A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
How the prose reads.
A freighter’s failed engine sends three incompatible crewmen out of the solar system with no ordinary route home.
An alien envoy announces Earth’s forced annexation and dares a military research team to overcome his perfect defenses.
When the stars vanish and a voice schedules Earth’s judgment, a New York dress seller watches humanity prepare for the end.
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.
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 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.
In a ruined Kyoto gate, a hungry servant encounters a stranger whose desperate act forces him to decide what survival permits.
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.
From Paradise, the Buddha offers a single spider’s thread to a robber suffering at the bottom of Hell.
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.
