A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
How the prose reads.
A major crosses a ruined battlefield to negotiate peace, unaware that the autonomous weapons around him have learned to look human.
Three Terran agents flee Mars with a stolen city hidden among office supplies, but one fellow passenger asks too many questions.
Explorers land on a dead planet and discover that one weapon has outlived the civilization it was built to defend.
Stranded on a seemingly hospitable planetoid, a spaceman discovers that the only danger comes when he tries to sleep.
A grieving morgue-ship attendant recovers a scientist who has floated frozen through space for three centuries—and may hold the key to a war.
A burned-out coroner on a space morgue ship gets one last chance to confront the war whose dead he has carried for a decade.
On the eve of humanity’s first Moon rocket, the man who owns the launch company tries to stop a breakthrough he believes civilization is not ready to use.
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.
After a catastrophic time-machine demonstration, an inventor is condemned to become the living pendulum of the device he built.
On a colonized, dying Mars, an exiled musician plays a tune that may summon a violent reckoning for Earth’s occupiers.
On a crowded war-bound ship in 1864, a plague of lice gives two samurai factions something more urgent to fight about.
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.
At Tokyo’s dazzling Rokumeikan ball in 1886, a seventeen-year-old Japanese woman dances for the first time with a visiting French naval officer.
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.
From Paradise, the Buddha offers a single spider’s thread to a robber suffering at the bottom of Hell.
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.
Impoverished in Tang-dynasty Loyang, Tu Tzuchun is offered a second fortune by an enigmatic old man—but begins to want something different.
A condemned ritual thief on a dying Mars raids a forbidden vault, hoping that fragments of ancient science can save his people.
A defeated space fleet returns to peaceful Earth for fuel and turns a willing welcome into occupation, forced labor, and revolt.
A gangly schoolmaster courts a farmer’s daughter in a drowsy Hudson Valley town haunted by a headless horseman.
