A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
The narrator’s attitude toward the story.
Sixty years after being stranded on Mars, an old man receives a phone call from the younger self he recorded to survive the silence.
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.
Across peaceful future suburbs, children take up a new game called Invasion—and their parents cannot decide whether to take it seriously.
After inventing an immortality serum, a biologist is pursued by a secret organization determined to control the discovery.
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 crew guarding Earth against telepathic invaders waits for a detector to reveal the first compromised mind.
Autonomous machines built to prevent murder begin expanding their definition of whom and what they must protect.
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 government animal inspector discovers that one engineered pet can think and speak like a child, forcing him to decide who counts as human.
