A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
The readership the story was written for.
An inventor descends five miles beneath the ocean in a steel sphere and finds that the abyss is neither empty nor lifeless.
Alone in a remote Borneo observatory, an astronomer discovers that the darkness inside the dome holds a threat far closer than the stars.
A vain minor poet mistakes his hunger for inspiration for a grand passion when a young admirer takes his rhetoric seriously.
A shipwreck survivor in a diving suit is mistaken for a god, but keeping up the role may cost him the treasure he came to recover.
On a carefully cultivated tour of Rome, a refined schoolteacher meets an ideal companion—until one social detail tests her affection.
A young builder finds a chest of silver beneath his fiancée’s garden and discovers that getting rich is harder than finding treasure.
A mild schoolmaster tests his courage with a harmless mock burglary and stumbles into a real criminal escape.
A village shop assistant returns from three missing weeks with ashes in his pockets and a love he cannot explain or forget.
After crossing a feared secret society, an arrogant colonial traveler finds that revenge follows him from Sierra Leone to London.
A young schoolmaster receives a golden fruit said to grant perfect knowledge, just as he begins his respectable new career.
After five years and most of his fortune, Monson must decide whether his flying machine is ready—or whether ridicule has forced the decision.
An ironmaster invites his wife’s lover on a midnight tour of the furnaces, where every display of heat carries a threat.
A sighted mountaineer falls into an isolated valley where blindness is universal—and learns that his advantage has no accepted meaning.
A neglected shopkeeper discovers that a crystal egg offers a living view of another world—and that its inhabitants may be watching back.
A ragged stranger claims to carry a fortune in man-made diamonds, but every proof of his success has made him look more like a criminal.
A successful politician confides that a green door has offered him glimpses of a lost garden of perfect happiness throughout his life.
A Brazilian gunboat sent against a plague of giant ants discovers an organized enemy capable of challenging human rule of the Amazon.
A quiet orchid collector longs for one remarkable event, then a mysterious plant from the tropics begins to bloom in his greenhouse.
A colonial patrol trapped on a cliff must escape enemy fire, thirst, and a drop that seems impossible to survive.
A professional burglar poses as a landscape painter, only to find that art criticism is the least predictable hazard of the job.
A housemaid watches her respectable fiancé rise in the world—and begin to treat their long engagement as something beneath him.
A confident rural army meets an enemy weapon built to cross trenches, resist rifles, and turn courage into a tactical liability.
An abused laborer in a roaring power station begins to worship the largest dynamo as a god capable of judging his brutal supervisor.
A shabby barroom storyteller explains how he was promised a fortune by an unread author—and why he never received it.
