A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
Where does the story take place?
A pilot risks a solo flight to Mars, where a hidden survivor and a silent alien intelligence reveal why Earth’s missions never came home.
A hunted mutant slips past Pluto’s quarantine and finds a dead scientist, a false disaster, and a doorway to a world remembered only in nightmares.
A stranded fugitive boards a living spaceship and begins planning how to make its extraordinary power his own.
A planter hunts the alien beast eating his crop, only to find that each mile of the chase makes his quarry smarter and more dangerous.
A neglected shopkeeper discovers that a crystal egg offers a living view of another world—and that its inhabitants may be watching back.
When soldiers on a remote asteroid declare themselves plants, a psychiatrist enters the woods to find who taught them.
A Terran boy visits his alien friends on the day their people finally begin winning back a century of conquered worlds.
After a Mars-based spiritual grifter strands a group of elderly women, their leader decides they will take the promised journey anyway.
A terrified Mars-bound crewman is given a mental refuge so convincing that his childhood memories become the only world he can see.
Sixty years after being stranded on Mars, an old man receives a phone call from the younger self he recorded to survive the silence.
An aging, disgraced navigator claims he can guide a vital supply ship through an asteroid belt after its computers fail.
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.
A Venus-bound rocket crew blunders into battle in a delirious send-up of space-adventure pulp.
Stranded on an asteroid with minutes of oxygen left, a patrolman and his camera-obsessed partner confront monsters that may exist only in the mind.
On a colonized, dying Mars, an exiled musician plays a tune that may summon a violent reckoning for Earth’s occupiers.
Seekers from several species travel to a machine that knows everything, only to learn that knowledge depends on asking a valid question.
An aging prospector on a remote asteroid gives his work robot a personality and gains the companion he never expected.
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 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 condemned ritual thief on a dying Mars raids a forbidden vault, hoping that fragments of ancient science can save his people.
22 stories
