liquid--Vitagua--that is pure magic. Everything it touches is changed. The secret is out--and the world will never be the same. Astrid's best friend, Sahara, has been corrupted by the blue magic, and now leads a cult that seeks to rule the world. Astrid, on the other hand, tries to heal the world.

Conflicting ambitions, star-crossed lovers, and those who fear and hate magic combine in a terrible conflagration, pitting friend against friend, magic against magic, and the power of nations against a small band of zealots, with the fate of the world at stake.

Blue Magic is a powerful story of private lives changed by earthshaking events that will ensnare readers in its poignant tale of a world touched by magic and plagued by its consequences.

A.M. Dellamonica is at it again! The thrilling adventures of Gale Filachild and Captain Perrish continue in a series of prequel stories that offers to take us deeper into the fascinating world of Stormwrack.

When the crew of the Nightjar find a merman of the fleet wounded and stranded in the ocean, Gale's sister, Beatrice, is forced to take a back seat while Gale and Parrish work to find out who would assault a member of the nation of Tallon's intelligence service. They soon discover a plot that could shake the foundations of the fleet and Beatrice might be the key to preventing a catastrophic disaster.

One minute, twenty-four-year-old Sophie Hansa is in a San Francisco alley trying to save the life of the aunt she has never known. The next, she finds herself flung into the warm and salty waters of an unfamiliar world. Glowing moths fall to the waves around her, and the sleek bodies of unseen fish glide against her submerged ankles.

The world is Stormwrack, a series of island nations with a variety of cultures and economies--and a language different from any Sophie has heard.

Sophie doesn't know it yet, but she has just stepped into the middle of a political firestorm, and a conspiracy that could destroy a world she has just discovered... her world, where everyone seems to know who she is, and where she is forbidden to stay.

But Sophie is stubborn, and smart, and refuses to be cast adrift by people who don't know her and yet wish her gone. With the help of a sister she has never known, and a ship captain who would rather she had never arrived, she must navigate the shoals of the highly charged politics of Stormwrack, and win the right to decide for herself whether she stays in this wondrous world... or is doomed to exile, in Child of a Hidden Sea by A.M. Dellamonica.

As soon as Sophie Hansa returned to our world, she is anxious to once again go back to Stormwrack. Unable to discuss the wondrous sights she has seen, and unable to tell anyone what happened to her in her time away, Sophie is in a holding pattern, focused entirely on her eventual chance to return.

With the sudden arrival of Garland Parrish, Sophie is once again gone. This time, she has been called back to Stormwrack in order to spend time with her father, a Duelist-Adjudicator, who is an unrivaled combatant and fearsome negotiator. But is he driven by his commitment to seeing justice prevail, or is he a sociopath? Soon, she discovers something repellent about him that makes her reject him, and everything he is offering.

Adrift again, she discovers that her time spent with her father is not without advantages, however, for Sophie has discovered there is nothing to stop her from setting up a forensic institute in Stormwrack, investigating cases that have been bogged down in the courts, sometimes for years. Her fresh look into a long-standing case between two of the islands turns up new information that could get her, and her friends, pulled into something bold and daring, which changes the entire way she approaches this strange new world...

The Nature of a Pirate is the third book in acclaimed author, A.M. Dellmonica's high seas, Stormwrack series. The Lambda Award nominated series begins with Child of a Hidden Sea.

Marine videographer and biologist Sophie Hansa has spent the past few months putting her knowledge of science to use on the strange world of Stormwrack, solving seemingly impossible cases where no solution had been found before.

When a series of ships within the Fleet of Nations, the main governing body that rules a loose alliance of island nation states, are sunk by magical sabotage, Sophie is called on to find out why. While surveying the damage of the most recent wreck, she discovers a strange-looking creature--a fright, a wooden oddity born from a banished spell--causing chaos within the ship. The question is who would put this creature aboard and why?

The quest for answers finds Sophie magically bound to an abolitionist from Sylvanner, her father's homeland. Now Sophie and the crew of the Nightjar must discover what makes this man so unique while outrunning magical assassins and villainous pirates, and stopping the people responsible for the attacks on the Fleet before they strike again.

For centuries, the island nation of Redcap has been obligated to pay tribute to the powerful nation of Sylvanna. Suffering under the heavy burden of the contract that by rights should be declared illegal, the princesses of Redcap summon Gale, a wealthy seawoman, to advise them. Political savvy is only one weapon in Gale's diplomatic arsenal, but she's up against a Sylvanner ambassador who will push her to the brink... or over it.

A. M. Dellamonica's previous story for tor.com was a uniquely unusual contemporary fantasy love story set in the real world. "Among the Silvering Herd" takes place in another world, one that exists near ours but is quite different. "Among the Silvering Herd" is about loyalty, tradition, and the things people will do to protect what is theirs. This fantasy adventure shows off Dellamonica's gift for engaging characters and her ability to conjure unusual situations to test those characters' mettle.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

A.M. Dellamonica is at it again! The thrilling adventures of Gale Filachild and Captain Perrish continue in a series of prequel stories that offers to take us deeper into the fascinating world of Stormwrack.

When Gale and the crew of the Nightjar are called back to the fleet to handle an issue involving a law regulating new patents and a missing magical inscription, they soon find themselves embroiled in a plot that is could potentially pit island against island. Now, they must discover the mystery of the glass galago before time runs out for both it and the fleet.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

Returning to the world of Stormwrack where she set the tor.com story "Among the Silvering Herd," A.M. Dellamonica offers a new story that takes us deeper into this fascinating world, the site of her new fantasy novel Child of a Hidden Sea. The Fleet, integral to the governing of a world that is mostly water sprinkled with a number of islands, must deal with a unique form of magic, Inscribing, which is so subtle that its effects can sometimes only be known in retrospect. When a ship of the fleet visits an island where scripping is common, the crew members of the sailing vessel Nightjar are at a disadvantage when faced with local matters of which they know little or nothing at all. Strangers on the shore, indeed, they may enjoy the local customs... but also may attract unwonted attention that could cost them more than embarrassment or money...

The Castello di Putti has a suggestive sound to it, but don't be deceived. This is a story of civil strife, of culture shock, and ultimately of the risks and rewards of naval duty. Filled with Dellamonica's fresh, inventive worldbuilding and the joie de vivre of a society in flux, it shows a side of Stormwrack very different from what she presented in the previous tale.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

The latest volume in the acclaimed Heiresses of Russ series features stories that are anything but invisible: the women in these tales are not hiding and are not easily overlooked but rather are choosing the harder path, the more dangerous route, whether that leads to love or loss or adventure. Included in these pages are stories that have won a World Fantasy Award, a Tiptree Award, and a British Fantasy Award... but every one of these stories chosen by guest editor A.M. Dellamonica (herself an award-winning writer of queer speculative fiction) is emblematic of the new vitality to be found in lesbian-themed tales of wonder, the eerie, and the miraculous.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - (2016) - essay by A. M. Dellamonica
• Grandmother-nai-Leylit's Cloth of Winds - (2015) - novelette by Rose Lemberg
• The Occidental Bride - (2015) - short story by Benjanun Sriduangkaew
• The Devil Comes to the Midnight Café - (2015) - novelette by A. C. Wise
• And We Were Left Darkling - (2015) - short story by Sarah Pinsker
• A House of Her Own - (2015) - short story by Bo Balder
• Love in the Time of Markov Processes - (2015) - short story by Megan Arkenberg
• Where Monsters Dance - (2015) - short story by A. Merc Rustad
• Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers - (2015) - short story by Alyssa Wong
• Fabulous Beasts - (2015) - novelette by Priya Sharma
• The Wollart Nymphs - (2015) - short story by Melissa Scott
• The New Mother - (2015) - novella by Eugene Fischer
• Eldritch Brown Houses - (2015) - short story by Claire Humphrey
• The Tip of the Tongue - (2015) - short story by Felicia Davin
• Where Can a Broken Glass Mend? - (2015) - short story by Sonya Taaffe
• A Residence for Friendless Ladies - (2015) - novelette by Alice Sola Kim
• The Deepwater Bride - (2015) - novelette by Tamsyn Muir
• Doubt the Sun - (2015) - short story by Faith Mudge