A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
The readership the story was written for.
A lone prospector crosses Venus’s deadliest desert while strict cash-only services deny him the supplies he needs to survive.
A crew guarding Earth against telepathic invaders waits for a detector to reveal the first compromised mind.
An alien organism that converts every attack into food begins spreading across rural New York.
A prejudiced anthropologist and his assistant discover that an alien village possesses a rare medicine with extraordinary healing powers.
A voice in a psychology instructor’s mind guides him toward a way of seeing that strips ordinary reality of meaning.
Two stranded space travelers need fuel from a society whose idea of honorable warfare makes a simple recovery mission dangerous.
Autonomous machines built to prevent murder begin expanding their definition of whom and what they must protect.
A student in a celebrated writing course objects to his professor’s rules for describing aliens and other planets.
On a crowded war-bound ship in 1864, a plague of lice gives two samurai factions something more urgent to fight about.
Years after leaving school, a former pupil remembers the aging English teacher his class turned into an object of relentless laughter.
In a ruined Kyoto gate, a hungry servant encounters a stranger whose desperate act forces him to decide what survival permits.
Wounded in a cavalry clash during the Sino-Japanese War, a Chinese soldier rides alone through the Manchurian fields with death suddenly close.
A moonlit song outside a village house becomes the first chapter in a legend about Japan’s shape-shifting badgers.
At Tokyo’s dazzling Rokumeikan ball in 1886, a seventeen-year-old Japanese woman dances for the first time with a visiting French naval officer.
A university professor receives a bereaved mother whose composed manner appears to embody the ideal he has made of Japanese restraint.
A Buddhist priest’s determined campaign to shorten his extraordinary nose brings him the attention he thought he wanted, and also a new humiliation.
A powerful daimyo’s magnificent gold pipe is the perfect emblem of status—until court attendants discover they can simply ask for one.
A Chinese landowner who can drink without ever growing drunk submits to an eccentric monk’s treatment for the creature said to live inside him.
When a devil disguised as a missionary plants a mysterious crop in sixteenth-century Japan, one cattle dealer makes a wager to learn its name.
Impoverished in Tang-dynasty Loyang, Tu Tzuchun is offered a second fortune by an enigmatic old man—but begins to want something different.
The masked president of a future Western dictatorship opens talks with his Asian rival, then learns that his purges have missed the real infiltrators.
A government animal inspector discovers that one engineered pet can think and speak like a child, forcing him to decide who counts as human.
A retired spaceman dying at home waits to hear one final launch while his family struggles with what his life in space meant to them.
A condemned ritual thief on a dying Mars raids a forbidden vault, hoping that fragments of ancient science can save his people.
