Short Science Fiction Fantasy Stories

This expansive collection contains 27 stories and novellas written between 1963 and 1981, years in which Dick produced some of his most mature work, including such novels as Ubik, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, and A Scanner Darkly. Among the many pleasures included here are the classic title story (filmed twice as Total Recall), in which an ordinary clerk, awash in resurrected memories, discovers the truth about his past and about the astonishing role he has played in human history.

The When Swords Fall Silent anthology showcases the imaginations and talents of more than a dozen of the best modern science-fiction and fantasy authors, with each tale centered around one or more characters burdened with a bloody task they will see to completion no matter the cost. Every story takes you for a vicious ride through a world of shadow and death, each as unique in perspective and execution as the contracts carried out within.

Finding seeds of inspiration in the Brothers Grimm, seventeenth-century French lore, and Scottish ballads, Kelly Link spins classic fairy tales into utterly original stories of seekers—characters on the hunt for love, connection, revenge, or their own sense of purpose. Twisting and winding in astonishing ways, expertly blending realism and the speculative, witty, empathetic, and never predictable—these stories remind us once again of why Kelly Link is incomparable in the art of short fiction.

Here is the precursor to Jurassic Park. Victorian explorers have heard there is a remote plateau where dinosaurs still survive, and a group set outs on a dangerous mission to find out more about it.

Before Area X, there was Ambergris. Jeff VanderMeer conceived what would become his first cult classic series of speculative works: the Ambergris trilogy. Now, for the first time ever, the story of the sprawling metropolis of Ambergris is collected into a single volume, including City of Saints and Madmen, Shriek: An Afterword, and Finch.

A powerful, eerily unsettling story collection from a major international literary star. Unearthly and unexpected, the stories in Mouthful of Birds burrow their way into your psyche and don't let go. Samanta Schweblin haunts and mesmerizes in this extraordinary, masterful collection. Schweblin's stories have the feel of a sleepless night, where every shadow and bump in the dark take on huge implications, leaving your pulse racing, and the line between the real and the strange blur.

I’m Lucy, a regular accountant turned alpha werewolf. A tryst with the wrong incubus ripped me from my ordinary life and sent me tumbling into a magical realm that I'd never even dreamed existed. I was just adjusting to pack life when I was asked to mercy-kill the current alpha. I'm not a total bitch so I did what he asked, but it's left me as alpha of a pack I don't know, full of werewolves who resent that I still live and breathe while their old alpha doesn't. If I’m to survive in this dog-eat-dog realm, I’m going to have to win my new pack over–and fast.

This collection of over 50 stories brings together three of Enid Blyton's earliest and most imaginative story collections - The Book of Fairies (1924), The Book of Brownies (1926) and The Book of Pixies (1989) - and shows Blyton at her most imaginative and playful.

A classic tale featuring two of the most-memorable characters in sword and sorcery, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. Over a span of 50 years, the late Fritz Leiber wrote dozens of adventures, set in the fictional city of Lankhmar, featuring the seven-foot-tall barbarian and the diminuitive thief. The stories were recognized with both the Hugo and Nebula Awards.

Leto II Atréides, l'Empereur-Dieu de Dune, est désormais un ver de sable à face humaine. À peu près invulnérable et immortel, il a entrevu dans l'avenir l'extinction de l'espèce humaine. Pour la conjurer, il fait respecter son ordre, le Sentier d'Or. L'empire a connu trente-cinq siècles de paix. La Guilde et le Bene Gesserit ont les mains liées : c'est Leto qui contrôle sur Dune les dernières réserves de l'indispensable épice. Les Ixiens lui envoient une femme parfaite, issue d'une éprouvette et chargée à son insu de le séduire et de le détruire.

Beast, with Jane Yellowrock in the background of her mind, observes the lumber camp of white men who are destroying her hunting grounds. She decides to take revenge on the leader of the lumberjacks.

A rural town finds itself under the authoritarian sway of a tree that punishes children. A pair of old friends navigate their fraught history as strange happenings escalate in a Mexican restaurant. A pair of narcissistic friends wreak havoc on an activist community. An aloof young man finds himself living through his lover’s memories. And a day of LARPing takes a cosmic turn.

In this striking and bleak, yet luminous debut collection, Nathan Ballingrud, winner of the inaugural Shirley Jackson Award, uses the trappings of the Gothic and the uncanny to investigate a distinctly American landscape: The loneliest and darkest corners of contemporary life. Ballingrud’s stories are love stories. They’re also monster stories. Sometimes the monsters collected here are vampires or werewolves.

Follow a core group of characters known as the Trailblazers as they use alien technology and knowledge discovered in Antarctic ruins to obtain limited immortality and lead humanity out into the galaxy, encountering, befriending, and fighting hundreds of alien races all the while desperately trying to prepare Earth for the unbeatable threat at the core of the Milky Way that is destined to return and reclaim their lost colony...and their former human slaves.

A classic tale featuring two of the most-memorable characters in sword and sorcery, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. Over a span of 50 years, the late Fritz Leiber wrote dozens of adventures, set in the fictional city of Lankhmar, featuring the seven-foot-tall barbarian and the diminuitive thief. The stories were recognized with both the Hugo and Nebula Awards.

First contact with a mysterious race of aliens reveals an unusual request; a family's pet dog comes to grips with the newly bestowed gift of human-like intelligence; a poet, in danger and alone on a distant world, makes unlikely allies; hundreds of years in the future, a famous hermit lives in the sea above the now-underwater Harvard University; former friends navigate unsteady peace between human refugees and the technologically superior race that saved them; in a future where human life can be infinitely extended through cybertronic rebirth, one woman declines immortality.

My life took a turn I never expected on the day the world ended. Suddenly forced to fight in a bloody arena by a faceless System, I find the only way to survive is to win. I’m told that ten victories in the arena will give me my freedom, but if I’m going to get there, I’ll need a crack team of hardened allies to fight with me. What I got instead was a bratty college girl with a jealousy streak, a momma’s boy roommate who now inhabits the body of a piglet, and a devastatingly gorgeous teacher whose sword is as sharp as her tongue.

William and his friends have battled scores of the diseased and left communities behind them on their journey to find what lies south of the wall bisecting the country. They’ve lost loved ones and overcame many challenges, but they’ve never faced an obstacle as great as the one before them: the wall, steel, sheer, and 200 feet tall—an insurmountable barrier designed to separate the north and south. Their dream should stop here, but the group has a plan to get to the other side, and it might just work.

Ryan doesn’t remember much about his life before becoming a dungeon core. Only that he had a bit of a disagreement with the church—something to do with a beheading? Now reborn, Ryan begins to arm his darkness dungeon with devious traps, bestial zombies and ill-named skeletal creations, without doing anything too evil. Well, mostly. Some adventurers just deserve a stalactite to the head.

The Sabbat War is a savage Imperial crusade, cutting a bloody, burning path across a vast swathe of the Imperium's lost territory. On the front line, the stalwart regiments of the Astra Militarum, including the valiant Tanith First-and-Only—better known as Gaunt’s Ghosts—confront the relentless menace of Chaos, the Archenemy of Mankind. There is, and ever will be, only war.