Military Science Fiction Anthology

Masterpieces of Science Fiction Short Stories written by Lamees Alhassar is a display of the most boundary-pushing, genre-blurring creative sophistication. Selene is part of the book Masterpieces of the Best Science Fiction Short Stories, Book 1....

An infantryman, certain resistance is futile, nevertheless deploys with his unit to fight against an alien invasion. Lords of the Remnant is a 3,800 word military science fiction short story.

Lieutenant Jackson Silver walked into the bustling dock workers’ bar. The heavy stale air seemed to cling to his skin. The smell of unwashed workers and their oily grease-stained overalls infiltrated every corner of the crowded, dimly lit dive. Many pairs of eyes watched him as he headed for the bar. Little did Lieutenant Jackson Silver realize what kind of a situation he was walking into when he walked into that bar, or how much trouble he was about to get into.

In "The Crystal Crypt", Earth and Mars are poised on the verge of war. On the last spaceship to leave Mars for Earth, law enforcement officials are looking for three fugitives who somehow made a great Martian city disappear. Unable to find the perpetrators, the officials allow the ship to disembark for Earth. A businessman named Thacher strikes up a conversation with a young woman and two men who reveal a very interesting secret to him about the mysterious case.

The Tronik Gambit is the story of a rag-tag group of air pirates. Like their older, sea-borne brethren, they spent years terrorizing aerial shipping, raiding ships on the seas with float-planes, and robbing towns and remote outposts on land, and using their machines to make the fastest getaways imaginable. Operating from a massive flying aircraft carrier and using clouds, mist, and forbidding terrain to hide their presence and move around with impunity, their weapons and machines are makeshift and purchased from corrupt industrialists and created entirely from scratch.

Glide along the corridors of an Independent Alliance training station Nobel with Chief Engineer Henry as he rescues a class of cadets from their own misfortune while teaching them a few life lessons.

In this P. K. Dick short story read by award-winning narrator Mike Vendetti almost everyone had a bomb shelter, but if they didn't have the latest model, chances where they wouldn't survive a nuclear attack. Mike Foster's dad wouldn't be bullied into buying a shelter until finally one Christmas he signed up for the easy payment plan and....

Joseph Rannen is dead, and no one besides Morgan Kimball seems to believe he wasn't a traitor. With greedy Earth warships hovering overhead, Kimball has twelve hours to produce evidence that his friend and mentor was murdered, preferably without jeopardizing the colony's safety.

An errant encounter with a passing star has flung Earth away from its old Solar System into the dark and cold of deep space. With the entire atmosphere frozen as chemical snow dozens of feet deep, one last family struggles to survive. But what are they to think when they see figures moving in the city ruins? Are Earth's dead coming back to life?

A charming rogue, Dan Courtney is learning fast that it takes more than a little charm to lay the groundwork for a railroad. Particularly when the plan is to build it across some of the roughest and most dangerous territory on earth. Courtney's been hired to survey the land that would link up the Uganda Railway to the Anglo-Egyptian railroad. Running through desert, jungle and mountains, this is one line—and story—with more twists and turns than the New York City subway system.

Captain Warden and Lance Corporal Goodwin are the space marines with the hard job. They have to infiltrate a Deathless base, identify and capture a senior officer and extract him from under the nose of his soldiers, preferably without dying in the process. They’re relying on Ten to watch their backs, but when he is accosted by the denizens of the jungle he’s yomping through, he has to make a tough choice between speed and humanity.

Necahual is a short story from the collection Tides from the New Worlds. Caribbean-born novelist Tobias Buckell established himself as a gifted new voice in science fiction with his stunning first novel, Crystal Rain. Now, in his first collection, Buckell demonstrates his strengths in the short form, offering listeners a collection of stories that are compelling, smart, wonderfully imagined, and entertaining.

In 3022, the Barchetta family rules the world of Sullivan for Hanse Davion and the Federated Suns. Young Matthew, more interested in the pleasures at Madame Lu's than his studies as a mechwarrior, stands next in his family's line to head out and make a name for himself. This is his story....

It is a fact of history that when Neil Armstrong set Apollo 11 down on the moon he was running dangerously low on fuel. This Pushcart Prize-nominated story recounts an alternate history in which the lunar module crashed and man's journey to the moon ended not in triumph - but tragedy. A decade later, a pair of astronauts finally return to the moon. And what they'll find is something no one expects.