A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
Recurring elements in the story’s premise.
An unemployed carpenter walks from town to town seeking work until hunger and official suspicion drive him toward collapse.
An exhausted French detachment facing a deadly winter march finds unexpected resolve after taking two civilians under its protection.
An inventor descends five miles beneath the ocean in a steel sphere and finds that the abyss is neither empty nor lifeless.
A young man forbidden to risk his finest clothes chooses one moonlit night to wear them freely and embrace the world beyond his home.
Two exhausted adventurers follow a stolen treasure map into a tropical forest, certain that murder has put a fortune within reach.
A penniless London dreamer searches night after night for Celephaïs, the timeless city he first entered in childhood.
A scholar climbs a forbidden mountain to see the gods of Earth, certain that his learning can protect him from their anger.
A young singer crosses many lands searching for the beautiful city he remembers, hoping to find people who understand his songs.
A ruthless U-boat commander loses control of his submarine and drifts toward ruins on the Atlantic floor.
A lonely lighthouse keeper boards a white ship under the full moon and sails through dreamlike lands of beauty, mystery, and danger.
A Yukon camp's judge wakes alone in a boat with no food and no memory of how he got there.
A newcomer crosses the Yukon alone in extreme cold, with a dog whose instincts tell it the journey is unsafe.
To keep a promise, a Klondike traveler carries a friend's heavy bag through storms, rapids, and a mountain pass.
A farmer goes to a country ball to escape indecision about marriage and meets a woman with plans of her own.
A banished young Sienese entrusts his sister to the rival who toppled their family.
A despised prince secretly marries the peasant woman who restores his faith in the world.
A dying professor lends his brain to an experimental warship, and the machine begins making decisions its creators never authorized.
After a Mars-based spiritual grifter strands a group of elderly women, their leader decides they will take the promised journey anyway.
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.
Seekers from several species travel to a machine that knows everything, only to learn that knowledge depends on asking a valid question.
A lone prospector crosses Venus’s deadliest desert while strict cash-only services deny him the supplies he needs to survive.
A condemned ritual thief on a dying Mars raids a forbidden vault, hoping that fragments of ancient science can save his people.
