56 free-to-read stories tagged “War”
"On the island of Manhattan, there’s a building out of time. I can’t tell you where it is, exactly. It has an address, of course, as all buildings do, but that wouldn’t mean anything to you. What I can tell you is that the building is called The Oakmont."
war
Technically dead after a terrorist attack, Asante gets a new body and second chance at life, provided he serves 5 years as an experimental supersoldier.
child-deathviolencewar
"The glass-bottomed ice cream truck floated above the rooftops, playing “All Around the Mulberry Bush” through a cracked speaker, searching for teeth to rot. A neighbor’s too-loud radio said “Kennedy” two or three times a minute. Except for those slivers...
"You see them, the shadows, everywhere. They look like the person you knew, maybe someone you were related to, maybe someone you loved. Always someone you lost. But they aren’t that someone. That’s the infuriating and the comforting part. They can’t be...
"Alvin was slumped in the passenger seat of the open-top Willys terraplane. Two thousand feet below us, the Black Sea lived up to its name: a sheet of ebony darker than the sky above, its featureless surface relieved only by the scattered flecks of night...
violence
A Russian fighter pilot in the battle of Stalingrad comes back from a mission to find a wounded alien stuck under the wing of her airplane.
deathwar
Laburnum castle hosts key nobles from across the kingdom as well as the king himself for an enormous feast--a feast that's equivalent to a war.
deathwar
"Did you know,” the Ijt Ambassador said, as she sipped gently at her soup with her long, blue, curling tongue, “that your predecessor, in an act of yofishi —” the translator choked on the word, but Station Commander Ennie Niagara knew that it meant...
In an alternate 1950s with robots, spaceships, and flying cars, the US Army sends a robot father to the son of a dead soldier.
deathviolence
"Not all the ghosts of Chornobyl died in 1986. Some died years—decades—later, bodies ravaged by mutated cells. They were a hundred kilometers away, not realizing their favorite mug was doused with irradiated atoms from the destroyed reactor. I died in...
deathdeath-of-a-loved-onewar
"Outside is the palace of slaughter. Under its gambrels of boiling sky, there is the cold unforgiving sea; there are mountains ready to cradle your bones. Along its corridors of singing grass, there are horseback warriors who will cut you to pieces. There...
animal-harmgoreviolence
"It didn’t really matter how he had come to be abandoned. A guardian had been at his side; was there no more. Locke was the only human on the world, so far as he knew. Many other lives were here. Survival was simple enough. Along the broad roofless...
Original humans killed off all the people on Karalang 15,000 years ago, but the captain of Karalang’s last surviving warship just woke from cryosleep to get his revenge. But there’s an intruder on the ship.
deathgenocideviolence
"It’s cruel of the soldiers to come when Mama is so sick and so pregnant. I tell this to Dijkstra, and she agrees. Then she goes to Mama and clambers into her lap, which is now too small to hold me and almost too small to hold Dijkstra, and says it in a...
body-horrorchild-deathviolence
"Dirtsiders mostly do not understand orbital mechanics. They say stupid things like, “Space travel is a racket. My cousin emigrated to Mars last year and her trip only took three months. Now they’re saying I have to pay for seven months transit. Spacers...
child-abuseviolencewar
"I was shipped to Barsaylus like freight. The ship was unmanned or, more accurately, uncrewed. Unlit, even. The aliens had given us technical specifications to build a kind of pod for my own survival, and it had taken NASA about a year working around the...
genocideviolence
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
death-of-a-loved-onewar
"I walk into Old Town. In a curio shop on the promenade, an old man sells paintings, deras, kikois, and ornaments. Tuk-tuks move swiftly along the cabro paving, passing the teapot sculpture at the round-about. Pushcarts lumber beside the street restaurants...
child-deathdeathwar
"It takes the lieutenant one hundred years to climb the hill to Lao Po’s house. By then, the warlords have come and gone, the Republic has risen and fallen, and developers have been petitioning the ruling party to demolish Lao Po’s hilltop hut for decades."
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
In which we learn how bad translations averted a war and led to lasting peace.
misogynywar
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
body-horrorviolence
"April 1970 olded newspapers marched like soldiers in military precision across the conference table in Deke Slayton’s corner office. Headlines blared, “PARALYZED APOLLO 13 SPLASHES DOWN,” “INJURED ASTRONAUT HOSPITALIZED,” and “APOLLO IN RETROGRADE.”
"Konstantinov’s Company found the hostages just a few hours after setting out on the trail of the True raiders who’d taken them. Leaving behind the tar sands mine, its extraction plant, and the smoldering ruin of its tank farm, the fresh graves and...
goreviolence
"The beheaded tilapia nudged teasingly against the riverbank in a bloody soup, staining the lush weeds beneath the little girl’s feet. Oblivious to the stench, she squatted beside the muddy water, her gaze tracking over the dead fish. There were a dozen of...
deathviolencewar
"The aftermath of the great war deposited me on a breathtaking port city called Aeskir, on a dazzling world called Aevii. This was about as fine a place to end up as I could have hoped. Many thousands of worlds across human space had been scoured of life...
genocideviolence
"Teodorq sunna Nagarajan the Ironhand sat astride his horse at the head of his regiment and studied the situation before him. His regiment, the Roy’s Own Savage Archers, was arrayed on the extreme left of the Royal and Imperial Army of Cuffland,...
war
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
deathdeath-of-a-loved-onewar
"Operation Cherry Blossoms will not change the final outcome, though there will be carnage, to be sure, when his three planes attack. Three planes, that is all. Two will defend the third, the one that carries the new superbomb the Germans call Das Biest....
"Three days into their journey, and the strangers—humans and one janusian couple—felt as if they had become respectable friends. A convincing illusion, and essential. The male janusian, rooted firmly into his wife’s broad back, was eager to outline the situation."
war
Bob, one of the bat-like Zoeys on New Horizons, helped architect the peace treaty that ended the war with the humans, but some Zoeys who don’t want peace plan to use his son against him.
An alien hive mind encounters something strange and tries to understand it. The human colonists are even more clueless, even though they’re caught in the middle of a pending war.
In a world where atmospheric problems made guided ICBMs impossible, a young missile pilot talks about his life at base waiting for the call to fly a nuclear missile to his death.
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
deathdeath-of-a-loved-oneviolence
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
deathwar
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
goresuicideviolence
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
deathviolencewar
The magician raises his wand. Initially, this commission seemed simple. One large country invading a much smaller one, a clear case of aggressor and victim—but nothing is ever so straightforward.
There exist places where the walls between worlds grow thin. Places like this one, where two villages press together like lips on opposite sides of a glass: Renna-tal and Renna-ba, both perched on the edge of the lake called Mirror. Built in the same...
war
Long after the final attack on the Automatous Abbey, long after the enemy, repugnant and resplendent in their flesh and blood, had fired their array of weapons at the undefended structure, long after the Abbess had sounded the klaxons and evacuation...
deathwar
He hates the birds. There are two, a breeding pair. Their eyes are red as devils’. On land they’re stupid, little feet pushed so far back on their bodies that they can’t escape by running. Yet they glide over the water, glossy mottled boats. Their chicks...
animal-harmviolencewar
The day before the blind missionaries first arrived in our village, we had been raided by one of Jurgen Blanco’s enforcement squads. Blanco’s people were all the same—gaunt, lupine-visaged mockeries of men and women with broken, half-formed grins that...
goreviolencewar
I killed four hundred soldier bots all vying for the same thing before I realized there was no such thing as anti-war if our invention was the solution.
deathviolencewar
A father bumbles his way through family domesticities as he makes his way to the airport. His children do not know he is not their father at all, but a stranger with a gruesome past, hard-earned advice, and a primal longing for a stolen life. Copyright...
violencewar
In Japanese-occupied Malaya, an older Chinese immigrant reflects on his arrival to this land in his youth and embarks on a daring rescue. Content warnings: Blood Copyright © 2025 khōréō magazine. Story by Joshua Lim, edited by Zhui Ning Chang. Audio...
deathviolencewar
Feng, once indentured to the university in return for her studies, accompanies the Professor who bought her debt to the mountains. There, they expect to find a rare and tragic treasure: a dead dragon. This is Part 2 of "Dragonsworn" by L. Chan, the first...
deathviolencewar
The unsettling arrival of war and how hope in tales pass from generation to generation. Content warnings: War, orphans, implied trauma due to armed conflict, death Copyright khōréō magazine 2024. Story by Tania Chen, edited by Aleksandra Hill. Audio...
deathwar
"When We Make it to Bet-Zelem" is a profound meditation on hope and what it means to seek something that may no longer exist. Content warnings: War, violence, starvation, mass killing, animal death, displaced persons Copyright khōréō magazine 2024. Story...
deathviolencewar
A Croat refugee comes to terms with his trauma through studying metaphorical maps to his own lostness. Content warnings: Graphic wartime violence and implied torture, death of friends and strangers, hateful language directed at ethnic groups, mental...
deathgenocidewar
Feng, once indentured to the university in return for her studies, accompanies the Professor who bought her debt to the mountains. There, they expect to find a rare and tragic treasure: a dead dragon. This is Part 1 of "Dragonsworn" by L. Chan, the first...
deathviolencewar
A standalone excerpt from a novel-in-progress, "The Blue Glow" is set in Hiroshima in 1945, in the aftermath of the atomic bomb. Sen, a sixteen-year-old suicide pilot who lived, returns to his home city, where gods now crouch disheveled among the...
deathgorewar
“Time Enough at Last” originally appeared in IF Worlds of Science Fiction January 1953. For a long time, Henry Bemis had had an ambition. To read a book. Not just the title or the preface, or a page somewhere in the middle. He wanted to read the whole...
deathwar
“The Body Remembers” was originally written for, and published in, the anthology Dark Matter Presents: Monstrous Futures in April 2023. CW: War, death, graphic descriptions of injuries, self-harm, suicidal ideation From the author: “The idea for this story...
self-harmviolencewar
“The Horse Leech Has Two Maws” was originally published in The Jewish Book of Horror This story deals with the Holocaust. This story has an academic frame and that the text on the website has a number of scholarly footnotes that provide additional context....
body-horrorgenocidewar
PseudoPod 810: Her Face All Teeth is a PseudoPod original. Denny did not want to spy on the confessional, but at the same time, he did. He wanted what he did not want, or he did not want to want what he wanted. As a Catholic, he should have been...
child-abusedeathviolence
“The Green Scarf” originally appeared in The London Magazine, August 1926 When the Wellingford family became extinct the days of Wellingford Hall as one of the great country homes of England were already numbered. The estate passed into the hands of...