What if God was lonely? What if a Reader could change the stories she reads? What if a machine outlived the Universe? The stories in this collection are stories about the end of Worlds, and Empires, and Universes, and Stories. There is a story about the end, and the beginning, of Time. There's a story about Men in the Universe after the end of the Earth. There is a story about the oldest sound, the sound that everyone can hear, suddenly and dramatically stopping, and the deaf detective enlisted to solve the mystery. These Collected Stories are glimpses of worlds, figments of fiction framed by the imagination, and journeys so far into the future that there might be nothing left to greet the traveler at the end.