Search Worlds Without End

Nebula-nominated Novella

Humans live deep within an apparently lifeless planet covered by massive ice sheets. Having to survive in confined spaces has bred a unique culture where deference and non-confrontation make co-existence possible.

Osaji's opportunities are limited by the need to care for her aging grandmother. But all that is about to change as circumstances push her toward a journey like no other.

Reports of a strange, new habitable planet have reached the Twenty Planets of human civilization. When a team of scientists is assembled to investigate this world, exoethnologist Sara Callicot is recruited to keep an eye on an unstable crewmate. Thora was once a member of the interplanetary elite, but since her prophetic delusions helped mobilize a revolt on Orem, she's been banished to the farthest reaches of space, because of the risk that her very presence could revive unrest.

Upon arrival, the team finds an extraordinary crystalline planet, laden with dark matter. Then a crew member is murdered and Thora mysteriously disappears. Thought to be uninhabited, the planet is in fact home to a blind, sentient species whose members navigate their world with a bizarre vocabulary and extrasensory perceptions.

Lost in the deep crevasses of the planet among these people, Thora must battle her demons and learn to comprehend the native inhabitants in order to find her crewmates and warn them of an impending danger. But her most difficult task may lie in persuading the crew that some powers lie beyond the boundaries of science.

Tedla is a 'bland,' an asexual class of people that exist only to serve their fellow beings.

Val is an expert on alien cultures but has never seen a bland before. They come together after Tedla is found light-years away from its home planet-alone, isolated and suicidal. Val's mission is to help Tedla recover. But the more she learns about the beautiful alien being, the more she discovers about the torment Tedla and its kind suffer on their planet.

Little does the rest of the universe know of the hidden world of the blands, a world that hides shocking secrets and unspeakable crimes.

Halfway Human is a mesmerizing look at an intricately created alien world which is strange and distant, yet hauntingly familiar.

Nebula Award nominated novelette in Gilman's Twenty Planets universe. It originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, October-November 1991. The story can also be found in the anthology The Best from Fantasy & Science Fiction: A 45th Anniversary Anthology (1994), edited by Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Edward L. Ferman.

Hugo- and Nebula-nominated Novella

Set in the same universe as Arkfall (although a totally independent story), The Ice Owl tells a tale capturing that moment when we start to lose our childhood...when we start to realize that our parents and the "grown-ups" are just as flawed as we are... everyone struggling to deal with their own demons.

It is also a story about past crimes and the haunting echo of ghosts long dead, of a life-long quest for redemption and, for some, the final revenge for crimes lost in the stellar dust...