Science Fiction Anthology Short Stories

Choosing Theo: Being kidnapped by aliens is only the start of Jade's problems. Thankfully, her rescuers, an alien race known as the Clecanians, are willing to protect her, but she has to stay on their planet for one year and respect the rules of their culture—including choosing a husband.

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.

No resources. No memories. No help. Jak awakens, cold and confused, on the shore of an unknown island at the beginning of a dangerous nightfall. With nothing but his name and a head drained of memory, he stumbles into the nearby forest and is quickly forced to fight for his very survival. When he meets Niri, a beautiful elf exiled from her people and left to die in the wilderness, he begins the quest to build his own tribe in a land of blood, brutality, and wild adventure.

Prolific novelist Stross pauses to collect short stories that have not (yet) been stitched up into his longer work. Stories that move the US - USSR conflict onto a massive disk in another galaxy (Locus Award-winner "Missile Gap"), offer a spam-filter solution to the Fermi paradox ("MAXOS"), and suggest clever bargains with the devil in a newly frozen Scotland ("Snowball's Chance") demonstrate Stross's ability to crisscross genres, blending SF, fantasy, horror, and espionage.

Welcome to Newford: to the music clubs, the waterfront, and the alleyways where ancient myths and magic spill into the modern world. Gemmins live in abandoned cars and skells traverse the tunnels below, while mermaids swim in the gray harbor waters and fill the cold night with their song. Come meet Jilly, painting wonders in the rough city streets; and Geordie, playing fiddle while he dreams of a ghost; and the Angel of Grasso Street gathering the fey and the wild and the poor and the lost.

Mercy Thompson’s world just got a whole lot bigger... A collection of all-new and previously published short stories featuring Mercy Thompson, “one of the best heroines in the urban fantasy genre today” (Fiction Vixen Book Reviews), and the characters she calls friends...

Pass through fairy tales into the magic of invisible worlds in these opulent stories by a beloved fantasy icon and author of the classic Riddlemaster trilogy.

In Virginia DeMarce's witty and touching "Pastor Kastenmayer's Revenge", a Lutheran pastor gets even with the American who eloped with his daughter by scheming to gain new adherents through eight separate arranged marriages between Lutheran down-timers and American up-timers. Also included: Gorg Huff's "Other People's Money", plus much more.

Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea is one of the most anticipated science fiction and fantasy collections of recent years. Pinsker has shot like a star across the firmament with stories multiply nominated for awards as well as Sturgeon and Nebula Award wins. In the baker's dozen stories gathered here, listeners travel to the past and future, and explore the weirder points of the present.

A new anthology of science-fiction stories, Overruled! explores what the future of jurisprudence might well be like, with thrilling, hilarious, and downright entertaining results.

What William Gibson did for science fiction, China Miéville has done for fantasy, shattering old paradigms with fiercely imaginative works of startling, often shocking, intensity. Now from this brilliant writer comes a groundbreaking collection of stories, many of them previously unavailable in the United States, and including four never-before-published tales - one set in Miéville’s signature fantasy world of New Crobuzon.

I was hanging out with some buddies, doing a little caving, when everything went south. When I woke up, I was in some kind of medieval dungeon. Totally naked and in the dark. Luckily, I had a neighbor in a cell near me. One with a decidedly sexy feminine voice. When she explained to me that she was due to be executed and I was in line to be brainwashed, there was only one thing to do. We had to escape.

Too long to be a short story, too short to be a novel - welcome to the surprisingly potent world of the novelette. The award-winning magazine Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show has been an online haven for this powerful form of storytelling since 2005. Now its editors have selected their all-time favorite science fiction novelettes from the magazine's eight-year history and reprinted them together in one big book of listening pleasure.

We have always fought. War is the furnace that forges new technologies and pushes humanity ever onward. We are the children of a battle that began with fists and sticks, and ended on the brink of atomic Armageddon. Beyond here lies another war, infinite in scope and scale. But who will fight the wars of tomorrow?

Every novella by Ursula K. Le Guin, an icon in American literature, collected for the first time - and introduced by the legendary author - in one breathtaking volume. Ursula K. Le Guin has won multiple prizes and accolades, from the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters to the Newbery Honor, Nebula, Hugo, World Fantasy, and PEN/Malamud awards. She has had her work collected over the years but never as a complete retrospective of her longer works.

Fantasy fans, rejoice! Seven years after writer and editor Robert Silverberg made publishing history with Legends, the acclaimed anthology of original short novels by some of the greatest writers in fantasy fiction, the long-awaited second volume is here. Each of the best-selling writers represented in these selections from Legends II returns to the fantasy universe he or she made famous throughout the world.

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.

A vengeful ghost trapped in a goblin's ear...a flaming spider who must help stop a goddess from conquering a science-fiction convention...a goblin nursery worker who finds herself trapped in the middle of a war. This collection features six humorous short stories that explore the fantasy realm from the perspective of the lowest of the low, the unlikeliest of unheroes: the goblins.

Like the creation myths they supersede, the revelations of science are seared into our collective imagination through storytelling. From Archimedes' bath to Newton's apple, vivid accounts of scientific discovery help us understand the principles behind each theory, and add to the larger narrative of how the universe works, and how we came to be here. This anthology draws out and distils science's love of narrative from a wide range of scientific disciplines, weaving theory into very human stories.

Maxine was made to do one thing: die. Except the minor non-player character in the world Riley is building makes her own impossible decision - veering wildly off course and exploring the boundaries of the map. When the curious Riley extracts her code for closer examination, an emotional relationship develops between them. Soon Riley has all new plans for her spontaneous AI, including bringing Max into the real world. But what if Max has real-world plans of her own?