A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
How the prose reads.
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.
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.
A prejudiced anthropologist and his assistant discover that an alien village possesses a rare medicine with extraordinary healing powers.
Two stranded space travelers need fuel from a society whose idea of honorable warfare makes a simple recovery mission dangerous.
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.
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.
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 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 submarine officer deserts rather than help begin total nuclear war, but enemy vessels force him to decide what he is still willing to fight for.
