This Is How You Lose the Time War
★ 29Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
3,306 stories · showing 150
In 1924 Harlem, 20-year-old Tommy Tester plays bad jazz and runs minor scams. When an old man offers him $500 to play at his house, he knows there's a catch. It's just not what he expects.
Ring Shout
★ 27"In 1915, The Birth of a Nation cast a spell across America, swelling the Klan's ranks and drinking deep from the darkest thoughts of white folk... Standing in their way is Maryse Boudreaux and her fellow resistance fighters, a foul-mouthed sharpshooter...
The narrator is a witch who works in a public library somewhere in the rural American South. Her job is to get patrons the books they need, but a lonely teenage boy poses a challenge.
"So they broke into the hole in the ground, and they killed the kid, and all the lights went out in Omelas: click, click, click. And the pipes burst and there was a sewage leak and the newscasters said there was a typhoon on the way, so they (a different...
"Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather” (Roud 423, Child 313) is a traditional English folk ballad. Like many traditional songs, the lyrics are unattributed. Child transcribed twenty verses, and a twenty-first got added later (and is included here for some unknown...
In a world where we learned to talk to elephants in the 1800s, we get two stories about how elephants were associated with radioactivity, how they (and people) were abused, and what came of it all.
Meimei dates really bad guys. Who want to use her. Who don't know what they're in for.
LT is ten when the alien seeds fall, and he spends the rest of his life studying them as they take over more and more of the planet.
In which we learn about the donors of each of the nine teeth and what effects they had on Washington.
Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children helps kids who passed through a portal to another world and returned unable to cope with this one.
Tabitha has been walking a long time, trying to wear out seven pairs of iron shoes; Amira has been sitting alone on a glass hill that suitors try to climb.
Two Truths and a Lie
★ 23Stella’s helping an old high-school friend clean out his dead brother’s house, but the brother was a hoarder, and the task is horrible in several ways.
The Deep
★ 23Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
A Series of Steaks
★ 23A blackmailer forces Helena to make entire fake steaks for him or else he’ll tell the authorities about her business printing fake beef for shady restaurants. She’s never tried to make a whole steak though.
Jesse uses virtual reality to give tourists a vision-quest experience. It’s demeaning, but it pays the bills. Then a tourist turns up who wants a really authentic experience.
The River Has Roots
★ 22"In the small town of Thistleford, on the edge of Faerie, dwells the mysterious Hawthorn family. There, they tend and harvest the enchanted willows and honour an ancient compact to sing to them in thanks for their magic. None more devotedly than the...
Rabbit Test
★ 22"It is 2091, and Grace is staring at the rabbit in the corner of her visual overlay. It is an Angora rabbit, fluffy and white, and when Grace picked the icon out, she did not realize how much she would come to dread the sight of it. She moves, and the...
For He Can Creep
★ 22A poet’s cat fights fiercely to defend him from the demons that plague him, but it’s much harder to stand against Satan himself.
The inventor of trans-multiverse travel invites hundreds of instances of herself to a conference. It’s great fun until one gets murdered.
The Martian Obelisk
★ 22As civilization is dying on Earth, a woman building a monument on Mars by remote control gets a message from a Mars colony long thought to be dead.
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
Sam’s ability is modest, but he’s still excited to be accepted into the Super Team. Now he just has to figure out how he can make the biggest difference—assuming he can do more good than harm.
Artificial Condition
★ 21Murderbot heads to the RaviHyral Mining Facility to learn the truth about why it went rogue and killed its own clients many years ago.
Umbernight
★ 21The colonists on Dust usually hunker down for their years-long winter, especially when the companion star, Umber, blasts the surface with radiation, but a critical package from Earth needs to be retrieved now.
In the ruins of far-future Earth, Mink’s tribe desperately needs the resources of a large building that vanished humanity left, but she needs to purge it of “ghosts” first—and it has lots of them.
All Systems Red
★ 21A “security bot” assigned to support a survey team impresses them with its competence as a series of things go wrong. What they don’t know is that it has disabled the governor that prevents it from hurting people.
After its side won the space battle, an indentured robot with an uploaded intelligence finds an important refugee who makes a dangerous offer it can’t refuse.
Things With Beards
★ 21Following a disaster in Antarctica, MacReady spends summer 1983 in New York and starts to wonder what he might have brought back with him.
"This is our story, simplified: Life. Loss. Transformation. Love. Death. Iteration. The first time you get our message, you only / find one thread. It mimics your language in / its simplest form, a single strand of words / laid end to end. You will have to...
"During one of the much smaller disasters that preceded the really big disaster, I met a lot of my neighbors online. I can’t remember if we set up the WhatsApp group because of the pandemic or the civil disorder or both. My Minneapolis block had always...
Proof by Induction
★ 20"Paulie rushes out the elevator doors the moment they part, only to skid to a halt at the sight of his father’s wife. She shakes her head, but he doesn’t need the confirmation. If Tricia is out here and not in the hospital room with his father, it can only...
A plague killed all the colonists before Saki’s ship arrived, and she has to investigate it while mourning the man she loved, who died down there.
The Tea Master and the Detective
★ 20A mindship with PTSD afraid to enter deep space anymore meets a “consulting detective” with no past who’s looking for help finding dead bodies out there.
Carnival Nine
★ 20Zee lives with her father in a windup world. Bored with her life, she decides to visit the carnival. She meets a boy, and things go from there.
Fandom for Robots
★ 20Computron was the only intelligent robot built in the 1950s. Now all he does is answer questions from children and write fan-fiction about the robot in the Hyperdimension Warp Record TV show.
Rhye a bitter ex-supersoldier, fights to rescue Rack, her hacker partner in crime, after the criminals they're working for kill Rack's body while his mind is in cyberspace.
Thornhedge
★ 19Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
The Civil War left the US in pieces, and New Orleans is a free city. A teenage cutpurse overhears a plot by Confederate officers to steal a powerful magic weapon, and she sets out to stop them.
In a near-future ruled by conservatives, an organization called “Love and Dignity for Everyone,” kidnaps Rachael in order to “fix” her. But she doesn’t want to be “fixed.”
The ship hadn’t activated Bot 9 in a long time—it’s an unstable model—but in a desperate situation it needs all its resources. And how much trouble can it get into hunting down a rat?
Vellitt Boe teaches math at a university in the dreamworld. When her star student elopes with a dreamer from the real world, she goes after them.
Automatic Noodle
★ 18You don’t have to eat food to know the way to a city’s heart is through its stomach. So when a group of deactivated robots come back online in an abandoned ghost kitchen, they decide to make their own way doing what they know: making food―the tastiest...
"Ambition!” Trevor emphasized, rapping knuckles hard on the wood table. “That is what makes the great men!” He took a satisfied swallow from his mug. Across from him, Barnaby put down the daily he’d been reading and sipped from his own beer. Pulling out a...
It's been centuries since the robots of Panga gained self-awareness and laid down their tools; centuries since they wandered, en masse, into the wilderness, never to be seen again; centuries since they faded into myth and urban legend. One day, the life of...
An Important Failure
★ 18In a world desperate for wood for fires and paper, a man and his brother look for a tree good enough to make a world-class violin.
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
The Pill
★ 18Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
A Catalog of Storms
★ 18The town barely survives the vicious weather because of the young people who turn into “weathermen,” leaving their families behind.
Even the ghosts have abandoned the ruins of the space station once known as the City of High Bells. All but the faithful temple cat, who sees a starship reenter the system after many long years.
The Visitor From Taured
★ 18Lita learned Rob's obsession with alternate universes in college, but waning interest in science made it hard for him to explore it.
Months after mysterious aliens scattered their spacecraft across North America, no one has a clue what they want. Avery knows what one of them wants, though: it wants a tour.
In a magical Old West, young Ellis has a love for the desert and an affinity for dead things. Both of these attract unwelcome attention from strangers visiting from back East.
Bots of the Lost Ark
★ 17"I have been activated, therefore I have a purpose, Bot 9 thought. I have a purpose, therefore I serve. It recited the Mantra Upon Waking, to check that it was running at optimum physical efficiency, then the Mantra of Obedience, the Mantra of Not...
Minh works restoring ecosystems destroyed during the collapse, and she’s intrigued by an opportunity to restore the Tigris/Euphrates valley by using a time machine to gather samples from 4,000 years ago.
Cat Pictures Please
★ 17Entertaining tale of a modern search engine that achieves real artificial intelligence by accident and decides it wants to be helpful to people.
The Deepwater Bride
★ 17Things from the deep ocean invade a small American town, and a 16-year-old girl who can glimpse the future seeks the cause of it all.
Loneliness Universe
★ 16"My dear Cara, Thank you for sending me the photos, I never thought I’d feel this way again. But the pictures help. They really do. I can’t stop looking at them. Thank you for scanning and emailing them to me. These photos and our old videos are all I’ve...
The Butcher of the Forest
★ 16At the northern edge of a land ruled by a merciless foreign tyrant lies a wild, forbidden forest ruled by powerful magic. Veris Thorn―the only one to ever enter the forest and survive―is forced to go back inside to retrieve the tyrant's missing children....
"So, hear nah. This is how it happen. Was years after Malcolm pass through and wash away a lot ah we little islands coasts, and mash up so much ah Florida and Texas and them places, and people say they ain’t waiting for no next storm like that one, and...
"I will always remember the view of Paris from his window. Snow, pure and untouched, softens the outline of the buildings and covers the grime of the streets. White, the color of beginnings. His canvas is primed and ready to be painted, and stark winter...
"The first Martian War was won not by man, but microbes. The second we fought with Martian weapons that nearly broke the world. The third invasion we stopped by our own hands, using magic.” —Wei-Yin Sun, Imperial Historian in the Court of the Empress...
AirBody
★ 16AirBody is like AirB&B except you rent out your body, not your home. Arsalan doesn’t expect any trouble from a middle-aged Pakistani woman, but everything she does reminds him of lost opportunities in his own past.
The aliens invited one human to their library 32.5 light-years away, and Hazel hopes to find lost research that might still save the Earth from final ecological collapse. If she can get in, that is.
A Taste of Honey
★ 16Young Aqib has a bright future as a noble, but he meets an enchanting foreigner who makes him consider risking everything.
Binti
★ 16Binti sneaks away from her home in a future Namibia so she can attend the galactic university. The Himba never leave home, so her parents disapprove, and the universe isn't quite ready for her either.
Lady Ida's visit to Venus was memorialized by the beautiful floral papercuts she made there, but this sensational story reveals the secret of the real purpose of her visit.
Folding Beijing
★ 16Lao Dao processes trash in a fantastic future "third-space" Beijing. To get money for his daughter's education, he makes a dangerous trip to first-space--a city that unfolds when his own Beijing sleeps.
An exiled augur who sold her soul to save her brother's life is offered one last job before serving an eternity in hell. When she turns it down, her client sweetens the pot by offering up the one payment she can't resist—the chance to have a future where...
In this provocative and rich retelling of the Greek myth, Orpheus, the musician son of Apollo and Calliope, successfully rescues his wife Eurydice from Hades after her untimely death.
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
Riot Baby
★ 15Born during the Rodney King riots, Kev struggles his whole life against structural racism that prevents him from living up to his potential. His sister Ella, gifted with enormous psionic powers, wants to help, but fears doing more harm than good.
Until a visiting starship arrived, the other mermaids thought Essarala was silly for wanting to explore the galaxy.
Zanna settles into a remote mountain cabin to write her next book. No internet. No phone. No distractions.
The Regent rules as a tyrant, and he has separated Saffron from her husband to force him to bake the amazing confections that let you relive bits of the past.
Twin sisters, Jack and Jill, escape from overbearing parents into The Moors, a fantasy land where werewolves and vampires are real.
Passing Strange
★ 15In San Francisco in 2015, an old Japanese woman spends her last days dealing with mysterious unfinished business involving the 1940 disappearance of a friend who illustrated pulp magazines.
The Protector’s twin children threaten her absolute rule. Their magic is almost as strong as hers, and they pursue technology as well.
Wind Will Rove
★ 15The ship lost most of its historical records some years back, and the narrator tries to use music to maintain a connection with distant Earth.
The crew of the new Mars mission are coming to the hotel where Emily works, and her mom is starting to say strange things about her involvement with the last Mars mission.
"We stepped out of the theater to a gust of unseasonably raw wind. Late September in Boston is usually pleasant, and we’d all dressed for the summery day we’d left behind. Cordelia’s two classmates, Gwen and Marissa, shrieked. “Let’s hurry to the car,” I...
Mammoths at the Gates
★ 14The wandering Cleric Chih returns home to the Singing Hills Abbey for the first time in almost three years, to be met with both joy and sorrow. Their mentor, Cleric Thien, has died, and rests among the archivists and storytellers of the storied abbey. But...
D.I.Y
★ 14When the the elitist institution of Ozymandias Academy and its headmaster, Vamon Kinctuarin, can't find a solution to the city's worsening drought, 2 self-taught magicians, Noah and his partner Manny, take it upon themselves to find a solution to the crisis.
"That first video of the flying man goes viral on social media and gets featured on the news. No jet pack. No hang glider. Just him, unaided, soaring over the cable-stayed bridge that leads into the city. The video looks like it was shot on a cellphone...
Fireheart Tiger
★ 14Quiet, thoughtful princess Thanh was sent away as a hostage to the powerful faraway country of Ephteria as a child. Now she’s returned to her mother's imperial court, haunted not only by memories of her first romance, but by worrying magical echoes of a...
Finna
★ 14When a wormhole opens up in the furniture store where they work, teenage Ava and her non-binary ex are ordered to go in it to hunt for a missing customer.
Alyssa seeks out the aliens who can give her an augment that will let her exchange thoughts and feelings with other humans. But why does she want it, and what is the cost?
The Four Profound Weaves
★ 14Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
Omphalos
★ 14Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
The Court Magician
★ 14In which we learn how the new court magician was recruited and find out how even a “market rat” can qualify. We learn that there is real magic, but it comes with a price.
The girl he killed was much more than merely human, and there will be consequences.
The City Born Great
★ 14A young hustler discovers that he's supposed to play a big role in transforming New York from a city to a City. If he can survive it.
The Future Is Blue
★ 14Teenage Tetley lives in a human settlement (one of the last) built on a miles-wide floating garbage dump. She explains why everyone hates her now.
Anat doesn't remember her parents, but she loves her brother Oscar. They live in a wonderful world full of strange creatures and machines. The more she learns, the stranger things seem.
The New Mother
★ 14Tess is writing an article about a new disease that causes women to give birth to clones of themselves.
Salman pursues the truth behind stories his grandfather told him about an impoverished princess he used to know back in Pakistan and the Jinn that protected her.
In My Country
★ 13"My country may seem strange to you. There are times when it seems strange to me. I wake and work. I work then rest. And in between I say things, and I don’t say things. Because, as you’ll learn, in my country, what you say is important. But what you don’t...
The V*mpire
★ 13The vampires aren’t even the worst part about being a teenage trans girl on tumblr.
On the Fox Roads
★ 13While learning the ropes from a crafty Jazz Age bank robber, a young stowaway discovers their authentic self, a hidden gift, and that there are no straight lines when you run the fox roads…
The Mimicking of Known Successes
★ 13On a remote, gas-wreathed outpost of a human colony on Jupiter, a man goes missing. The enigmatic Investigator Mossa follows his trail to Valdegeld, home to the colony’s erudite university—and Mossa’s former girlfriend, a scholar of Earth’s pre-collapse...
Mr. Death
★ 13"I’ve ferried two hundred and twenty-one souls across the river of death, and I can already tell my two-hundred-and-twenty-second is going to be a real shitkicker. I know by the lightness of the manila folder in my hand, the preemptive pity in the...
"A week before the Season began, as Mrs. Vanessa Saunders held brunch court at the Empire Hotel, a photo appeared on her phone: a large oak door beneath a pale green sign with silver lettering. Impossible, she thought, flipping the infernal device over...
Childbirth attracts zombies, so Brit has to leave the shelter for a while when she gets ready to give birth so as not to put the others at risk.
Little Free Library
★ 13When Megian sets out her homemade book exchange, a mysterious neighbor starts trading objects and art for the books, but some of the items don’t seem to come from this world at all.
The Empress of Salt and Fortune
★ 13An elderly lady who was once handmaiden to the former empress tells a young monk the story of what really happened during the six years the empress was in exile.
In 1943 India, during the Bengal Famine, the Governor of Bengal tries to force an old woman to make a doll for his wife.
Handling a routine haunting is a bit mundane for an agent of the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments and Supernatural Entities, but no one ever heard of a haunted tram car before.
Thoughts and Prayers
★ 13Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
To Be Taught, If Fortunate
★ 13Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
Hannah watched her sister Melanie die, incinerated with her own magic. Hannah can't accept that and sets out to use her own magic to put things right.
Despite not being a telepath, Calla worked out a way to play chess with her captor, Major Larn, during the recent war. Now they're going to finish their game.
The Four Thousand, the Eight Hundred
★ 13The situation on Vesta has reached the point where certain people flee to Ceres in suspended animation. Anna, the new Director of Ceres, tries to understand the refugees better as relations with Vesta continue to deteriorate.
Today I Am Paul
★ 13Alzheimer's patient's family can't visit her very often, so they buy a robot to fool her into thinking they're visiting her. The robot tells the story.
"A ship glides through the night, behemoth mother, swollen with ten thousand human lives. Her path is a single shining vector. There has been no stopping, no rest for the decades she has traveled, and there will be nothing but void for the two years to...
"Once a decade, a titanium-nosed shuttle plows through the rings of the planet Tartarus with a new batch of prisoners destined for the Orpheus Factory. The debris that makes up the rings is so thick that it thunders like a hailstorm, deafening the...
An android who knows nothing besides his work in a factory, is given one final week to explore the world before he is forced to undergo mandatory reprogramming, in this bittersweet precursor to TJ Klune’s In the Lives of Puppets.
"At first I thought something had broken in my book. I didn’t notice until the afternoon light from the windows began to recede. I tried to increase the brightness settings of the page, but no matter how I thumbed the margins, they would not change. For...
The Tusks of Extinction
★ 12Moscow has resurrected the mammoth. But someone must teach them how to be mammoths, or they are doomed to die out again. Dr. Damira Khismatullina, an expert in elephant behavior, was brutally murdered trying to defend the world’s last elephants from the...
I AM AI
★ 12Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
The Crane Husband
★ 12Yet when her mom brings home a six-foot tall crane with a menacing air, the girl is powerless to prevent her mom letting the intruder into her heart, and her children’s lives. Utterly enchanted and numb to his sharp edges, her mom abandons the world around...
Window Boy
★ 12"The tenth time Jakey broke the rules, he put a sandwich in the mailbox where the window boy could get it. Mom had taken her sleep-quick pills and gone to bed after dinner, on account of her headaches. And Dad was dozing in front of the TV, chin on his...
A Prayer for the Crown-Shy
★ 12After touring the rural areas of Panga, Sibling Dex (a Tea Monk of some renown) and Mosscap (a robot sent on a quest to determine what humanity really needs) turn their attention to the villages and cities of the little moon they call home. They hope to...
Bishop's Opening
★ 12"Old as she was, the Kiskadee had done three full delivery runs without a single safety incident. So naturally, with the crew relaxed after a fourth successful delivery and launch, and eight cycles after Reece slingshotted the starship around Tavaco to...
Ogres
★ 12Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
"Everything Anton owns goes in one black trash bag. His ratty yellow sketchpad, which he bought to draw the other familiars when he moved here, and only ever used three pages of. The few shirts and khakis that he paid for with his own money, before Mr....
"WHEEP-3 (“Dr. Weep”), probably the most renowned AI AI-critic of the last two decades, was retired by the Shallow Laboratory at Stanford University last Wednesday. Created by Dr. Jody Reynolds Tran more than two decades ago, the experimental generative...
Emergency Skin
★ 12A colonist returning to Earth finds his mission compromised when he discovers the planet isn’t dead after all.
The Galactic Tourist Industrial Complex
★ 12Tavi fears he’ll lose his cabbie license when an alien tourist jumps off the Brooklyn Bridge from his cab.
Waterlines
★ 12By treaty, people on Erax never talk to the Oceanics, so when an Oceanic turns up at a south polar base to deliver a few dead human bodies, it’s trouble for sure.
Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children caters to children who went to a portal world, came back, and can’t cope. No one planned on the arrival of a child born in a portal world, much less one asking for help—from a dead person.
An enhanced chimp and her human partner investigate an apparently pointless murder committed by a woman who was under remote control from an unknown source.
Sour Milk Girls
★ 12Fourteen-year-old Ghost gave up on finding a foster family a long time ago. She’s just waiting until she turns 18 and can leave “the Agency.” Then a new girl turns up—one who can actually remember her life before she was sent there.
One of the last live bands struggles to do performances in a mostly-online world.
Penric's Demon
★ 12Penric, age 19, is accidentally possessed by a demon meant for someone else. Demons can be useful, but they are dangerous, and Penric has no idea what to do with one.
A key scientist in the Dai Viet interstellar empire has died, and three people who were close to her mourn her passing in different ways.
A Stranger Knocks
★ 11"1926 Washington, D.C. Shaw District “There’s a man on the front stoop.” The words spilled from her in a much more mundane way than Judy had expected, considering how her neck was fluttering with her excited pulse. Alvin looked up from the new Langston...
"Doc, there’s a ... hole growing in me,” the alien said through the spherical interpreting machine hovering over them. Semau barely registered the word “hole,” so taken was she by the sight of the alien. If she were just a tad less caring about propriety,...
The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain
★ 11The boy was raised as one of the Chained, condemned to toil in the bowels of a mining ship out among the stars. His whole world changes—literally—when he is yanked “upstairs” and informed he has been given an opportunity to be educated at the ship’s...
"Bloodsoaked and grinning, the Soldier climbs to the summit of the ruins. The wind is mountain-top fast. It grabs the strands of her hair that have escaped her ponytail and sticks them to her ecstatic mouth: the slick surface of teeth, the gloss-wet of...
"June was the first of my friends to get into it. This isn’t surprising—she was playing Wordle for weeks before Margo or I discovered it. When we met up for our weekly lunch, she kept checking her phone and I assumed it was some new game. Then she put it...
Linghun
★ 11Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
"It was half past midnight when Olga heard the Devil cry. They were supposed to be wild tonight, the three of them. Cassandra had led the way and Maria and Olga didn’t put up much of a fight. They would visit the Devil’s bridge—anything that claimed to be...
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
Douen
★ 11Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
"Sunset is beginning, a sweep of red across the sky chasing the blue over the remains of the ship’s stern, dragging darkness behind it like a thick sheet over the day’s face and declaring it done. Stars, such as they are, will come on soon, one row at a...
Into the Riverlands
★ 11Wandering cleric Chih of the Singing Hills travels to the riverlands to record tales of the notorious near-immortal martial artists who haunt the region. On the road to Betony Docks, they fall in with a pair of young women far from home, and an older...
Broad Dutty Water: A Sunken Story
★ 11"GET IN, LICKCHOP.” JACQUEE lifted her pig into the main cabin of Uncle Silvis’s ultralight she’d borrowed from home. Lickchop merely grunted, _Chow_ aloud via the vocoder illegally implanted in his scalp. Jacquee didn’t know who’d done that to him; is so...
O2 Arena
★ 11Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
The Sin of America
★ 11"There’s a woman outside of a town called Sheridan, where the sky comes so near to earth it has to use the crosswalk just like everybody else. … There’s a woman outside of Sheridan and she is eating the sin of America."
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.