Short Stories Science

Toby Adams saved the world once before. Now he must do it again. The catch? This world isn’t Earth. It’s Eclipsia, a fantasy realm Toby visited as a kid. And he’s having a bit of trouble remembering how he accomplished his world-saving mission the first time. Magic was involved, he’s sure of that. Powerful companions, too. Possibly even a magical weapon of some kind.

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.

Viewed by many as the greatest science fiction writer on any planet, Philip K. Dick has written some of the most intriguing, original, and thought-provoking fiction of our time. This collection includes "The Minority Report," "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale," "Paycheck," "Second Variety," and "The Eyes Have It."

In Matheson's vampire classic I Am Legend, a plague has decimated the world and transformed the unfortunate survivors into bloodthirsty creatures of the night. Robert Neville is the last living man on Earth. Every other man, woman, and child has become a vampire hungry for Neville's blood. By day he is the hunter, stalking the sleeping undead through the abandoned ruins of civilization. By night he barricades himself in his home and prays for the dawn. How long can one man survive in a world of vampires?

E. E. Isherwood presents Books 1-3 of the Neighborhood Watch series.

The world ends in a slew of blue notification boxes, bringing with it a game-like existence including monsters and Classes. Now, John has to make his way from Kluane National Park in the Yukon to Whitehorse through monster infested forests. But, that's not enough; because he'll need to help rebuild civilization itself around the System, aliens and monsters. And, as always, humanity will be its own greatest enemy.

Gain a ship, assemble a team, conquer the galaxy! Born in a small spaceport on a distant planet, I dreamed of flying a starship, exploring wild frontiers and having one exciting encounter after another. I wanted to go everywhere, but life locked me onto the slow track to nowhere. Then fate dealt me a new hand, and my life changed beyond all imagination in the most amazing ways. But I couldn’t do it by myself. To fulfill my dream, I needed a team of starship heroes.

For Fox, Caleb, Gage and the other residents of Hawkins Hollow, the number seven portends doom - ever since, as boys, they freed a demon trapped for centuries when their blood spilled upon The Pagan Stone.

When a storm reveals a mysterious cave behind a waterfall, the young mystic’s apprentice and her wolf investigate. Inside, she discovers a secret place containing a pile of human bones and the young girl makes what could be a fatal mistake. In this Legends of the First Empire prequel, we witness the events that helped shape the woman who would one day become Suri the Mystic, the first Rhune Artist, and a hero to a generation

While training for a manned mission to Mars, Dr. Sophie Winston and her team of scientists find themselves cut off from the rest of the world. Trapped inside a biosphere deep within the confines of Cheyenne Mountain, Sophie and crew discover they are the survivors of a brutal alien invasion. But as they struggle to stay alive, they realize their safe haven is far from safe and that they must team up with other survivors around the world to defeat the aliens before it’s too late for humanity and the Earth.

Doing Time: For the prison writers whose work is included in this anthology, it means more than "serving a sentence"; it means staying alive and sane, preserving dignity, reinventing oneself, and somehow retaining one's humanity. For the last quarter century the prestigious writers' organization PEN has sponsored a contest for writers behind bars to help prisoners face these challenges. The contest honors the best short stories, plays, essays, and poems among hundreds submitted annually by men and women nationwide.

The first three novels and the prequel novella in the Preternatural Chronicles: I'm Glad You're Dead, Dawn and Quartered, Shadow of a Doubt, and Deliverance.

I am a bashful, dorky human—your average refugee on Risda III. Haina is tall, blue, and magnificent. She is effortlessly confident, and her laugh is contagious. I might hide behind the candle section at the store in Risda's port just to get a weekly glimpse at her when she makes her vendor runs. I might be in love with her from afar. Someday I'll get the courage to talk to her. Someday. But fate steps in, and 'someday' turns out to be a lot sooner than I expected.

The only thing Benji lacks more than ambition is luck. And his new job has to be the lowest of the low. But something is stirring in the zero-footprint economy of New St. Louis. And Benji’s about to find himself chin deep in the muck! This story was originally published in the Hugo Award-nominated METAtropolis.

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.

With the same deadpan mania and genius for dislocation that he brought to his internationally acclaimed novels A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Haruki Murakami makes this collection of stories a determined assault on the normal. A man sees his favorite elephant vanish into thin air; a newlywed couple suffers attacks of hunger that drive them to hold up a McDonald's in the middle of the night; and a young woman discovers that she has become irresistible to a little green monster who burrows up through her backyard.

Immerse yourself in a land of bomnubbles and quarreling cousins, sea dragons and book publishers, thieves and Fangs and secret maps. Inside this book lie seven stories of the distant past, lost adventures, forgotten songs, and heartbreaking histories. The Shining Isle is restored, but Aerwiar is vast - and these authors have tales yet to tell.

Civilization has collapsed, and the man who's responsible is buried in a small town graveyard. At night, teens Wren and Elias meet near his grave to spend some alone time together, but a stranger resembling a character from an old children's book interrupts them with a strange message.

A happily ever after with my summer fae men was within our reach...until the Heart of the Mists tied me to one of the foreboding winter arch-lords. I can't escape the connection between us. The enemy can speak from right within my soul. I'm not willing to give up on my happiness so easily, but I can't let the realms descend into all-out war. I'll brave the uncertainties of the winter realm if that's what it takes to protect the men I love. My chilly Unseelie arch-lord isn't quite what I expected, though. There's passion beneath his icy front...and also so much pain.

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.