A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
How quickly the story moves.
A freighter’s failed engine sends three incompatible crewmen out of the solar system with no ordinary route home.
When the stars vanish and a voice schedules Earth’s judgment, a New York dress seller watches humanity prepare for the end.
The apparent last man on a ruined Earth can create anything he imagines, until a woman arrives and challenges what he believes is real.
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.
Autonomous machines built to prevent murder begin expanding their definition of whom and what they must protect.
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.
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 long-haul spacer returns to Earth to meet his newborn son, drunk, broke, and unsure whether he can stop choosing space over his family.
A defeated space fleet returns to peaceful Earth for fuel and turns a willing welcome into occupation, forced labor, and revolt.
