Worlds Enough & Time

This collection gathers five speculative novellas by Dan Simmons. The title piece, Orphans of the Helix, is an award-winning return to the Hyperion Universe. In it, human colonists who have turned away from the idea of becoming gods meet their long-lost cousins, along with an old and dangerous plague. Elsewhere, a broken man on the edge of suicide is drawn into a strange cat-and-mouse chase with a young woman who holds a power that could end the world. Another story follows the far-off descendants of a people who were once oppressed, and what they learn about how the past refuses to fade. A climb up the frozen, snowbound flanks of K2 tests four mountaineers and exposes what each of them really is, and one of them is not human. The final novella places an older American in Russia, where a grand history meets a shabby present, and he faces his own mortality while catching sight of a remarkable future.