A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
The narrator’s attitude toward the story.
A Terran boy visits his alien friends on the day their people finally begin winning back a century of conquered worlds.
An aging, disgraced navigator claims he can guide a vital supply ship through an asteroid belt after its computers fail.
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 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.
On a colonized, dying Mars, an exiled musician plays a tune that may summon a violent reckoning for Earth’s occupiers.
Years after leaving school, a former pupil remembers the aging English teacher his class turned into an object of relentless laughter.
Impoverished in Tang-dynasty Loyang, Tu Tzuchun is offered a second fortune by an enigmatic old man—but begins to want something different.
A defeated space fleet returns to peaceful Earth for fuel and turns a willing welcome into occupation, forced labor, and revolt.
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.
