The Skies Our Home
Reading Time: 5 minutesThe funeral was hard. But the thing that helped me smile through the tears was counting the times Tom had sat on top of hotter pyres and lived.
Reading Time: 5 minutesThe funeral was hard. But the thing that helped me smile through the tears was counting the times Tom had sat on top of hotter pyres and lived.
Reading Time: 15 minutesA strange star is spotted in the distant sky. Scientists watch as its near miss brings humanity to its knees.
Reading Time: 3 minutesWhen a robot does something right, Dr. R says, “Look, Mr. Butterfield. A breakthrough, Mr. Butterfield. What do you think of that, Mr. Butterfield?” It goes in a box with the other good robots, then trucks come to get them. When you’re good, you go outside.
Reading Time: 6 minutesTechnology allows us to revisit the most cherished moments of our lives. But is that a good thing?
Reading Time: 10 minutesScience fiction meets gothic in this story of a groundbreaking discovery gone wrong, and the horrifying fall of the titular scientist.
Reading Time: 19 minutesWhen a bioengineered “weapon” goes feral, a kill team is dispatched to retire it.
Reading Time: 8 minutesWhen a dead scientist calls a city paper to report a nuclear accident, the night reporter goes out to investigate. What he finds is completely alien.
Reading Time: 11 minutesA higher power watches a small group of primitive humans in the far future try to understand the alarms triggered by their presence in a long-abandoned city.
Reading Time: 6 minutesProbably nothing bad happens after you donate your body to science, right?
Reading Time: 17 minutesA rogue scientist’s intrepid search for life becomes a metaphoric and existential journey of the heart that explores how we connect and communicate—with one another and the universe—a journey intimately connected with water.
Reading Time: 2 minutesWhen The Soul© chip is implanted in the cerebral cortex at birth, it’s imagined it will create an immortal soul. But there are problems.
Reading Time: 3 minutesI find your heart on Europa, and for a moment it is mine. I follow the signature of your thoughts, and it leads me far above the galactic plane.
Reading Time: 13 minutesStranded when their ship was torn apart unexpectedly, the Crew of the Scorpion were lucky enough to find refuge on a nearby planet. Or were they? It turns out, the planet has a mind of it’s own.
Reading Time: 7 minutesIn a world where you can purchase a synthetic replica of a person from a vending machine, the best person to frame for a crime you committed may be … yourself.
Reading Time: 5 minutes“Everyone looks to the sky with mixed feelings, some welcoming of the arrival of Others, some dreading it. How we behave in that moment of revelation will speak volumes to those who need merely wait and watch, to know all they need to—about us.”
Reading Time: 5 minutesColonists struggle with a strange, addictive plant that is strangling their settlement.
Reading Time: 4 minutesBrrr’s investigation reveal his ice planet is losing cold and fledglings because of bureaucrats chasing profit with human aliens.
Reading Time: 23 minutesA government Hunter in a post apocalyptic world is challenged with either changing his allegiance or living a lie.
Reading Time: 23 minutesA post-apocalyptic love triangle inspired by “Casablanca” that revolves around a misanthropic bar owner, a Mars-bound clone fighting for his freedom, and a repurposed sex droid.
Reading Time: 3 minutesDubious captains, drones, economies built around recycled rocket boosters, and love.
Reading Time: 20 minutesThe wild hunt calls, and it’s time for Ondine to depart this world, alongside her club-obsessed brothers and sisters. Yet she’s in love with a mortal – or is she? Her decision to stay or go must be made fast, for a terrible monster hunts her
Reading Time: 16 minutesOn a distant planet, a young alien and his human neighbor plot to escape to the paradise known as Earth.
Reading Time: 19 minutesJackson, a wanna-be bounty hunter in a post-apocalyptic city, has been hired to find the people responsible for several acts of industrial sabotage. A moral person living in a city where morality isn’t a particularly good survival trait, Jackson ends up facing a crisis of conscience.
Reading Time: 9 minutesIf you happened to have an illegal telescope, or proxied your galaxynet address well enough to pirate your way to satellite images of Mars, you might glimpse a damaged but operational Mars Orbiter 1, alive with ‘rebels. If so, you’d be witnessing Mars Wars.
Reading Time: 12 minutesIn a world of seamless surveillance where virtual and real coalesce in a teasing dance, love is the trickster
Reading Time: 4 minutesTwo space prospectors, Zdenek and Sarika, encounter an unusual unknown life form in space. Due to carelessness, the first contact with it turns out to be too harsh and the situation escalates…
Reading Time: 10 minutesThe alarm blared. Tim Jorgensen opened his eyes and sighed. The clock was yellow. It should have been red!
Living in a buggy computer simulation is not all it’s cracked up to be.
Reading Time: 13 minutesWhere past and future meet, often it’s those living in the present that feel most conflicted.
Reading Time: 3 minutesMulti-award-winning hard science fiction author Robert J. Sawyer new book The Downloaded is coming out later this year, and it will be out in audiobook first. In fact, Audible is getting an exclusive for the first six months, before the print and ebook versions come out.
July Meeting of the WPL’s Science Fiction Book Club – WWW: Wake Read More »
Reading Time: 3 minutesBenefits and pitfalls of undersea tourism exposed!
Five Things to do on the Way to the Bottom of the Sea Read More »
Reading Time: 17 minutesIn a world where it is illegal to be unhealthy, a young doctor must choose between her heart and the career she’s fought so hard for…
Reading Time: 12 minutesThis technique of intellectual suspense and argument is a great example of fantastic storytelling that doesn’t involve rayguns or spaceships.
Deford’s The Eel Mixes Globalization, Crime, and Punishment Read More »
Reading Time: 90 minutesIn this story set in her incredible Darkover universe, Marion Zimmer Bradley masterfully blends science and fantasy, psychological suspense, and action.
Bradley’s The Planet Savers Engages Mental Health and Colonialism Read More »
Reading Time: 15 minutesWhat mental stress is waiting for our astronauts on extended journeys, and what treatment can we possibly offer them? Frederick Pohl gives us one fascinating option.
Pohl’s The Hated Explores Psychosis of Space Travel Read More »
Reading Time: 23 minutesWe were to start at noon. The impatient crowd which pressed around the enclosed space, filling the enclosed square, overflowing into the contiguous streets, and covering the houses from the ground-floor to the slated gables, presented a striking scene.
Reading Time: 26 minutesThe Moreot, Katusthius Ziani, travelled wearily, and in fear of its robber-inhabitants, through the pashalik of Yannina; yet he had no cause for dread.
Reading Time: 5 minutes“Listen to me,” said the Demon as he placed his hand upon my head. “The region of which I speak is a dreary region in Libya, by the borders of the river Zaire. And there is no quiet there, nor silence.”
Reading Time: 15 minutesIt was on the first day of the new year that the announcement was made, almost simultaneously from three observatories, that the motion of the planet Neptune, the outermost of all the planets that wheel about the sun, had become very erratic. Ogilvy had already called attention to a suspected retardation in its velocity in December.
Reading Time: 23 minutesThere was, until a year ago, a little and very grimy-looking shop near Seven Dials, over which, in weather-worn yellow lettering, the name of “C. Cave, Naturalist and Dealer in Antiquities,” was inscribed. The contents of its window were curiously variegated.
Reading Time: 75 minutesThis story is of a time beyond the memory of man, before the beginning of history, a time when one might have walked dryshod from France (as we call it now) to England, and when a broad and sluggish Thames flowed through its marshes to meet its father Rhine, flowing through a wide and level country that is under water in these latter days, and which we know by the name of the North Sea.
Reading Time: 107 minutesThis story is of a time beyond the memory of man, before the beginning of history, a time when one might have walked dryshod from France (as we call it now) to England, and when a broad and sluggish Thames flowed through its marshes to meet its father Rhine, flowing through a wide and level country that is under water in these latter days, and which we know by the name of the North Sea.
Reading Time: 22 minutesHis name was George McWhirter Fotheringay—not the sort of name by any means to lead to any expectation of miracles—and he was clerk at Gomshott’s. He was greatly addicted to assertive argument. It was while he was asserting the impossibility of miracles that he had his first intimation of his extraordinary powers.