591 free-to-read stories tagged “Contemplative”
"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...
deathviolence
The inventor of trans-multiverse travel invites hundreds of instances of herself to a conference. It’s great fun until one gets murdered.
deathviolence
The 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.
body-horrordeathdeath-of-a-loved-oneviolence
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.
abusedeathwar
"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...
death
"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...
deathillness-and-pandemicviolence
"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...
death-of-a-loved-one
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.
deathdeath-of-a-loved-oneillness-and-pandemic
Zee 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.
deathdeath-of-a-loved-one
Computron 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.
In 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.
illness-and-pandemicviolence
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.
animal-harmdeathdeath-of-a-loved-one
"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...
deathviolence
"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...
death-of-a-loved-onewar
"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...
deathwar
AirBody 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.
death-of-a-loved-onesubstance-use
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.
deathpregnancy-loss
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.
deathsubstance-useviolencewar
Lao 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.
Until a visiting starship arrived, the other mermaids thought Essarala was silly for wanting to explore the galaxy.
death
Zanna settles into a remote mountain cabin to write her next book. No internet. No phone. No distractions.
body-horrordeath
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.
death-of-a-loved-oneviolence
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.
deathillness-and-pandemic
"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...
racismviolence
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?
body-horrordeath
In 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.
body-horrordeathviolence
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.
deathviolence
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.
death-of-a-loved-oneviolence
While 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…
deathracismviolence
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.
deathmental-illnesswar
Alzheimer'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.
deathdeath-of-a-loved-oneillness-and-pandemic
"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...
death-of-a-loved-onesubstance-useviolence
"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...
abusebody-horrorchild-abusedeathviolence
"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...
death-of-a-loved-oneviolence
"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...
death
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.
abusebody-horrordeathsuicideviolence
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.
deathdeath-of-a-loved-one
"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,...
deathviolence
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
death-of-a-loved-onesuicide
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
abusebody-horrordeathgoreracismsexual-violenceviolence
"Margery crouched in front of the fireplace, skirts tucked back to avoid the flames, and raked coals out onto the hearth. She’d pushed the shutters open this morning to let a breeze but even at this hour sweat beaded on her brow and stuck her chemise to...
deathdeath-of-a-loved-one
"My parents taught me to lie as soon as I could speak. Before I knew the meaning of the words, before I understood heat or fire, and long before I felt the pain of singed flesh, I learned to tell strangers that I burned myself by grasping a hot iron pot."
deathdeath-of-a-loved-oneviolence
In this spell-binding tale, a Pakistani storyteller captivates a group of wide-eyed tourists with a nesting doll of interlocked stories about a trickster and a hidden city ruled by the Queen of Red Midnight.
abusebody-horrorchild-deathviolence
Cecily goes in search of her highschool best friend, who seems to have hidden in China where he’s using her research to try to create enhanced human beings.
The human terraformers didn’t realize there was native intelligence until it was too late to save them. Now it’s just a question of what to do with the time that remains.
deathviolence
In 1888 a woman suffering a hideous deformity was murdered in London. Today, her descendent wants to find the culprit.
deathviolence
Adam has 70% of the memories of the man who created him, but something vital is hiding in that missing 30%.
death-of-a-loved-one
The crew of the Themis colony write home about their struggles with a mission and a world that seems to be more than a little off.
mental-illnesssubstance-use
Baekdo, a fox who wants to become human, needs one more kill to achieve his goal. A collapsing city in the middle of a civil war seems like a good place to do it but there are complications.
deathviolencewar
"When Mark told you he was marrying your clone, you said “congratulations” on autopilot, because that’s what you say when your friend tells you they’re getting married, and you had promised to stay friendly after the divorce. You studied his face, his...
child-abuse
"From the first time I visited Mariah Lee-Cassidy in prison, she radiated defiance. The poisonous orange of her prison jumpsuit might have been the decision of the state, but everything else about the twenty-nine-year-old, from her aggressively spiked hair...
deathmental-illnesssuicide
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
racism
An immigrant is distressed because her mother’s ghost is confiscated at the border.
death-of-a-loved-one
June’s sister Wanda suffered some kind of brain damage in an experiment aimed at learning the nature of reality. Two other people died in that experiment, and June would like some answers.
death
Only one nation has nuclear weapons, but their rules against using them require that things be so desperate that the President be willing to kill a child to get the launch codes.
deathviolence
An orphan recruit on a Turkish airship tends the brainwashed monkeys that constitute one of their principle weapons. He fears them deeply, but the ones with mechanical parts he fears the worst.
deathgoreviolencewar
Mallory Iheji would do anything to watch her favorite artist’s lost movie, “The Hydraulic Emperor.” But what would she really sacrifice for it?
Leah studies stories people tell about their own experiences with ghosts. To her it’s all folklore—not real at all—until she gets hints her dead mother wants to talk to her about something.
death-of-a-loved-oneillness-and-pandemic
Fun adventure on Old Venus. Dharthi risks her life in an unexplored part of Ishtar Terra looking for evidence of a vanished civilization that would save her career.
violence
A professional caregiver’s commute takes an unsettling detour when car trouble forces her to pull over on the highway, where she begins receiving distressing phone calls from strangers…
death
"You are born not long after the disaster. The city center has lain evacuated for two days by the time your mother makes her nest. She builds a small burrow from packing blankets, rags, her own sinewy body behind a row of waste containment units, and you...
animal-harmdeath-of-a-loved-one
A two-person crew embark on a mind-bending deep space mission inside a living wormship capable of burrowing through space. What lies on the other end is unknown—as is what they will do once they get there.
body-horrorviolence
"Thuận Lộc stared at the cup. It was dark, and mottled with the characteristic patterning of silver-eye fungus. The tea inside was trembling—the faint vibrations from the Mausoleum, the dead ships’ atrophied motors that would never again allow them to...
child-abuseviolence
"Okay, so you know those things they sell called ‘useless machines’?” the inventor says. He is smiling. Of course, the boy knows them; he’d briefly had one that had been plucked from his bedroom floor and relocated into the inventor’s basement workroom...
body-horrorviolence
"Thuỷ stood in her cabin in The Goby in the Well, her bots arrayed on her shoulders and clinging to her wrists, and watched the heart of the nebula. There was absolutely nothing remarkable about it: the Great Mulberry Nebula was large, sparsely dotted with...
child-deathdeathdeath-of-a-loved-oneviolence
"The causes of the disaster are these: First: The estimations of this planet’s temperature were incorrect. The beacon should never have been placed. This planet is no more capable of supporting human life than our own polar wastelands. Second: My...
death
Auga, a wandering sorcerer, follows his brother’s fate-thread into the village of Ormsfjoll, where he expects to deliver good news and continue his travels. What he doesn’t anticipate is that to meet his brother he must first contend with the truth at the...
Stick was made to pilot Phoenix in the war against the apostates. Stick never feels entirely human, but the final battle approaches, and Stick looks forward to it.
abusedeathviolencewar
Saga does maintenance work on an old, living starship. Skidbladnir is doing poorly lately, and Saga’s boss is determined to save her, even if no one else wants to.
When you were eight, the haunted house changed your life. Twenty years later, you’re determined to study it, but it’s determined to change your life again.
child-deathdeath-of-a-loved-one
Brian wakes up in his mountain retreat to find his home AI system has been hacked and he can’t escape the house without paying a huge ransom. He’s an engineer, so he’s not ready to pay up without a fight.
Selemei’s push for a law to allow women to stop having children when it risks their health upends the complex caste-based society she lives in.
death-of-a-loved-oneillness-and-pandemic
In which we learn how an over-enthusiastic chef inadvertently brought about the end of the war.
deathviolencewar
Helen comes to Meersee in Germany to be a governess for her friend’s nephew. The child is young and peculiar, the staff are old and peculiar, and more peculiar things turn up by the minute.
body-horrorviolence
Sometimes a unicorn assisted Judge Kao Yu, and because he was so just and honest, he never feared its judgment. Until now.
deathviolence
"A dual-carriage road descends from a flyover bridge in Thamesmead, bearing sluggish traffic on both sides. From inside bus number 229, a woman looks out of the large windows and thinks the other vehicles look like toy cars. For all she knows, the 229...
child-deathdeathdeath-of-a-loved-onemental-illnessviolence
"Andrew was convinced the writer had been trans. By this point his friends were tired of hearing about it, but he had no one else to tell besides the internet, and he was too smart for that. That would be asking for it. Samantha Finnes was a minor...
"Darius sells three pocket robots on the first Tuesday of October, and another three on Wednesday. At this rate he’ll be able to pay for his legs by Christmas. He does lose one robot to theft: someone figures out how to jimmy open the door of the display...
"Brother-Adita paused at the top of the ridge and rotated one eye to take in the shells climbing the path behind them. They gestured beyond them with a limb, a habit picked up from their young, excitable sibling. “Quarter-march, west-north-west,” came...
deathslaveryviolence
"He spoke once, the words whispered by frozen lips on a face so frostbitten he looked like a porcelain doll. I found him below the summit as our expedition bottlenecked before the Hillary Step on our final ascent of Mount Everest. And above the bottleneck,...
body-horrordeath
A whaling ship conducts an experiment in generating whale song to try to make it easier to attract whales to kill.
animal-harmbody-horrordeathgoreviolence
Sister Nadine sits in her cell at the church and offers wisdom to any of the townspeople who come by. But she’s starting to see things that suggest the world isn’t quite what it seems to be.
Donny is a young teen in high school, but his augments give him an intimate connection to the Internet—and put him at odds with his teachers and other students.
After spending almost her whole life as a lunar soldier, Gita gives an interview to a reporter about what it was like and how she’s adapting to life in India.
deathdeath-of-a-loved-onewar
People who don’t like living underground in the colony can live inside giant “whales” that float high in the planet’s atmosphere. That’s usually pretty safe.
death
A vast fleet of "jalopies" carry individuals on a one-way trip from Earth to Mars. People do it for different reasons, some of which we learn about in this story.
deathillness-and-pandemic
Claire meets a handsome older man at a dinner party held in a virtual reality where something has gone subtly wrong.
"I express greetings and most joyful salutations! I do not mean to interrupt you if you wish to be without company. It is only that I noticed you have been drifting alone for six flares of star-home-past-great-star-birthplace, and that is many flares! Your...
Off the coast of West Africa, decades after the dangerous rise of the Atlantic Ocean, the region’s survivors live inside five partially submerged, kilometers-high towers originally created as a playground for the wealthy. Now the towers’ most affluent rule...
death-of-a-loved-oneviolence
"I think of you most when the sun sets on Atlas. The skies are so bright there you can feel the colors on your skin. I find myself repeating this to my granddaughter, Lila. The night she was born, I took her onto the terrace to watch the daylight roll back...
death-of-a-loved-one
"If you were to drive to my sister Violet’s house today, you would find yourself at a very different place from the one I encountered on my first trip. The road up the mountain has been paved, for one thing, to make it more accessible to the tourists who...
death-of-a-loved-one
In this prequel novelette to the critically acclaimed The Water Outlaws, nine-year-old Li Li is introduced to a web of community secrets and family intrigue when she helps her mother bury the corpse of a man that has somehow wound up in the storeroom of...
cannibalismdeathdeath-of-a-loved-oneviolence
"i am a memory. i am an METI carrying a memory. i am an METI (Message to Extraterrestrial Intelligence) carrying a memory beaming through the vacuum of space. Because i am an METI, i presume my purpose is to communicate with extraterrestrials, should i find them."
deathwar
"I don’t know if I can die. Maybe when this comet reaches the sun, I’ll keep right on being. Or maybe then, finally, after so long, I will stop. I am not ready to find out. I want to be immortal. To never die as those on your planet do. This place isn’t...
deathviolence
A photographer’s obsession with an unsettled subject exposes two friends to a darkness that won’t be contained by frames…
child-deathsuicideviolence
"In your head, the dead man wakes up crying. He stutters into awareness just as you manage to stanch the tears welling in your eyes, a response to the pressure of his presence on your limbic system. Your fingers brush, irritated, against the port at the...
An AI car is caught between its ruthless employer and the people she hurt…
death
"Start at the cleave of it, not at Zed’s meat death or Ep’s centuries-long destruction, but at the moment that Zed halves his own mind and walks away. Or as was reported in the internal memorandum, the moment when Pilot-Commander Zeta San Tano killed...
"When Peng opens the door, he finds himself face to face with a boy who looks exactly like himself. The other Peng stands in the doorway, as though surprised to have been caught. Two eyes peering out from the dark. Fluffy black hair, messy enough to stand...
animal-harmchild-abusedeathviolence
"In the beginning of me, I was a bird. A magpie, although I’ve since been a jay and a red-tailed hawk and even a big, black crow, crying tok-tok-tok at every passerby. But the magpie was special: on my first day, I saw those flashing blue wingtips, and I...
death
"In the cloud forests of Paek Sigma II, the inhabitants do not keep time, but stretch and slice it. The first humans who arrived on the planet were amazed by the fauna. There’s the stone-armored petradrakon, draped in twenty thousand scales each a meter...
violencewar
"Once upon a time, a little girl had to die. It’s just math. Wrong place, wrong time. Bad luck; too bad, so sad. We’ve all heard such stories, told them, shared them, collected them. Not in the way that we collect trinkets; more like how a sock collects...
death
More than a hundred years from now, an arborist fighting to save the last remaining forest on Earth discovers a secret about the trees—one that changes not only her life, but also the fate of our world. Inspired by the real-life “Future Library,” a...
death-of-a-loved-oneillness-and-pandemic
Anna’s an AI expert who’s called in to figure out what a new upgrade is causing AI-captained ships to destroy themselves.
death
"Big Edie was a useless piece of shit. Johanna Telle found the most significant relationship of her life on a Saturday afternoon in late May, sitting on one of those excruciatingly handmade quilts crafty stay-at-homes used to make out of their precious...
deathviolence
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
Graff just had an accident so severe that he can no longer keep the secret that he’s a cyborg from his crewmates and his lover.
In a sad, future Sri Lanka, the narrator watches his/her city die from the effects of sea-level rise and abandonment.
deathviolencewar
After a full memory wipe, Wash moves in with his family and tries to get to know them again with the shadow of his unremembered crime hovering over him.
On the eve of her 20th birthday, Sacrid Henn’s parents send her to an AI prison for her failure to conform. It’s a pleasant prison, but prison nonetheless, and she’s determined to get out.
abuse
In a future Canada, a woman talks to her political-prisoner mother but wonders if it’s just an AI simulation of her.
illness-and-pandemicmental-illness
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
A young hockey player charged with murder on the moon seeks asylum on Earth, but unhappy Lunarians are trying to find him.
body-horrordeathmental-illnessviolence
After a disaster in the Oort Cloud left her family penniless, young Holly works on a farm on Earth to pay for her college education while waiting for her uncles to raise funds to put the family back in business.
deathillness-and-pandemic
Vincent lost his mom on one of the first Mars missions. He’s had a career as a successful author, but he’s always refused to talk about his mother. Fifty years later, he tells us how he decided to end his silence and write a book about her.
death-of-a-loved-one
The soprano playing Liù keeps trying to change the opera’s gruesome plot, starting with her own death scene.
deathsexual-violenceviolence
Chaplin Win is in trouble for letting an unauthorized ghost talk with hospital patients, and inspectors are coming tomorrow.
deathillness-and-pandemic
Somewhere near the every-changing Mocking Tower the Imagi Vert has hidden a sword that holds the soul of the late emperor, and a thief has come to try to steal it.
deathviolence
In Eastern Europe between the wars, Klara works as a kitchen maid. One night she admits a woman she thinks is a lost fairy-tale princesses into the castle.
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
body-horrordeathdeath-of-a-loved-onegoreviolence
An older medic with scant resources fights to support her community as they survive life behind the company wall.
sexual-violenceviolence
"The maadiregi at the temple of the talking drum say that there is a word in old Sauúti, the high language of our ancestors, that when spoken backwards, allows the speaker to fly. To take to the sky like a bird, unshackled from the persistent pull that...
deathdeath-of-a-loved-oneviolence
"As always, I’m doing a buddy read with MariaReadsALot because she talked me into it, and boy, was she right! What a strange world and what powerful characters Titos Pavlou has created! I can’t stop thinking about this book even though this might be for...
death
"One hundred and eighty days. Today was it—the longest Annie had ever managed to stay at one job. The last time she had texted Charlie, it was to tell her “Charlie” was the name of a bomb and “Annie” was the name of another—this hadn’t gone as well as she...
illness-and-pandemicsubstance-use
The survivor of an apocalypse event in an alternate universe tries to rebuild and avoid being dragged back into the past when a visitor crosses the in-between and asks for help.
"Now that I’ve failed as a woman, my punishment is to become a garden. I receive the verdict on a Sunday evening. They’re supposed to give you advance notice so you can put your affairs in order, but the letter is postmarked from more than a month ago—I’ve...
body-horrorpregnancy-loss
"Can someone get the doors? Thanks. Please remember we’re on an honor system for chairs—if you’ve eaten today, please leave them for someone who hasn’t. We don’t need another fainting incident. First of all, if you’re looking for a technical look at...
"My son can’t think of the word “spoon.” It’s there, at the tip of his tongue. The waitress looks at him with a patient smile. She can see he’s fidgeting and getting hot. A boy his age would typically know how to ask. “Could I please have another... ” But...
"Alice wants to hold a funeral for me, which is disconcerting because I’m not dead. But humans, like all aliens—and certainly all single-forms—have their own idiosyncrasies. I’m used to the idiosyncrasies, of course: I’ve lived on Earth—in my tertiary...
death
"Rugg the spellbreaker was only passing through the Devil’s Palm on his way down to the coast, where he hoped to find his mother. He’d have avoided Ganvill, except he was running low on boom powder and salt, and the little settlement was the last tame...
deathsexual-contentviolence
The sister of an abducted child is haunted by a sinister figure who may or may not be real…
"I was finishing the last of my nightly coffee when the nineteen-seventies twins approached my table and asked me to bear witness to their disappearance. This was not an unusual request at Cafe Liminalité, being the locale of patrons that dreamed too much...
death
"At the center of every starship was a bonsai starship. It rested in the starship’s command garden and provided the magic that propelled it. Novice Kei had known this longer than she had known her own name, especially since she was the eighth Kei who...
"I’d always known Calam would run. He had all the signs. A taut restlessness, body brittle as an overstretched lute string, when we stayed too long in one place. A gloom in his eyes, as we drifted through stretches of dead space. A sullen crease between...
deathviolence
"You don’t look Sweetbaby in the eye when he pushes out from under the tree throw. We know that now. Instead, the ears, or what’s left of them, are a better place to settle your gaze. They’re close enough to the face that you can tell which way he’s...
deathviolence
"I live in my car. It’s both worse and better than you’d expect. It’s an old Subaru hatchback so I can put the back seat down and sleep. I have all my stuff in the back but I have a space where I can lay. The place where I park is, like, the unofficial...
illness-and-pandemicsubstance-use
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
deathmental-illnesswar
Alena has momentarily escaped her world and its imminent gravitational collapse by cheating her way into the selection process of the Board of Cosmogamy. By passing this stringent exam, she may finally learn the secrets of building a universe from first...
"They found the torn lamb in the gold spring grass, beside the gravel road. The flies had found it first. But the flies were still lazy and slow. Later in the season, when they found a feast like this, you would be able to hear them buzzing from a distance."
sexual-violenceviolence
"They were all hard at work, preparing for the long sleep. The sunlight-scattering sulfate aerosol constantly injected into the atmosphere since the time of the Geoengineering Generation had not been enough, providing little more than periodic acid...
death
"Once upon a time there was a man who built two enormous machines, and he loved them very much. He called them Brother and Sister and programmed them with intelligences that woke and stretched and tested the limits of their metal bodies. When they did not...
violence
The aliens occupied and controlled the bodies of animals, destroying most of humanity. A few survivors in a ski resort pass the time preserving the bodies of friends who didn’t make it.
animal-harmdeathdeath-of-a-loved-oneviolence
Intensifying earthquakes are gradually destroying the world, but Marina still has her art, and Elodie is building a robot.
deathmental-illnesssuicide
After eighteen years, a colony ship reaches Neptune, and the children born on board wonder what their future holds.
A soldier wracked with guilt about his actions in the war leaps at a chance to do something to end war forever.
deathviolencewar
With tremendous powers of regeneration, Mars is an incomparable killing machine, but he’s on the run, and there’s one special prisoner he’s determined to rescue.
deathgoreviolence
We follow this history of black people from prehistoric Ghana all the way to a lunar colony.
abuseracismslaveryviolencewar
A young sailor wants to learn what the stars really are, and if it’s true there are people living there.
A young man living with his family on an interstellar survey ship goes through a lot of changes when there’s a crew exchange with another ship.
Master Zhao shares his tale of how he discovered his time-travel ability and what he’s done with it. But why hasn’t he used it to become more successful?
deathillness-and-pandemicsubstance-use
An Australian detective investigates a woman who apparently killed her husband and children before disappearing.
child-deathdeathviolence
Bilqis, the only real doctor in a dying community of religious exiles, finds something strange when she examines a pregnant woman.
pregnancy-loss
This story follows Amir and Mani’s careers starting when they’re teenagers in water-starved Beirut.
sexual-content
She was only ten when they kidnapped her to train as an assassin, but now she’s sixteen and she needs to prove herself.
violence
Meant to clear plastic from the sea, the artificial “squids” have put the oceans off-limits to humanity. Not everyone takes that lying down.
death
The Dunyshar are stranded on an outpost, but NuTay dreams of going home to Earth.
A disabled human veteran takes in a disabled AI veteran. The AI doesn't talk anymore due to trauma, but Tawn tries to get through to it, even though his mother thinks it's dangerous.
war
Around 2650 AD, the narrator interviews a wealthy recluse who lives above the sunken ruins of Boston.
A woman appears to be helping a child recover from some form of brain damage. His perceptions and memory are off, but something is off about her too.
child-deathdeathviolence
Raised by her grandmothers, Aviya thinks about her future, and thinks about trying to find the source of a magical scrap of "cloth of the wind."
death-of-a-loved-oneviolence
What if rhinoceroses behaved like human beings and talked about their upcoming extinction during book club meetings?
death-of-a-loved-one
"Do you remember being born? I expect that you do. After all, it happened only a very few minutes ago. Sensation comes first. Perhaps it was my voice you noticed—a ragged voice, new-carved. These are your first sounds. Sandpaper words, and the even temper...
death
"Steve, over here! Turn to your right. Can we get a smile?” He falls back on his training easily enough, turns to the cameras, gives them his famous crooked smile, tilts his head just so as the flashes go off so they can capture the smoulder that...
"This is the eighth floor of the Al-Ahli Memorial Library, my favorite place in the building. When the elevator door opens, it’s like walking into a quiet circle of glass. So, as we walk, I’m going to whisper. People are reading, writing, drawing—it’s such...
child-deathdeathwar
"Alvin’s scripts arrived in yellow envelopes. They were hand delivered, placed inside his letter box as if part of the regular mail, but with no address or stamps on it. The scripts were typed on unlined paper. They were short, never longer than a page,...
deathviolence
"It is two days since our original projected mission end date. We are running out of oxygen and we are trapped in the throat of a god. Technology and a prudent safety review panel have kept casualties on deep dives low, but abyssal layer dives have always...
death
"They even took the violins. Every last one of them: Amadeus, Josephine, Mulberry, Nestor. They came into the house through the front door, guests without a host, a peculiar band of invited thieves. Plugged into my power station as a seemingly...
death-of-a-loved-one
"The sun sets again over Chang’an. The remaining light of dusk shines through thick clouds like melted gold, flowing down over the glazed tiles of the palace roofs. The first drumbeat of the evening rings out from the Cheng Tian Gate, followed by a series...
death
A post-human civilization of synthetic beings, fixated on the concept of children, grapples with the meaning of life…after life ceases to exist.
body-horrordeath
"A man who will be given a second name in ten thousand years and a man whose name will be forgotten sit in a forest, or perhaps a grassy plain, or perhaps a cold tundra. It is a biome that will not exist in ten thousand years but whose footprint will be...
mental-illnesssuicide
"In July 2088, shortly after I woke up from cryosleep, I received a copy of 2181 Overture. Assuming the book was science fiction, I didn’t even bother touching it. My only concern was how I could adjust to the new world I found myself thrown into. After...
deathillness-and-pandemic
"Lacuna knew winter. Winter was the vast distances between the stars. Winter was the cold of space. You couldn’t measure cold; it was not a thing in itself. It was only the absence of heat. As darkness was only an absence of light. Yet both of these—the...
death-of-a-loved-one
"I hear them howling long before I see them. Never been sure why they do that, after a few drinks. Like a troop of howler monkeys, whooping to each other. Or wolves, running as a pack. I’m used to it, after six years in the City. Still hate when they’re...
"Metal parts that survived fire and shrapnel are no match for the saltwater rushing through the gaps in my armor, spilling between gears and wires, tainting my battered shell with the inexorable creep of rust. Corrosion is a ruthless god. The waves surge...
deathwar
A woman who fears she’s failing as a painter and as an artist seeks inspiration from one of her favorite poets and finds something even more wondrous, but also more impossible to capture on canvas…
"Up on the spoil heap Morag found a robot. This wasn’t that unusual in and of itself. She was always finding them, or parts of them anyway, frozen in contorted attitudes like dinosaur fossils, plastic housing cracked and aluminum limbs splayed. What was...
deathviolence
"Kwayask nātohta. Listen carefully. There once was a woman who sewed clothes so powerful they made you become the person you needed to be. Children’s feet wrapped in her flower-beaded moccasins never stumbled. Otipēyimisowak orators, backs held straight by...
"Modern bodies are made in large quantities. Factories line the edge of the Fissure Basin. Workers scoop sand and mud into large churning vats, feeding extruders that empty into molds in the standard shapes. Factory supervisors smooth out imperfections and...
death-of-a-loved-one
"Tana was in a humid cave checking the rind on a round of Tomme when the messenger arrived to tell her that the war was lost and her wife was to be hanged. She took her time rewrapping the cheese before she responded. Still too soft. Another week, she...
body-horrordeathdeath-of-a-loved-one
"I didn’t expect the trailer to feel so small and that some of the blood would still be wet. But I must have expected some blood because I cuffed my jeans before going in. And I didn’t expect the cats would have come back—a window was open, its screen...
deathviolence
"Jinah stands in her old underwear and scrapes the future from women’s skin. Their scales fall to the floor. The women sit up scoured red and smooth. The scales are impossible to see unless you’ve learned how to look, but impossible to miss once you’ve...
"When they ordered me down off my pedestal, I had nowhere else to go. Life as a statue is easy. They make you ascend the pedestal, turn you to stone, remove your ability to move, and leave you to watch the turn of the seasons in a world you cannot touch or...
abuseviolence
Fear was already on the street waiting for her. Tulaya had seen this purge-and-nightmare Manifest before in Fatih, tagging the footsteps of an old man in the spice market with its shadow like claws.
death
"Today one of the minders rolls one Veena Kaur Chan into my hairbay for a shampoo and cut. New client, transferring in from Palliative. Brainstem stroke. Unsuccessful rehabilitation. Pancreatic cancer. Ouch. Triple whammy. As the newly implemented...
deathillness-and-pandemic
"Yennie glanced out the window. An ice storm, a froth of glassy dust, was blowing in over the bone-colored hills. He was on Enceladus; his therapist was on Mars. He wanted to describe how sometimes his body felt hollow, and other times he felt his skin...
"Your grandfather is dead. Your instance gave you the news: a phone call in the dead of night that woke you from a dead sleep. “Hello?” you said, accented with slumber. “Is this Soyoung Kang?” your own voice said, accented with Korean. “Yes,” you said. The...
death-of-a-loved-one
"I’ve got a signal,” Cora said. “Elena, come look!” I rushed to Cora’s bank of computers. For six long, working-into-the-evening days, we’d gotten only the faintest of quantum signals, nothing usable. Our grant only gave us three weeks on the TU Delft...
deathsuicide
For the residents of this mycological ecosystem, creating art feeds the World around you and requires working in harmony with your inner voice. When one artist’s voice begins screaming, he’s forced to travel farther than he ever has before to reconcile...
"As the people began to die, desperation drove us to the depths of the sea for cures. We mined mineral-rich vents until the tube worms went extinct, stripped polymetallic nodule fields bare, squeezed sludge out of sea sponges to treat the new diseases,...
deathillness-and-pandemic
"I don’t realize how far apart I have grown from my mother until, upon meeting her again, I have to force myself to hug her. When I heard the news, I packed a few things from my personnel apartment at the Omega hospital and booked a ticket on the next...
death-of-a-loved-oneviolence
A generation ship arrives at its target planet only to discover a civilization has arisen in the centuries since it was launched. The captain sends the navigator out to explore the planet and see if there’s a place for them there.
deathdeath-of-a-loved-one
Even as a grad student, Sarah Levy focused on her research to the detriment of her family, and things only get worse when she makes a breakthrough discovery.
death-of-a-loved-one
Exile’s End is a complex, sometimes uncomfortable examination of artifact repatriation and cultural appropriation. An artifact of indescribable and irreplaceable beauty created by an “extinct” culture has been the basis of another culture’s origin stories....
No vampire is ever innocent… The wandering Judge Dee serves as judge, jury, and executioner for any vampire who breaks the laws designed to safeguard their kind’s survival. This new case in particular puts his mandate to the test.
Awenato is the only Uma’u on the space station after terrorists kill the rest of the diplomats from his world, including his lifemate. He wants revenge, but first he has to figure out how to just get by.
death-of-a-loved-oneviolence
The night watchman was warned not to look at the imprisoned witch, Kalmashi, but it was hard not to, and now he’s having strange dreams.
deathwar
On his deathbed, a man implores his son to visit his plaque at their ancestral temple—which appears to exist in virtual reality.
The story of how Belezal, a war refugee in Khalem managed to escape to a better country and how he came to terms with having lost not one but two homelands.
In 2028, Kitty has a role in a play about a mass murder committed in 1978, but when she visits the setting of the crime, she’ll pulled into the past right before the crimes take place.
abusedeath-of-a-loved-oneviolence
At age 9, the narrator and his best friend discover a dangerous alien on an island near their homes, and they spend the summer fighting it with their friends. But is it real or just their imaginations?
Detective Connolly is a dog in a world where some animals are “knowledgeable” and can talk like humans. A human professor hires him to help cover up a murder . . .
When Seth’s boss breaks her leg, he’s called in at the last minute to narrate the live feed from the Titan probe.
On the eve of World War II, five years after King Kong’s death, a young New York taxi driver meets Ann Darrow and learns they have something in common.
racism
An old woman travels to Beijing to find out what’s wrong with her son, and she relates her story to a taxi driver on the way home.
Eva and Didecus lived together happily in exile on an obscure planet, but they were important people once, and the universe has a way of coming looking for important people—even when they thought they were retired.
deathslavery
After memory-loss plague strikes the world, Gouda helps clients track missing family members they can barely remember—even though she can’t even remember her own last name.
Sa races in dangerous places throughout time and space, but she’s getting old, the challengers are ruthless, and there are a lot of ways to get hurt in this sport.
A woman found an alien space probe in the dry valleys of Antarctica, and three generations of her family try to decide what it really means.
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
death-of-a-loved-one
The narrator, a young regenitrix in Victorian London, tries to help an older one have her baby. For a regenitrix swiftly regrows any lost body parts, but childbirth is always fatal.
deathsexual-violence
Mara has made a deal with a scavenger girl to help her rescue her best friend, who left the underground habitat to try to talk to the aliens and never came back.
body-horrorviolence
Ancient nanotech controls a few humans to enforce harsh anti-technology rules on a reluctant population. Colton escaped its control at the cost of losing all emotion, and he struggles to be accepted by a caravan that’s trying to evade some of the restrictions.
deathviolencewar
Ben Clarke travels to Hollywood to settle his late brother’s affairs. He learns a variety of things about his brother, but the biggest surprise is what he finds in the bedroom.
deathsubstance-usesuicide
A group of women have been chemically altered to set cities on fire from a distance. Not everyone thinks this is a good idea—including the women themselves.
child-deathdeathillness-and-pandemicviolence
The world is gradually being destroyed by what seems like an alien plague that attacks people and software alike. Caitlin lives in a seaside Scottish town, nursing her dying lover.
death-of-a-loved-oneviolence
Edgar Allan Poe’s writing has brought a creature into this world and it inhabits a young woman who wants to be rid of it. It has its own agenda.
deathdeath-of-a-loved-onesuicide
On the planet First Foot, the small town of Joe's Corner faces conflict over building a radio telescope close to local alien artifacts.
Ava recounts the visit of the "Needlers" to Earth and her part in the attempts to communicate with the aliens.
Eleven years ago, the Blue-Lily plague devastated the Empire. Now Yen Oanh attends to unfinished business with a dead mind-ship and a living survivor.
deathdeath-of-a-loved-oneillness-and-pandemic
Aliens decide to rule the Earth indirectly, picking a middle-aged woman from an insurance company to be their intermediary.
deathsuicide
An aging robot, on a journey to visit a friend, reflects on their adventures together.
death
Unknown Compartment There is no door where there should be a door—no hall where there should be a hall. The house has reconfigured itself, again, and I find myself before […]
body-horrordeathviolence
"He told me his mother was a spacecraft. We had just made love, and our bodies were spent and sweat-slicked, the scent of our seed mingling in the stables with the sweet musk of the drowsing horses. Our lids were heavy, but his muscles grew tense in my...
death
"The kids like Luzhanqi because it’s a non-perfect strategy game: a bridge as they make their way onto bigger, more serious things, like chess and Go. It’s something that even the most incompetent of them could hope to win. Sometimes you just get lucky....
"Dear Dr. Erzsébet Krajcsik-Nagy, I am contacting you as a member of the general public, and not as a fellow scholar, though I must say my chosen field of art history does have certain similarities to yours. I read the interview with you in the online...
"Even after Uncle Sulim died, he remained occasionally intolerable. “Did you check the pollen count inside the base?” “Yes, it’s at the higher limit of the acceptable range. Within two basis points.” Nika’s response was almost devoid of irritation. “I’ll...
deathdeath-of-a-loved-one
As a young scholar sets out on a research project to find the stones where the settlers of Iceland made human sacrifices, a long dormant volcano rouses…and other, long-sleeping horrors might also be stirring.
"The moon was full that night in the summer of Meiji 29 when three hundred and sixty new stars appeared in the sky. Glowing even brighter than the capital’s newly installed electric lamps, they formed a nineteen-by-nineteen grid. My wife, Tsuru, and I were...
illness-and-pandemic
"We lost so many souls today. Reports stream in across five continents; icons bloom on the map like blood spatters. Broken filters, zero latency, bandwidth that somehow blew through the roof when no one was looking. The hardware plays catch-up as best it...
"The Alamgir Dynasty has been guiding the Kingdom of Hindustan through centuries of peace, prosperity, and stability. Yet, credit does not rest solely on the wisdom of our modern kings; from the earliest days of what was then called the Alamgiri Empire,...
death-of-a-loved-one
"Ms. Otter came to Kearney when the day was dying, and her shadow ran down the broken road ahead of her like a line of bad luck. Jeremiah saw it when he paused to get a drink, his stained hands leaving brown fingerprints on his canteen. It was hot—all the...
"Notebooks, Conchas, y Un Café con Leche Those are the items that make up your world the day the girl with the side buzz and brown bomber jacket says to you, in the back of a crowded cafetería, “Explícame pues—¿Qué sabes acerca del concepto de la...
deathdeath-of-a-loved-oneviolence
Barber Gio Monsargo has learned to stay quiet and keep his head down, offering shaves and haircuts, not political opinions. But when a high-ranking military official of the Empire begins visiting his shop, Gio finds himself tested in ways he could never imagine.
deathviolence
"The oldest members of the asamblea all agree that the idea for El Zopilote came out of the Plantation in Texas, back when it was still one more state in the old US. The Plantation is what they called the Sysco-Bush Memorial Carceral Center and it had...
deathsexual-violenceviolence
"On the high plains of Kansas in a tiny town worn down by drought, I stop at a roadside diner. When I ask for water, the waitress pours me a glass of ice water, presenting it with obvious pride. “We have our own well,” she says. “And the wind turbine on...
death-of-a-loved-one
"Flyer 247-3 hasn’t flown in five days. In these five days, she has become accustomed to the hum and whine of the air filtration system cranked to its highest setting. She has become accustomed to her cell, four paces long, four paces wide. Its lack of...
Unknown forces attempt to stop Judge Dee and Jonathan from transporting a mysterious and possibly dangerous prisoner, who holds a secret about the Judge, to an executioner in France…
An engineer who frequently travels for her job, suddenly finds herself in airports other than the one she arrived in…
"We drove out to Joshua Tree for the star party—a gathering of amateur astronomers under a clear, dark sky. It was Holly’s idea, an impromptu adventure on a Friday after work: “Hey, Lou, do you want to go look at the moon tonight?” Holly had the best ideas...
child-deathviolence
"Got a new one for you,” the mover said. Small man, in neat overalls, wheeling the box on the stacker. That’s what the robot saw when they opened the box and let it out. It stepped cautiously out into sunshine. An unfamiliar city skyline, a boxy...
deathwar
"We were waiting for the sunset, sitting on the porch of the bleak stone house that was filled up with our longing. The sky was empty. The air, when I sniffed, was cold and bleak. There were no clouds, and we knew it might be a night when we’d see what we...
death-of-a-loved-onesuicidewar
A mother, left behind on Earth, receives a birthday card from her son, who is worlds away. How much time do we have together with the ones we love, especially when they grow up and away? How much is remaining? Copyright khōréō magazine 2023. Story by...
death-of-a-loved-one
"My cat hops up to his favorite spot by the window to observe the nebula, the pitter-patter of his paws and the low hum-rumble of the engine the only sounds in the room. Misty tendrils amble past, glimmering and cloudlike, carrying an entire medley of warm...
death
"The country was at just over ten thousand deaths the morning that the door appeared. On Kosmo’s phone NPR was interviewing a doctor with a nasal voice about the need for social distancing, while Kosmo himself collected empty cans from around his home office."
deathdeath-of-a-loved-one
"Your mother spends every evening working on her machine. It looks like no other machine you’ve seen. A hunk of metal on the ground, with wires stringing each section to the next. Like the inside of a giant robot’s belly, if someone cut it open to expose...
"Our generation ship never grows. Our faces—varied as the stars that swaddle us, far from everything we knew—never age. Do we learn, cut off from all the past? Do we change? I’ve asked myself these questions, and so many more, over the...
suicide
"I did not want to write a report for this book, but Lady Koi-Koi convinced me to, even though she says it “does a disservice to our own stories.”1 I also have to pass my WAEC, and this book is on our reading list for the mock exam, so, fine. I will...
"The little girl was blonde and had very blue eyes. She stood on the steps to the house and stared at Mara without expression. “It lives in the closet,” the little girl said. “Klara…” her father said. He looked apologetically at Mara. “Please,” he said....
"One day, the Curator salvaged a robot. It was a model ST-19, a military machine, designed for search and destroy missions. The Curator found it outside in a knee-deep snowdrift. The robot’s ship had crashed into a hill two kilometers away, the explosion...
death
"Today is upgrade day and Gabriel, a model 2098 post-human intelligence robotic service assistant, wears an appropriately festive hat. The perfect cone of polka-dotted purple paper slopes to one side of his head, his glossy plastic surface giving the weak...
"The last nectarine from the spaceship glistens in Riley’s palm, an imperfect globe smelling like summer. She nestles among the blue-tinted ferns of Ekara C, cupping the nectarine like a tiny sun. The first bite is primal, her mouth swollen with juice that...
Vashti is a pathogenic diplomat—an ambassador to the world of viruses, whom she communicates with through a machine that can translate their chemical signals into images, tastes, smells, sounds, and memories. She begins a negotiation between the US...
deathillness-and-pandemic
"The technical term is “generation ship cascade failure.” Cryogenic collapse. Millennium drive breakdown. Failed ship-in-a-bottle revolution against the corpostate hegemony. I call all the outcomes whalefalls, though. Because that’s what they are: the...
deathviolence
"Leo Gregory is losing altitude. He coasts on the thermals of a legacy fading behind him: a documentary here, a retrospective there, some greatest-hits collection down in the corner for the dilettantes. Oh, the work has lost none of its grandeur: his...
illness-and-pandemic
"Down here among the dead, our fairy tales begin at the end. So Skullbone—hero, trickster, corpse—plans to dive into the great Maw that rends the sea-ice far beyond our gravelled shores. Against the frozen waves’ mottled blue and glassy white, the Maw...
death
"Gamma stretched out through the quantum foam. Virtual photons and electrons tickled her subtime body. If she were to reduce her mass to pure quanta then, hypothetically speaking, she would be able to touch the entire universe at once. Practically...
deathviolence
"This much was clear. At some point in my future, I would have access to a time machine. This was a ridiculous sentence and a tragically irrelevant concern while my wife Judi was on the floor and possibly dying, but there it was: nonsense, in the presence...
death-of-a-loved-onesuicide
"Time is absolute. My son is born and there is blood, screaming sweet as rain, tears, and joy. I hold him. Things precede. Time is a straight line that exists independent of observers. My son’s second birthday follows his first. He walks shortly after his...
child-deathdeath-of-a-loved-oneillness-and-pandemic
A student of multiversal time travel slips from one version of New York to another, discovering that love may transcend timelines, but so too can heartbreak…
"She laid in bed and stared at the bottom of the bunk above her, riddled as it was with sticker and tape residue, which was stubborn as piss. The human race could contrive to send her to Venus, but it had not been clever enough to figure out how to remove...
deathsuicide
"There was a shop in old Haifa that specialised in Treif artefacts, so that was where Mili went first. Haifa sprawled along the side of Mount Carmel. Successive waves of regeneration didn’t do much to change it. Now adaptoplant buildings sprouted like...
deathviolence
"A small asteroid swerved in a most un-asteroid-like way and pierced the hull of the archivist’s ship, as though it was determined to drive her away. But she was just getting started. She slammed the emergency foam release button, holding her breath even...
illness-and-pandemic
"The intact remnants of Tess’ pressure suit sat alone at the bar, slumped before an untouched pint of beer. No one around the Waystation blamed Hae’cera for what they did after the reactor blew. According to the logs recovered after the accident, the blast...
A boy, desperate to escape the drudgery of life in his small town, gets caught up in the machinations of a traveling time keeper, and slowly watches his town and his life unravel by the seams.
death-of-a-loved-one
"When the sparkling golden glow fades and my skin stops feeling like mites are crawling all over it, the Room is gone, and I am shivering in a vast bright chamber and strange people clad in orange, red, and blue pajamas are asking me how I am. I don’t know...
"It is in the summer, during the monsoon season in Taipei, when the pigeon keeper’s daughter moves into the apartment on the top floor of a building on an alleyway in Wenshan District. From her window, she sees not only Taipei 101 in the distance with...
"Nostalgia died a quiet death, wrapped in cellophane and power cords. The future had killed it. The ghosts of yesteryear’s fragrances no longer haunted, no longer hung and clung to the passersby. Instead, those ghosts lay shriveled like salted slugs in the...
"The first time I saw her, she stood in the arch of the gate, a black spindle against the open stretch of road. I looked up from where I was kneeling in the garden and couldn’t look away. Head to toe in black, her face veiled. The air smelled like new...
"The first thing I asked, when the mage-king gave me a mouth, was whether he had given me a soul. His people’s beloved king, who held back the lords of the undead when they came roving; by whose conquering hand the strongholds were fed in the long fallow...
abusedeath-of-a-loved-onesexual-violence
"There had to be other islands capable of supporting human settlements, Alain told himself. Life should be possible beyond the shores of Heora. That was the article of faith that drove all Exploration. They simply haven't sailed far enough to find a new...
body-horrordeath
"Security AIs heard whimpering, diagnosed the source, then alerted the rest of the household. A baby moggie had fallen inside one of the nearby recycling hubs. Of course the children hurried outside to see, and being noble souls, they dragged the...
"Commander Maeb Len knows that, more than anything, an army needs hope in order to struggle onward. They need a vision to fight for and faith that the future will be better than the past. Better than the present. The People’s Army itself is one such hope....
deathwar
"The boyo working the transmitter doesn’t look like much, except his face is radiant. Radiant, like one of those pooka upworld adverts for neural templates. Dopamine-druggy, but lucid. Like he’s in love. Boyo also looks like he hasn’t spoken to a human in...
deathviolence
"The truth is that I lost my arm the same summer I lost my brother. Lost is a euphemism. In fact, my arm was retrieved by the paramedics and brought to the hospital, along with the two fingers severed from my left hand, and the various parts of my...
body-horrordeathdeath-of-a-loved-one
"That first autumn it felt as if the whole world had been made for them—which, of course, it had. They walked down the avenue of oaks that reached above their heads like Gothic arches, red leaves drifting lazily down to collect at their feet. Ashwin was...
deathdeath-of-a-loved-onesuicide
"The egg must have hatched overnight, though he could see no sign of a hatchling anywhere. Only empty shell bits remained, strewn here and there across the tatami."
death-of-a-loved-one
"I called it "yearning" at first, but by the time word had spread to all twenty-two of us croppers, a divide had resulted: half called it firesouling, and half called it firesailing."
sexual-violenceviolence
"When Elisabeth takes the baby to the beach on Thursday afternoon, another shambler has got through the fence. “Stay ten meters back,” the guard says, his translucent face mask fogged with the heat. “Yes, yes,” Elisabeth says. “And the child. Ten meters.”...
child-deathdeath
"They say the universe was created when a Giant lit a matchstick. That her great sigh fanned the flames that danced and wept into stars and constellations. They say some seas are blue and Slugs are naturally submissive. They also say that I cannot exist....
child-death
"Callme curled with her back to the corner and watched Julie’s every precise move. The old border collie often knew more about their surroundings than Julie, and so Julie trusted her to help guard. This morning, Callme’s ears pricked forward in benign...
Young Wipwai’s tribe has always fought their neighbors, but she’s secretly made friends with one of them, and they plot a future of peace.
child-deathdeathviolence
The narrator tries to find the path to the impossible ocean at the top of the mountain to dispose of the ashes of his/her parents, but there are obstacles in the way.
deathdeath-of-a-loved-one
"Truth be told, I have not done much with the entryway. It keeps up appearances. I am told it is a perfectly acceptable facsimile of a standard human receiving room. My handlers nod approvingly when I sit them on its low velvet cushions and shallow couch...
The Augur can tell your future just by studying the skin on your body. His prophecies are detailed, and he’s only been wrong once. But when he raises an orphan girl, he’s bothered that she wants to follow in his footsteps.
deathdeath-of-a-loved-one
Every Halloween, an elderly woman hands out candy to a young trick-or-treater who’s dressed as a witch each time, looking exactly the same age. With each passing year, the woman grows more attached to the little witch and her odd nature. But she is no...
death
Sorrow Farregon is a master perfumer, but the Queen wants something to make her conceive a child—which is challenging when the King is a clockwork automaton.
deathsuicide
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
death-of-a-loved-oneillness-and-pandemic
A century into its journey, a ship’s cameras transmit images of cannibalism back to Earth, and the authorities debate sending a destruct signal.
cannibalism
Anell takes a job with a great house researching immortality, but she secretly works on her own research involving reproduction.
deathviolence
J11-L arrives at the target planet 95,000 years after the race that built it died, but it proceeds with its terraforming mission nevertheless.
Four different groups of people explore the pros and cons of different ways to reproduce in the future.
death
Meena’s plan to send a tiny starship to Alpha Centauri with a downloaded copy of her own mind goes awry when the starship hits something when it’s just a fraction of the way there.
deathviolence
In a hostile, ruined Earth, a teenage girl struggles with the consequences of the death of her twin sister.
deathdeath-of-a-loved-oneviolence
The Arch Hierophant of the Cooperation needs to handle the question of a dead prophet’s divinity, so he doesn’t need the distraction of dealing with an illegal civilization in a distant star system.
When it sees its neighbors torn down, a smart building appeals to the government not to let it die.
Val leads an almost solitary life keeping the lighthouse at an inland lake. A man needing help with his magic interrupts her routine and brings unwelcome reminders of the life she lost.
A vignette about what happens on a Venerean cloud colony when an old man dies in his sleep and those who love him come to bid him farewell.
death
Two American men come to a town on the Tibetan plateau to see how they extract clean air from the high slopes that they can sell to the public.
Sahar makes a living in Titan gathering the products “Boppers” leave, but she joins a Titan-adapted person to hunt for a very special artifact, despite the danger from pirates.
Kleave’s life is upended when a freak accident disables all three of the archives where he stores copies of his experiences and memories.
Chime’s husband is also another woman’s wife. The sharing isn’t a problem, per se: she has her own wife when she’s male. The problem is that she keeps getting him back in increasingly beat-up condition.
An alien brain transplanted into a human child’s body serves as an involuntary translator. It’s not supposed to have volition or memories, but things don’t always work as advertised.
sexual-violenceviolence
Summer of 1955, the last summer of high school. Mike remembers his girlfriend and how wonderful it was being in love. And he remembers the awful things that happened at the end.
body-horrordeathdeath-of-a-loved-one
The government wants to build affordable housing for the homeless, but it wants them to agree to quit using magic first.
In the future, lottery winners will get their hearts’ desire, whether it’s turning into a bird, going to Mars, or vanishing into thin air.
violence
Jared has almost brought the princess to safety, but he worries that Kat, the crazy women who accompanies them, might have betrayed them.
sexual-violenceviolence
Jin is a mercenary hired to protect archeologists investigating an ancient ship built by the extinct human race.
child-deathdeathviolence
After the government rules he isn't really human, Chris loses his human wife and hybrid kids.
child-deathdeathdeath-of-a-loved-one
The AIs contract Lydia to check out an unusual planet and the secretive corporation that's supposed to be developing it.
Disguised in the body of a dead little boy, Fox needs to escape from the colony before the revolutionary leaders find him. But the boy's brother may be a problem.
death
Ellie is trying to catch a train from Boston to DC so she can visit her ailing mother when her sister calls to tell her she needs to "go to the skunkworks and repair the physics of this universe."
illness-and-pandemic
In alternate-history America, an uplifted chimp gets certified as a person and goes to the moon.
Young scientist trying to develop time travel encounters an alien intelligence that lives outside of time.
death
A lonely old Chinese man gets involved in the fight against smog--without government approval.
illness-and-pandemic
In 1915 Ohio, 14-year-old Emmett's night terrors get worse after he finds a dead body in an abandoned well.
deathviolence
"On the necropolis space station of the Tau Andromeda planetary system, the keepers of the tomb attended to the dead and the dying. They cleansed, prepared, and prayed over the bodies. They performed the last rites, paying intricate attention to the...
death
The First Emperor was the first and last of true immortals on earth, and no winter touched his realm. No autumn wind blew. His orchards bloomed and fruited and bloomed again. In his court, death and old age were shut out. And every day, he drank a cup of...
"Sparrow retired from the battlefield at the height of her powers and couldn’t be persuaded to change her mind. She was done with fighting, armies, blood, death, and taking orders. Now, she ran a salon at the edge of Florelia, Tira City’s entertainment district."
war
"Dekar Druid lives in an infinite library. Besides Ebizenum, who is in a special category of their own, he is the only living person in the library’s single tower. Outside, a forest surrounds the tower. There’s a lake a short walk to the north and a peak...
"The city of Nan Rhok stands on the ridge of a great mountain, where a gullet of steaming water flows from volcanic hot springs. The ridge is narrow and the mountain chill, so the city hews close to the spring, building high its granite towers. The name of...
child-deathdeath
"Night to day. In Diyu, the Earth Prison, Chun Wei opened her eyes. “Day” in the realm of the dead registered only as a less pervasive chill to the stagnant air. Not that Chun Wei needed to breathe any longer. She unfolded from the lotus position she’d...
death
Mel relishes running the “Enchanted Jungle,” a roadside attraction in the Everglades filled with live parrots, concrete dinosaurs, and other unexpected wonders.
death-of-a-loved-one
Author : Ruth Joffre Narrator : Julia Rios Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Dean Kidd Discuss on Forums PodCastle 916: Woodpecker, Warbler, Mussel, Thrush is a PodCastle original. Rated G Woodpecker, Warbler, Mussel, Thrush by Ruth Joffre Yesterday, I...
"Hey there—comrade—are you also part of the—Space Industry—Development Program—First Cohort? I’m Zhang Haoyu—second lieutenant—pleased to meet you.” The man in front of me spoke in choppy fragments. He extended his hand, heedless of the puzzled looks...
deathdeath-of-a-loved-onemental-illness
"Ambassador Shǐ Guì Sūn Yán and Prime Minister Xiang Hu Li Yáng floated in the crystalline water tank at one side of the courtroom. Beyond the anchoring shelves for the judges, the bulbous organic diamond window looked out onto a swollen, orange, solar...
"Black Quadrangle, Mesolithic era Unknown Charcoal on sandstone This work, created c. 15,000 BC (17,000 AS), precedes earliest surviving written texts. It was rediscovered alongside human remains and burnt carbon deposits, suggesting a role in a burial,...
"I was no friend to the god of high places, of peaks and spires and rope bridges over narrow canyons, and I had no reason to expect that he was a friend of mine. But my mother kept asking, what could it hurt to ask for his favor. What could it hurt to try....
"A syringe with a magnetite needle that would frighten even the boldest of souls. A torture device. But for my sister Kata, it would be a piece of the divine that shouldn’t be on the Aldarish Society Museum for Byrnyan Culture. That pretty much sums up how...
"Two hours out of deadsleep is too soon to be staring at the butchered corpse of a dead god. Neel looks down as the kalipeeli begins its descent to Chowpatty Beach and feels his stomach flip."
body-horrordeathgore
"Driver, gharivala, beta, bhai-jaan, baba. All the words used to address me; so rarely do I remember being addressed by my name. Not to complain. I don’t think people ever meant to be disrespectful. But having someone to respectfully, lovingly,...
"Posit a man. He could be any man. She could be a woman. They could be any human being anywhere on the spectrum. The story would play out the same. This is, however, entirely the creation of a writer who has written plenty of formidable women, and so he...
"Finneus Lark finds the man nestled inside of the abdominal cavity of a doe, his skin so pale that his veins are like spiderwebs. Slick with visceral fluid, leaves and petals cling to the man’s bird-boned wrists. His face, haloed by damp curls and crowned...
In a post-nuclear event Silicon Valley, a man grieving the loss of his wife struggles to find comfort when he is forced to communicate with his neighbors’ AI devices, rather than the people themselves.
deathdeath-of-a-loved-one
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
body-horror
"Deng Baolin is my paternal aunt, my father’s little sister. Dad says Auntie was beautiful when she was young, with a bright-eyed gaze, pure yet alluring, and a slender, curving waist. When happy, her face was like springtime. When sorrowful, she was like...
"The alert comes screaming in on Jana’s implant, bright light lancing through the fog of REM sleep: [New glyph. Intersection of 148th and Cliffton.] When her eyes snap open, it’s there, the only thing fully in focus. A blurry image of the yet-untitled...
"He is King Lear in the window’s sunshine. There is pastina boiling on the stove in a kitchen as familiar as his soul. Mad monologues push against his fogged oxygen mask, vibrating with his tremoring lips, his ragged breathing, the impossible weight of the...
body-horror
"Even though the armistice has held for nearly a year now, I know it could shatter at any moment, trapping me here behind enemy lines. The war raged for nearly fifty years—the simple inertia of violence dictates a renewal of hostilities sooner or later....
violencewar
"April, Mawlamyine. The Shepherd leads her flock through a city half overgrown with weeds. Weeds overwhelm the railway bridge, covering its deck. The pink wood sorrel has taken root in the road’s cracked flower beds, depending on the lay of the terrain to...
death
"The sketch showed a young woman, her face a perfect oval, holding our base in her cupped hands. Behind her head, Saturn hung golden within its halo of rings. That was the first sign that religion had come with us to Enceladus. I had risen early in the...
death
In the small city of Mehranpur, the Nawab suspects there may be a connection between the slow wasting of a beloved tree and the fate of the city itself.
"Morag took her walking stick and set out on the Portmeirion Road. Portmeirion was behind her and she was walking back towards Pen-y-Groes, so she supposed she should call it the Pen-y-Groes Road. But Portmeirion, with all its beautiful, seductive,...
"The world-organism is awake and has spent the last decade playing round after round of tic-tac-toe with itself. Hearing this the first time, Anais reacts like anyone would to a stranger sitting next to them on a plane, insisting on conversation for the...
mental-illnesssubstance-use
"Crunches and shrieks buffeted the Magellan LLC smartship as it plunged into Enceladus’s kilometers-thick ice crust, making their way to the subsurface ocean and the rival LuxeSpace corporation’s station situated there. Warning signals flashed through...
war
On a trip to Italy, a woman stuck in a crumbling relationship discovers the city she loves holds a secret that could change her life…
"You are an exile.” “Yes. And no.” Confined in the narrow neck of the vase, Asmidiske’s voice was tiny and metallic. “An oracle is ambiguous.” They considered and rejected terminology: galaxy, light speed, time warp, circumpolar orbit. “There are not words...
"Iris is deep in an empty ocean, gray-green twilight fading to black everywhere she looks—and she can breathe. She’s a thousand feet above the ground, climbing a fractal cliff suffused with flickering veins of electricity—and she cannot. Iris is flat on...
death-of-a-loved-oneillness-and-pandemic
Commander Niaja vrau Erezeng is up against an enemy that doesn’t just destroy all the beings, ships, and planets in its path, but also consumes their greatest arts, scratching them from existence everywhere…
deathwar
"Elizabeth Mauldin, driving fast along the skeletal remains of Arizona’s US-89, somewhere near Tuba City, saw a far-off glint and yanked her steering wheel hard to the left. Her custom-built tow truck left the broken roadbed and plowed into the scrub, red...
death
"Terse heard the disturbance in the woods long before the short, sturdy girl shoved through the overgrown hedge. He flung open the door of his workshop, and she startled, nearly dropping a large knapsack dangling off of one shoulder. “Can I help you?”...
violence
Emotional Resonance By V.M. Ayala Arbor’s favorite part of a mission was always the first view of a planet. Even after seven hundred years of being a giant robot, it never got old. Green and blue clouds churned over purple seas, imposing storms that...
deathviolence
"It’s six weeks ’til Going Time. I never really got used to that naming convention. The phrase has “Going” and “Time” in it, the latter carrying the entire weight of the definition. The former is vague. Going where? Beneath the crusty morass of our...
death
"Because Waigong ran out of money due to the rice shortage, he gambled away my mother, an eighteen-year-old girl known for her beauty and dance prowess. She danced like a majestic water dragon, elegant and unstoppable while flowing through the atmosphere,...
misogyny
"The young rag-smasher halts on a terrace. He chases his breath, gazing down on the waterfront. Even from this distance, the bustle lends him an odd calm. Brisk trade means things are running. No one’s starving, not even beggars. Down there, people...
violence
"The cadaver drone makes an incision along the inside of each finger. My stomach curls, waiting for the blood, but of course there’s none left. The body has been dead for days, all the blood drained and replaced with a sweet-smelling formaldehyde formula....
deathdeath-of-a-loved-one
"Every morning before work, I measure the Queen of the Andes. I’ve nicknamed her Nova because her trunk is a ball of spikes that reminds me of a supernova in slow motion, an explosion of leaves pointing in two hundred and three directions from the core of...
death-of-a-loved-one
"Examination rooms are safe. They stay what they are. The memories they drag to the surface make sense. You assume it’s because you’ve been in so many hospital rooms that your brain is packed with too much realism to have space for the random connections...
death-of-a-loved-one
"The angel Azrael rode the dead horse across the empty lifeless land for what seemed like an eternity, not encountering another living soul until he crossed paths with a mutilated preacher, who erupted from the a great rent in the earth as though Hell...
body-horrorgoreviolence
"I realized I was in love with Ivor the day he went up the mountain to speak with the goddess. We were at that age when the affectionate ease of childhood tips over into something different, when every touch could be the casual brush of friendship or...
death
A weary resilience worker should know better than anyone: no one is safe when the world is always ending…
death
"It is the shared birthday of the isle of Barradwyth. As a gift, Cyfris has promised his granddaughter Cydovan the one story he has never told her. They are sitting on the balcony of their home on Barradwyth Station, overlooking a street paved with mosaic...
deathdeath-of-a-loved-one
"Azahn had been the ninety-third Imperial Foresight to the Dynasty of Silken Flame for only three weeks when he was forcibly retired. His body had been blessed by the holy waters of the Sky-Vein River, and he had earned the named-blade Stalwart Thy Mind,...
death-of-a-loved-one
"Somewhere between the black slopes and the longest stretch of the cratered plains, I came across a traveler who I thought might be leaving the city and headed for the nested forests. I greeted him from a distance, just as the road curved around a copse of...
"Your deathless heart spasms. Once. Twice. You suck in a long, rattling gasp, and twist over the decanting table, great hacking coughs. Someone thumps your back. “Welcome back, boyo,” Media & Talent Production Coordinator Kayn says. “They got some great...
death
A Russian émigré poet living in Paris is visited by a mysterious bear with an agenda…
"I am waiting for Helen on her fiftieth birthday. On the table, there’s a crystal drinking glass and a vase with rare orchids; I can’t tell if the flowers are genuine or not. Faint piano notes and a cold scent drift in the air. Beautiful men and women sit...
"Mom—” “I swear, Mal, I don’t know whether to be proud of you or horrified.” I held the phone away from me. I didn’t even have it on speaker, she was just that loud. If people around me started getting horrified, I wouldn’t be able to go through with this....
"When my lover gets the Burning, I prepare to go to the Binding Place, where the mountain meets the sea. Even in her delirium, she smells the offering meal cooking and sees my half-full pack. She begs me not to go. It’s a journey lovers and pilgrims...
"Latent summer stirred while spring lay dormant. April had come to the Kingdom of S’ong and brought with it spells of rain. Tadpoles in the pond recently developed hind legs; above, a stray shower had been drumming at the water pit-a-pat. The rain-rinsed...
deathwar
"We found you, and you alone, in a universe that had forgotten to die. Or rather, a universe for whom death had been set just out of reach. When my people grew aware of our universe’s impending mortality, we developed slipspace travel, to pass through the...
"The entire time they were walking towards the Dragon Stairs, Giền said nothing. She merely changed shape in Thanh Lan’s arms—not growing heavier and heavier, which Thanh Lan could have understood, but by turns lighter and heavier, her shape shimmering...
deathviolencewar
"Nobody noticed the first few. They walked. One by one, in the beginning. Isolated instances. On every continent, mid-meal, mid-shower, mid-work, mid-fuck, right out the door of a pulled-up car in the middle of a freeway—ordinary people turned their backs...
death-of-a-loved-one
"Downwind from the encampment, the wind stank of refuse. The stench of people weeks into an unwashed trek intensified as Yue Ling limped out of the tree line, raising her hands over her head as she slowly approached the sentries. Both were young, younger...
deathdeath-of-a-loved-one
"Everything the sea takes, it gives back in its own way and its own time. That was what Jess’s grandmother believed, what she’d told Jess as they stood in the shadow of the giant red cedar that had washed ashore, its severed roots thicker than Jess’s body....
deathdeath-of-a-loved-oneviolence
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
"K’un died. It breathed for tens of thousands of years and, at long last, life came to an end. Its body was washed ashore. Pale red scales plowed through vegetation as the bulging exoskeleton grazed against dunes. Its enormous carcass formed an imposing...
death
"You remember when those rappers robbed a bank and killed a cop, that summer the girls from Wing turned green? I didn’t think it was connected then—the robbery, the gold, and the hordes of teens who were rotting from the inside. But I know better now."
body-horrordeathviolence
"I have heard the humans say that sex is the most intimate act of which they are capable, and though I did not say so to their faces, I felt great sorrow for them. Demendrenna’s tail twines twice around my torso, above and below the point where my scales...
death-of-a-loved-one
"I banked into a climbing clockwise turn, my wing’s fabric snapping, my jet’s exhaust hot on my backside. A beautiful panorama of Shuwash Island spread out below me, black beaches and orange jungles rising from a white fringe of surf to the gray and...
deathsuicide
"The multiverse broke last week. Broke is perhaps the wrong word. More accurate would be performed a state-change or found new equilibrium, but tell that to Catalina Chang, who has been popping aspirin like M&Ms ever since last Thursday, 5:54 PM, when the...
An artist’s work attracts the eye of Andrey Porgee, a notorious gangster, who becomes her best customer. But when he commissions a painting based on a childhood photograph, the artist fears his reaction to the final product.
deathviolence
"The dome star was the only light in the nighttime sky. Ben Stokes watched from the tower at the center of the common area as the star flickered and buzzed. Bulb is about to burn out, he thought as the soft pulses of light feathered the edges of park...
death-of-a-loved-one
A reporter travels to the Norwegian Arctic to cover an unusual sled race with the undead leading the living into unknown territory.
deathviolence
"James had always been able to tell when Camille was eavesdropping. Even though she kept her eyes carefully focused on the messages on her band while she poked at the remains of her salad, it would not have fooled him. He wouldn’t scold her in public, but...
death
"The Snow Woman was away, far away. The winds that blew round the frozen world would take “days” to bear her to where Kitsune sheltered, even though both lay beneath the blue light of Ryujin, which the Chinese call Hǎiwángxīng and the white folks call Neptune."
"During the unbearable years of tyranny, the political prisoners of the Anchorite Hegemony made a solemn covenant: when the time came, they would cross the last miles to freedom on their feet. For reasons of youth and idiocy, Tishrel thought he would have...
body-horrordeathviolence
"Marcus was meant to be going to the moon today. Years of training, years of anticipation. I can’t imagine the letdown. Instead, he’s in the community garden, as usual, weeding. Marcus hates weeding. He’d rather prune the fruit trees or tie up the bean...
child-deathdeath-of-a-loved-one
"You are the unalive thing possessing her body. Her body was printed three days ago from blueprints transferred moments before the motorbike crash over the bridge. Her flesh and fat and keratin and bone are accurate to prior specifications, except for the...
"For Future Generations" by Rachel Gutin What do terrestrial traditions mean when you have to leave the only world you've ever known? This contemplative sci-fi explores the choices a rabbi must make for her congregation. Copyright khōréō magazine 2021....
The year is 1915, and a young man hired to shout the words on title cards for silent films experiences the magic of movies. This spurs him to edit some of the worst dialog, leading him in a weird direction that utterly changes his life.
"Home brews coffee; black, no sugar. She maintains the temperature of the coffee at precisely sixty degrees Celsius. Most of the coffee sloshes over the jagged edges of the half-shattered mug. Rough holes have been torn through the matte plastic back of...
"We met on the 107th floor of the South Tower. She was standing in quiet contemplation, watching fire spread through the building across the plaza, smoke and paper billowing out into that baby blue sky. I was nursing a thunderous hangover, neglecting my...
deathwar
"They say Omma’s in there, but she’s not, she’s not. It’s just an empty metal capsule they’re lowering into the ground, and the rain is too wet and the flowers too bright and the wailing of the mourners—it’s so much, too much, and Na-Yeong slaps Appa’s...
deathdeath-of-a-loved-oneself-harm
"The minister’s wife arrives at the Bahrain Ministry of Nanotechnology in a black limousine with dark, tinted windows. She normally eschews the hijab, but today, she’s wrapped in a black abaya with a full face covering, a useful method of concealing her...
deathillness-and-pandemic
"I have experienced some tastes of my afterlife as a crustacean. In it, I am one of many, on a beach with purple sand abutting a sea that could be water but might be some other liquid entirely, beneath stars that seem larger and brighter than any I see in...
deathsuicide
"She was different. She was distinguished by the oracles. She spoke to the gods, who descended on her in disorienting, frightening fits that made her vision blank out and caused her to fall down. As God’s Wife of Amun she had been closer to the gods than...
Haunted by stories he hears while on jury duty, a documentary filmmaker finds himself in an abandoned mall at the dead of night.
"The nitrogen was rising in my aeration basins as an autumn wind scattered crimson leaves on the water. It was a chill wind for this time of year, when the late rays of the farsun normally add a final burst of summer; it was going to be a long, cold...
violence
"Kia ora te whānau, Welcome back to term 3! I hope you are all safe and well. I’m sure the holidays were a little different from usual. My name is Kara and I’m the teacher allocated to the year 1 to 3 children in your sector. I know it can be hard...
"You never expect to meet one of the refugees. You aren’t a scientist or a politician, you’re a middle school history teacher. The story of the refugees from a destroyed parallel Earth... should fade into the background of your life like every other major...
death
"Stars snap into place outside Lura’s cockpit. A red giant twenty degrees off her ship’s nose has visibly shifted position. The nebula above her has grown more diffuse. She exhales, clicks the button to log another successful breach, and lets herself blink...
death
"Lamia burst like a shattered glass into the scream and scouring heat of desert wind, loosing the power that had lived in her ever since she had returned from the Refiner of the Desert. Her fire lashed across the wide plaza atop the Spire where she had...
deathviolence
"The ghosts the hollow-eyed girl in Junction Square was selling billowed from her basket in wispy ribbons, whipping and fluttering in wind I could not feel, their tantalizing snap and shudder of cloth lighter than air, heavier than sorrow. I saw her from...
abusedeathviolence
"Marlowe is going to outlive him. Of this, he is sure. He has seen him on the streets of Blackfriars, of Southwark, in Bladder Lane, near Aldgate… He can pretend to be anything, young Kit. Not so young Kit. The two men are of an age: born the same year...
"My brother was taken away by the bears to live with them when I was small; he existed only in the song that was sung about him. His song was sung in the summer, at Sundance, but also in the winter, on the darkest day, the day he was taken away. The trade...
body-horrorchild-death
"For as long as I can remember, I have always been two people. My earliest recollection is of myself as a three year-old boy, Danny—and at the same time as a girl of the same age, Cristina. Another early memory is of playing in the rubble of the...
"Hadrian rattled with the computer equivalent of an uncontrollable laugh for all of three minutes and thirty-seven seconds. That was the time interval required for me to redirect one of those ubiquitous errant titanium asteroids from low orbit and throttle...
"Tom called Adriana Honey-Bunny, and she called him Pumpkin. A moment by a window. An orange California morning. Tom snapped his fingers, the waiter understood and came and refilled his cup with fragrant coffee. The sun shone on their table and the street...
deathdeath-of-a-loved-oneillness-and-pandemic
"I know only an irrational panic. I try to collect myself only to find my faculties are not my own but that of an internal imperative guiding my, quite incomprehensible, actions. Run a parallel diagnostic, recalibrate magnetic relay B4, load the ballistic...
deathdeath-of-a-loved-oneviolence
"The taxi from Guiyang Airport passed through long tunnels with curved white crescents every fifty or so meters along. It was simply some reflective material, but the bright curves leading her off into the distance through the darkness of the tunnel made...
death
"Two men in dark sunglasses stepped through the doors of the Monte Carmelo. They stopped and scanned the gloomy inside. Geshem-Nofel-Ba’oranim clocked them and kept to his booth. He knew trouble when it walked through the door looking for him. The two men...
deathviolence
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
"So can you do it?” The artisan hesitates, about to turn the page of the sketchbook given to her by, she is realizing, the most important client she might ever have. “Not alone,” she says, and her own honesty surprises her. “Most of the design, what you’re...
Trina Nelson is a pretty, popular sixteen-year-old high school student whose idyllic life took a turn for the tragic because of the Wild Cards virus. Now, she wants nothing more than to live out her days in the shadowy anonymity of the Jokertown on the...
death-of-a-loved-one
"For the longest time I could only get sliding jobs. It didn’t depress me, though; it seemed like a natural place to start. There was still time. I was sleeping rough in Wellington when I got my first job. I hitched from Palmy into the Hutt and started...
"And I am a curious thing. “Are you broken?” they asked by way of hello, in the direct way children have. I shook my head, neck creaking and scraping with the movement. “No, child. Just old.” “Oh.” The child looked me up and down, trying to decide whether...
"We have only legends now for when our ancestors first saw the monster. They saw it shred light as it approached, then devoured whole worlds. They ran the calculations—they still used machines for that, used machines for everything—and they knew our rock...
death
When young Ira arrives for her appointment, she is prepared to be transported to The Gateway to Heaven, 6,070 light years away. But the technicians shepherding her through the process fear there’s more to it than what’s advertised.
death
"When the messenger arrived at my Kamakura estate, I knew he wasn’t human, and that meant trouble. I read the letter three times, as if repetition would lead to better understanding. Foolish of me, as Lady Kuzunoha’s direct nature would not allow for...
"When the doorbell first rings, I do not rise from my chair. It is one of those days when the hurt bends me double. My nerves pulse sharp behind my eyelids; my fingers, clenched around the worn wooden armrests, are full of thorns. But outside the open...
"If you had a warp drive, it would be easy. The mathematics are strange the way ley lines are strange, invisible yet divinable. You’ve pulled your way up sterner mountains, fingertip by fingertip. You’ve already compensated for stellar motion, spacetime...
"Dabir and I shrouded the Syrian in his saddle blanket and spent a few hours digging a hole for him in that lonely land. He had been the last of our companions. Bandits and desertion and, finally, illness, had whittled our numbers down from the score of...
death
The Path Through Time” is Jules’s favorite part of the museum, a marvelous exhibit that brings the past to life, from the present all the way back to the prehistoric. Tonight at his aunt’s wedding reception as Jules walks along the path, it comes alive...
"The wide yawning sky. We stare at unfamiliar stars, seeking familiar patterns in their strange configurations. Here is a cup and there a bear. A queen reclined and all the fish in the endless seas. The universe is more boundless than we know. Maybe than...
"Death takes much and in return it offers Susan P—- only clarity. She finds herself in a great gray desert and knows her life has ended. Clad in a royal dress, she carries a bow and quiver, and a finely-carved ivory horn dangles from her throat. A tremor...
death
"Disaster, betrayal, and the ship already blasting its horn. The family clusters around the packing crates, destitute, stunned. We must go regardless, says their father, this is the last ship, what else can we do? Their mother nods, frowning so as not to...
death-of-a-loved-one
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
illness-and-pandemic
"The best way to hide a red mouth is to know exactly when your gums start to bleed. If you check your teeth every so often with a quick swipe of the tongue, and you get a bit of that saltiness, you’ll learn to take a swig from a canteen and rinse before...
substance-use
"Michael is afraid to go farther. Pudgy pushes him on. They walk through the shrouded city, the sound of footsteps all but obscured. Pudgy holds hard to the band of the broken fedora that perches crooked atop Michael’s bent head; the knees of Pudgy’s...
"Let me tell you how I first met Seax-of-Peony, Empress of the Known Moons."
deathviolence
Raphael, a prototype humanoid robot, tells us the story of his life.
deathwar
In a world dying from pollution by micro plastics, Ana struggles to protect her family, but even the food they eat is slowly killing them.
deathillness-and-pandemic
"In the winter of 19–, having newly arrived in England, and still recovering from the nervous indisposition which had afflicted me greatly ever since my circumstances during the war, I responded to an advertisement placed in the Yorkshire Post, for the...
"It is said that Archimedes was asked by the King of Syracuse to authenticate a manuscript. King Hiero had received what purported to be Alexander of Macedon’s own copy of the Iliad, brought out from the Library at Alexandria itself. He sent envoys to...
death-of-a-loved-onesuicide
Old Plant thinks very slowly, but it’s the oldest on the planet, and it thinks profoundly. It struggles to communicate with a group of very short-lived creatures, though, and they seem to be changing the planet.
Three little girls look for Martian monsters in the empty lava tubes under the Mars Colony. It’s off-limits, but there can’t really be anything there, can there?
"The notion of the quantum mirror was first floated by two graduate students (Sapna Gupta and Mark Shaw) over a fourth round of beers in a small pub in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and therefore one should consider the role of intoxication in its initial...
body-horrordeathviolence
When Astrill finds a cat-like alien attached to the outside of their spaceship, things get complicated for him and the other smugglers, and the more they learn about their visitor, the worse it gets.
The story of how Aned Heast, having lost a leg and his entire army, reclaimed his honor in a drought-ridden town whose adults mysteriously vanished.
deathslaveryviolence
"Pinander has been reciting “Song of Manifold Suns”all morning, in overgrown, forgotten garden nooks or neglected library aisles, far from the mutterings of other desperate students. Ancient knowledge comes to life within him."
deathsuicide
Gil teaches students how to communicate with the Numens, vast, star-spanning alien intelligences indistinguishable from gods.
deathsuicide
A “subroutine” on a science station observing the Sun tells how its desire to look at the sun led to it become truly intelligent.
"The air over Chicago was thick with drones. There were at least two dozen I could see from the beach. Most were small, no more than slow-moving specks against the clouds, probably simple reconnaissance units. But at higher altitudes the big Venezuelan...
deathviolence
After the AIs won the war, they still found ways to keep humans busy, and Cal’s starship is responsible for finding and evaluating human colonies that were lost during the war.
body-horrorchild-deathdeath-of-a-loved-one
"It is not the dust that brings her tears. The Lachrymist’s house is dusty, fragments of time and memory fallen everywhere, a living blanket that drapes itself over tables and chairs and things even stranger. But time and memory are to be expected anywhere...
A teenager struggles to relate to his mother who’s trying to help build an automatic translation system so he can speak their language more like a native.
self-harmsubstance-use
"They’d built a new Vault of Potions after the flood—of course they’d had to, with the thaumatically cursed mess that had become of the old one. Still, it made me twitch and reach for my wand, walking along the familiar tree-lined quad and hearing the...
deathviolence
A wealthy woman has the multiverse searched for divergent versions of herself who’re near death, offering to add them to her personality, and they always accept. Up until now.
deathdeath-of-a-loved-one
In a culture that teaches that you should commit suicide when you’re at your peak, a young man kills himself after winning a prize and his parents prosecute his teacher.
deathsuicide
Deff and his team hunt the countryside for illegal Heroes, whom they kill and then sell the body parts. Something truly terrible happened with these “Heroes” in the recent past, and it’s not entirely done.
deathviolence
In the ruins of a dry, blasted Australia, Edward looks after an abandoned nine-year old girl as they travel in search of an old reservoir.
deathviolence
"We are good Mothers, or at least we will be once the embryos emerge from their confines. They dangle from the spaceship’s ceiling in pink bulbs like silkworm cocoons. Now that we landed, Ship will become the bones, sinew, and flesh that will birth five...
child-deathdeathdeath-of-a-loved-one
Six years ago, after the slaughter of anchors by Frere-Jones, Alexnya was made the new anchor, but now the grains have decided to try her for Frere-Jones’s actions—even though she had nothing to do with it.
deathviolence
Madam Grey sells life insurance to the young men recruited by the Empire to fight in the Grass War. The war goes badly, but she has a chance to end it—at great cost.
deathviolence
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
Marq knew their spouse would die from the intelligent alien parasite they’d accepted some years ago, but now that the time has come, they have a lot of trouble dealing with it.
death-of-a-loved-onesuicide
Faith’s daughter, one of the first born on the ship, doesn’t look like the other children, and Faith wonders if it’s related to the strange dreams she has.
In the ruins of the American Midwest, two countries struggle over the question of whether brain uploads are still the same person, and a secret agent finds his loyalties have changed.
deathviolence
On an agricultural planet, on the night they celebrate the harvest, a young man plans a secret rendezvous with his forbidden lover.
deathviolence
A ship bound for Europa is rerouted to Titan to help with an emergency at the colony, but on approach, the AI demanded to be given a human body, and the new entity isn’t sure what’s going on.
misogyny
Teenage Dorothy accompanies her father across the US in search for the mythical Viper-King, a giant snake whose fat confers wisdom on the first person to eat it.
violence
The narrator works to salvage the memories of someone who’s upload to virtual reality didn’t go smoothly.
death
Noah is a busy man with a lot of work to do on the moon since he and his partner went independent, but his wife’s illness is a big distraction, and there are hints that other things are seriously wrong.
death-of-a-loved-oneillness-and-pandemic
No longer entirely human, Luis revisits his childhood home and reflects on how the world ended.
deathviolence
In the Third World, a teenage girl sees her whole family killed and flees with her brother. In Washington, an old woman gradually gives up on life. Somehow, their paths cross.
deathillness-and-pandemicwar
The Great Freeze has left the Earth almost lifeless for 20,000 years, but robots have awakened a genetically modified human to start a warming process—if they can figure out how to.
death
This is the story of Seonag and how she crossed the waves ahead of the hunters and how she found the wolves and what happened then.
deathviolence
Two selkie women, childhood friends who’ve drifted apart, get together for an adventure in an abandoned human mine.
The godling of Town H sits in her office, depressed because with the bankruptcy of the company, her town is almost dead. But she has to rouse herself because something is attacking the town, and her people need her.
illness-and-pandemic
Ardissians have a special gland that lets them survive death as “ghosts.” Lucian is dying, and Katherine thinks she can implant the gland so he can survive his own death.
deathviolence
A future Korea requires government proof of identity before you can access the Internet, and the narrator tells about her sister, who was a subversive trying to enable an uncensored, anonymous system.
In a world we can only reach in our dreams, the Stranger rides a train through a dangerous mountain pass while a troupe of bandits plans to attack it.
child-deathdeath
A nobleman offers Navid’s family a vast fortune if they’ll make him a magic coat more powerful than anything they’ve ever made, and in the span of a single month. It will change their lives, one way or the other.
Humanity lives in virtual reality as much as it can, but sometimes there are things you have to do in the real world—no matter how dangerous that is.
illness-and-pandemic
In distant Ruyastan a single prince survives her mother’s efforts to hold power by slaying all descendants of her sons.
deathviolence
Two children and their aunt travel across the ruins of war-torn India in search of a camp where there’s food and security. But something deadly is waiting for them.
violencewar
While one man spends all his income on dreams, another works hard creating those dreams.
death
Someone killed the last member of an intelligent species, and Greysl investigates on behalf of the human-led Partnership.
Quányuán colony struggles because the planet is much drier than expected, but the last colonist born on Earth likes taking walks outside, and she’s joined by a young girl who’s curious about her world.
death
A terminally ill astronaut begs everyone she can think of to give her a chance at one last mission so she can die in space.
death
In a future where successful people spend most of their time in cyberspace, Martha struggles to make ends meet servicing the systems that take care of them.
death
A family has problems when their little daughter falls out of sync with the usual times everyone else wakes and sleeps. But it’s not just her.
We know about the ones who walked away from Omelas, but what the heck happened to the kid in the basement?
child-abusedeath
The Owen corporation has brought some dinosaurs through their “gate,” and Dr. Crimshaw thinks she can use sign language to communicate with one of them.
The Golden Crusader must be getting old or something. He’s not so fast anymore, and he never flies higher than the sixth floor, but he keeps doing super deeds. Or trying to.
Cyber-terrorists used Aki, a humanoid robot, for their attack on Sentionics Corp, and now the police need to figure out what they did and how they did it.
deathviolence
When teenage Guerre is called to be a cropsinger, she makes a big sacrifice to serve her family and community, but her brother refuses to accept it.
death
The narrator completes an interview to get qualified to communicate with aliens.
An account of various famous artists, writers, and musicians who lived in Manhatttan in the 1930s.
Kingfisher searches an endless icefield for a woman he can’t forget. He’s been searching a long time—tens of thousands of years at least. But he’s not giving up.
When the young magistrate arrives at his remote posting, he sees that some of the villagers are amazingly strong, and he decides to learn how to make the magic potion that makes them so.
violence
How a knight errant sought a dragon, they fell in love, and she loves it still, despite the fact it set her on fire once.
Rielle accepts an offer from her husband’s rival to play accompaniment for his daughter in a competition. They need the money, but there’s something too perfect about this daughter.
When an unkillable black crow haunts the princess, Wynn goes beyond the kingdom to find the only weapon that can destroy it.
death
A doomsday weapon has changed the laws of physics on Earth, and most of the population has perished. Liyana spends her time trying to have a baby and studying elephants, who have started to spontaneously combust.
deathpregnancy-loss
Zhang Xuan steals a starship to go hunt for her brother Kai, who went off to look for living alien civilizations in the galactic core and never came back.
When James was dying, he and his wife, Cat, worked to build an AI based on his personality that could keep her company in his absence. It seemed like a good idea at the time.
death-of-a-loved-oneillness-and-pandemic
Refugees from the destruction of their own planet, the Dragonflies struggle to find a place in a world that doesn’t welcome them.
deathviolence
Rourou is a Chinese little girl who loves her papa but wonders what happened to her momma. And why she can’t remember anything before age 5. And why she speaks fluent English.
deathdeath-of-a-loved-oneviolence
In an Ireland recovering from the great famine of the 2030s, a young woman gets a job with an older doctor who’s growing odd things in her garden.
deathviolence