A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
The readership the story was written for.
In a crime-free future, a pulp writer discovers that a perfect society has left him dangerously short of material.
Sixty years after being stranded on Mars, an old man receives a phone call from the younger self he recorded to survive the silence.
An aging, disgraced navigator claims he can guide a vital supply ship through an asteroid belt after its computers fail.
A grieving morgue-ship attendant recovers a scientist who has floated frozen through space for three centuries—and may hold the key to a war.
A burned-out coroner on a space morgue ship gets one last chance to confront the war whose dead he has carried for a decade.
In a future that has abolished fear, graveyards, and the literature of horror, the last man from the dead rises to make the world afraid again.
On the eve of humanity’s first Moon rocket, the man who owns the launch company tries to stop a breakthrough he believes civilization is not ready to use.
On a world where people are born, grow old, and die within eight days, a boy races against his own lifetime to find a way beyond it.
A Venus-bound rocket crew blunders into battle in a delirious send-up of space-adventure pulp.
Stranded on an asteroid with minutes of oxygen left, a patrolman and his camera-obsessed partner confront monsters that may exist only in the mind.
After a catastrophic time-machine demonstration, an inventor is condemned to become the living pendulum of the device he built.
On a colonized, dying Mars, an exiled musician plays a tune that may summon a violent reckoning for Earth’s occupiers.
Across peaceful future suburbs, children take up a new game called Invasion—and their parents cannot decide whether to take it seriously.
Seekers from several species travel to a machine that knows everything, only to learn that knowledge depends on asking a valid question.
An aging prospector on a remote asteroid gives his work robot a personality and gains the companion he never expected.
A man surrounded by labor-saving luxuries begins to question the debts that control his family’s future.
A freighter’s failed engine sends three incompatible crewmen out of the solar system with no ordinary route home.
An alien envoy announces Earth’s forced annexation and dares a military research team to overcome his perfect defenses.
When the stars vanish and a voice schedules Earth’s judgment, a New York dress seller watches humanity prepare for the end.
After inventing an immortality serum, a biologist is pursued by a secret organization determined to control the discovery.
Three shape-changing aliens land on Earth to open an invasion route, but the planet offers forms their rigid caste system forbids.
Treasure hunters on a remote Pacific island discover that a Martian parasite can unite animals and people into one obedient mind.
Two starving space travelers search an abandoned alien warehouse for anything a human can safely eat.
The apparent last man on a ruined Earth can create anything he imagines, until a woman arrives and challenges what he believes is real.
