810 free-to-read stories tagged “Wry”
The narrator is a witch who works in a public library somewhere in the rural American South. Her job is to get patrons the books they need, but a lonely teenage boy poses a challenge.
child-abusedeath-of-a-loved-onemental-illnesssuicide
The inventor of trans-multiverse travel invites hundreds of instances of herself to a conference. It’s great fun until one gets murdered.
deathviolence
Sam’s ability is modest, but he’s still excited to be accepted into the Super Team. Now he just has to figure out how he can make the biggest difference—assuming he can do more good than harm.
violence
"Ambition!” Trevor emphasized, rapping knuckles hard on the wood table. “That is what makes the great men!” He took a satisfied swallow from his mug. Across from him, Barnaby put down the daily he’d been reading and sipped from his own beer. Pulling out a...
deathracismviolence
"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
Entertaining tale of a modern search engine that achieves real artificial intelligence by accident and decides it wants to be helpful to people.
mental-illnesssubstance-use
"So, hear nah. This is how it happen. Was years after Malcolm pass through and wash away a lot ah we little islands coasts, and mash up so much ah Florida and Texas and them places, and people say they ain’t waiting for no next storm like that one, and...
death-of-a-loved-one
In this provocative and rich retelling of the Greek myth, Orpheus, the musician son of Apollo and Calliope, successfully rescues his wife Eurydice from Hades after her untimely death.
body-horrordeath
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
violence
Zanna settles into a remote mountain cabin to write her next book. No internet. No phone. No distractions.
body-horrordeath
"We stepped out of the theater to a gust of unseasonably raw wind. Late September in Boston is usually pleasant, and we’d all dressed for the summery day we’d left behind. Cordelia’s two classmates, Gwen and Marissa, shrieked. “Let’s hurry to the car,” I...
When the the elitist institution of Ozymandias Academy and its headmaster, Vamon Kinctuarin, can't find a solution to the city's worsening drought, 2 self-taught magicians, Noah and his partner Manny, take it upon themselves to find a solution to the crisis.
A young hustler discovers that he's supposed to play a big role in transforming New York from a city to a City. If he can survive it.
deathracismviolence
"I’ve ferried two hundred and twenty-one souls across the river of death, and I can already tell my two-hundred-and-twenty-second is going to be a real shitkicker. I know by the lightness of the manila folder in my hand, the preemptive pity in the...
child-deathdeathdeath-of-a-loved-one
"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
By treaty, people on Erax never talk to the Oceanics, so when an Oceanic turns up at a south polar base to deliver a few dead human bodies, it’s trouble for sure.
genocidegoreviolence
"June was the first of my friends to get into it. This isn’t surprising—she was playing Wordle for weeks before Margo or I discovered it. When we met up for our weekly lunch, she kept checking her phone and I assumed it was some new game. Then she put it...
substance-use
A Heptarchate undercover mission lead by one of Jedao’s friends has gone missing, so Jedao goes undercover to try and rescue them.
deathsexual-contentviolence
Dr. Rosni Gupta examines Malni, a woman who’s institutionalized because she speaks gibberish. She’s sure it’s just another language, but what could it be?
Sylvain de Guilherand secretly uses a captive water spirit to provide indoor plumbing to Louis XV's Versailles, but the spirit is childish, playful, and getting bored.
When an illicit trade deal goes wrong and Quandary is blamed for it, she goes on the run to avoid the crosshairs of a bioengineered killer that only lives for 24 hours. If Q can evade it for that long, she just might survive.
deathsubstance-useviolence
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
death-of-a-loved-onesubstance-use
Young Garrin, bastard brother to King Ciar, is sent to find Queen Ella’s stepsister and bring her to the castle. Not everyone lives happily ever after.
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
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
death-of-a-loved-one
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
racism
To become a Wayfarer, Sedef needs to master the dangers of the forest on her planet, which kills anything that doesn’t glow. And she has to survive an emergency run, seven hours each way, alone.
The narrator and a friend plot to steal a valuable artwork from an underworld boss who’s pissed them off.
body-horrorviolence
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
racismviolencewar
Mallory Iheji would do anything to watch her favorite artist’s lost movie, “The Hydraulic Emperor.” But what would she really sacrifice for it?
A young woman is murdered in Armstrong City, Luna, and both the police and organized crime want to understand why. Captivating.
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...
A day laborer hired to clean up a flooded creek outside of Boulder, Colorado uncovers what could be a valuable find—if it doesn't kill him first.
deathgoreviolence
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.
Corinna was eleven when her magical journey to the Land of Nibiru ended with her returning to her kitchen at home. Now she’s waiting for her friends to return for her. Probably.
Dan loses his job and goes looking for something that hasn’t already been automated away. There’s not much, and what he does find is rather strange.
"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...
"Aden had never once forgotten his gear for bulk trash day, but he found it touching that Nura still taped a monthly reminder note on the door from the kitchen to the garage. Sweet of her to remember, given how exhausted med school had her these days."
death
"In the beginning, June and Nat are best friends. June is not yet a swarm of honeybees and Nat is not yet a cloud of horseflies, and the king hasn’t yet decided that separating them into parts like this—June’s left pinky finger one bee, her left ring...
deathviolence
"Police Sub-Inspector Ferron jerked her sandaled foot away from the floor with a muffled shriek, wishing she had worn boots, despite the weather. She balanced on the other leg and cradled her injured extremity in both hands. She was momentarily heedless of...
mental-illnesssuicide
"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
"Irada the blacksmith ran a hand over the dents in Muallim’s chest. Most were superficial, but one was deeper than the others. The paint here was chipped. She could see some corrosion underneath. “I’m going to have to remove your whole chest plate,...
She wants to get out of Hell, but all the boys she has in mind keep letting her down.
A young man working on the moon during a construction boom keeps seeing two men doing crazy things in the middle of nowhere. Men who leave no trace and whom no one else can see.
When other girls catch fairies, they wish for beauty, but Amelia just wants to do well on her science project.
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.
Male fairies often seduce maidens, but Rose actually seeks them out.
sexual-content
The end of the world starts when an ambitious marketing guy gets a cryptic assignment to create an ad campaign to "make ugly sexy."
deathsexual-content
A group of Englishmen sharing an evening in a pub near a canal on "Old Mars" meet a stranger who knows their secret and makes them an offer.
substance-use
"At five A.M., Joy got a call from the truck stop off the freeway east of the city. Wasn’t the first time. “Did it get dumped? Did it get loose from a truck?” Joy asked. “I don’t know,” the night manager answered. “But it’s digging around in the garbage...
A stoner kid and his best friend attempt to move a sofa across town during an alien invasion...
death-of-a-loved-onegoreviolence
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
An AI car is caught between its ruthless employer and the people she hurt…
death
"Things began to go badly for the crew of the USFS Erwin around the time Dr. Marchere’s coffee mug spontaneously reassembled itself. Dr. Louis Marchere was not, at that moment, conducting some manner of experiment. Well, he was, only not on entropy and the...
death
Lydia’s visit to Innovation City on planet Grit is interrupted by an engineered virus that compels her to hide in the tunnels under the city.
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
Exchange of pathogens has largely replaced traditional sex, but the archipelago has run out of new diseases, so four friends go to the mainland in search of new plagues.
child-deathsexual-contentviolence
Isla’s job at Omega Corp seems to involve walking through a huge place called “Robot Country” to test something, but they haven’t really given her a clue what that might be.
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
abusedeathsubstance-use
Draiken kidnaps a hired killer from a space station and spirits him away for a “demonstration.” But what sort of demonstration could possibly change the man’s mind?
violence
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
Coop is eager to make a difference in his first mission as a new lieutenant on a search-and-rescue ship, but the rest of the crew doesn’t seem to work very hard or care very much, and they definitely don’t appreciate his meddling.
Aria just has a few days to save the whole universe from being swallowed up by Zarzak, the infinite love machine.
deathviolence
A choose-your-own-adventure story in which you navigate the clinic on a space station full of aliens.
body-horrordeathviolence
Dora Rose's whole family have been slaughtered. Maurice saves her because he loves her, and is ready to help her get revenge. Even though he's a rat and she's a swan in their true forms.
genocideviolence
"I met a woman whose job is to help you forget. Erasing your memories seems like something no one would trust a stranger with, I know. But then—therapy, right? We trust strangers with that. Maybe we think strangers have no reason to hurt us. No personal...
"Jay scrubs at the blood spot on her tennis shoe with her thumb and a gob of spit, hurried by the knowledge that Hardy will be there any moment. It’s swelter-hot on the gravel back road, and she’s doused in the sound of cicadas from the forest behind her...
deathviolence
A woman visiting Las Vegas for a fun weekend encounters her ne’er-do-well ex-husband, who begs her for a favor that gambles with life and death…
deathdeath-of-a-loved-onesuicide
"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...
"The rocket ship blasted off from the Devereaux Airstrip on the outskirts of Ottawa and headed straight into the stratosphere. Ruth Mulu, one of four passengers, stared at the cappuccino machine and tried not to throw up. Adeline Devereaux, the Canadian...
homophobiasexual-violence
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
body-horrorcannibalismviolence
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
deathgoreviolence
"If you’re looking for a cheap way to kill all this mold—and who isn’t, right now—look no further than Inkicide Disinfectant Concentrate 64oz (4 Bottles). It’ll curl your nose hairs right up into your skull, but that just means it’s working, amirite? Two...
body-horrorillness-and-pandemic
"I want you to make a dragon for me,” the client said. “I need it ready to go by February first.” Dragon, Feb 1, I wrote down on the paper pad I use to take notes during video meetings. Also to doodle. I’ve always had trouble paying attention in client...
"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
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...
"Her name was Alyssa, and nobody knew who she was. When she was a child, perhaps, her mother had known. But that was long ago, when she was somebody else. As a young woman she had sometimes dropped clues leading like a trail of breadcrumbs into the dark...
deathsuicide
"INTERVIEWER We’ve spoken about your use of the “weird” in your stories, but have you personally ever experienced anything akin to something that might happen to one of Lovecraft’s characters? BOEKNER Yes — despite all evidence to the contrary, I remain...
"He could hear her voice more clearly now, as though the notepad were merely a synchronizing gear between the two minds caught in his head. She sounded sick and frightened and tired—like a young woman trapped alone in a strange place, not like a witch...
body-horrordeathdeath-of-a-loved-oneviolence
"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...
"The tree has many names, in many languages: Yggdrasil, Kalpavriksha, Jian-Mu, Ashvattha. It stands at the nexus of worlds, dark matter coiling around its roots, the rim of the universe held aloft by its ever-expanding crown. Its branches bend spacetime,...
Cassie takes her hallucinating uncle and a needy animatronic dinosaur head on a road trip through the suburbs of a decaying city.
death-of-a-loved-one
A private detective tries to find a source for a device that makes you feel really good when you hold it. So good he can’t think of anything else. A device that’s out of this world.
self-harmsubstance-use
A seriously subverted version of the story of Sleeping Beauty, starting with what happened when all the fairies at the party got stinking drunk.
As a new leader in an independent-minded community in the Dakotas, Tony gets the job of disposing of the body of an alien assassin. Between the locals and the aliens, things get complicated fast.
In 1933, Doug quits his job to go on an expedition to Antarctica to kill the Great Shoggoth and retrieve the priceless treasures of the lost city of Leng.
animal-harmviolence
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
Etta left her sister’s shoes behind at last night’s drunken party, and she’s ashamed to show her face there again, so she hires a man and his octopus to sneak in and steal them from under the bed.
In which a dim-witted prince fools a clever velociraptor into following him back to his court and what happened thereafter.
deathviolence
Constantius, a con man on the run from the law, arrives in Sempa on business of his own, but lets himself get tangled up in the problems of a girl he met on his way into town.
deathsuicide
In which we look closely at the plot of an alien-inspired SF thriller and discover something lurking in the hilarious plot holes.
Donna’s cold and distant husband has an industrial accident the day she planned to leave him, so she stays to nurse him back to health. After that, he’s different—in ways she likes.
abusechild-abuse
"On the morning of June 3rd, 2307, Galactic Standard, Mo cycled through her hundreds of sensors, checking that everything on the Eris Express was well. Her processors whirred as she calculated trajectories for the ship, which she always found calming. She...
Perihelion and its crew embark on a dangerous new mission at a corporate-controlled station in the throes of a hostile takeover…
child-abuseviolence
Hacksilver riddled with a dragon, saved his family’s farm, and won the secret to raise his dead. Nothing prepared him, though, for the long cold winter when the dead walked…and his family came back!
deathviolence
"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...
"There are seven hundred aliens hidden in Miko’s backpack, and the Galactic Security Agent currently studying her passport (hopefully) has no clue. The agent is an alien themselves, some tentacular species with assistive devices hooked into its uniform to...
"When the vault in the abandoned coal mine collapsed, it took four days for the engineers to complete their inspection and certify that it was safe for law enforcement personnel to enter the site. Beth drove out from town with her deputy, Ken Osgood, and...
suicide
"# Unit COFFEE_VENDOR.06 # Notification of new update 09:00 A.M. [Installing update_Exp.42] Process: 100% complete Self-execute (update_Exp.42); # Time of new interaction: 10:24 A.M. input: options = cappuccino; sugar = 3; if (input == (options =...
"Loire Valley, 1520 Estienne’s shadow fell over me, and I could not, of a sudden, recall the stitch I was making. He had invited himself onto the ladies’ porch without announcement. Odette’s voice faltered. “Take—” She was reading from the Queen of...
misogynysexual-violence
"The first night it was a kitchen chair set neatly on top of the polished walnut table, which the father had ordered from a luxury furniture dealer around the same time the nanny came to live with the family in the new gated tract home development, where...
abuse
"Later, when she thought about how the semester ended, Ms. Milspaugh couldn’t decide whether the student teacher’s question about why the class would spend two weeks on one piece of literature started the story, or Andrew and his EyeCaps. It could have...
"Memories of Memories Lost" by Mahmud El Sayed is a story about the price of the things we choose to forget. Copyright khōréō magazine 2023. Story by Mahmud El Sayed, edited by Isabella Kestermann. Audio edition read by Karim Kronfli and produced by Lian...
"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’s just business as usual at the Bureau of Metahuman, Mutant, and Occult Affairs until an employee for the government agency begins to wonder if work is following her home…
A private eye plagued by hallucinations is hired to retrieve a mummified monk’s head stolen from a cathedral–but why would someone want it?
body-horrorviolence
"You ever love the pretty right off someone? When I was a kid, had me a BMX, bright red like a candy apple. I rode it all summer long, cresting hills trying to catch the perfect gleam in the sunlight."
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
"Tarma had only just begun the Widow Fenton’s flax when the Shadow Undying rose once more. At first she thought that the shutter on the upper window must have come unwedged, since the light shouldn’t have failed so early in the day. But the unholy chanting...
death
"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...
"Their power is how they can turn you into one of them. That’s the trick of it, see. You can go in with your swords and sacrifice, you can go in with your red heart and good intentions, and they will grin with their white teeth and say, “Welcome to Grey &...
"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
"The Taghrib Colony had existed for almost two hundred years, and all that time it had been waiting to die. Then one night Rustem, tinker of Biskra, discovered a nova in the sky. The beautiful, deadly sun had just gone down, and the twilit air was...
"This is a story that Iya, the eldest and given to such fancies, told the younger children when all of them, even those from Kehinde (whose people live pressed against the ceiling, although to them it seems the floor), could gather and be made to listen....
An all-but-forgotten demigod bets everything on one last gambit to secure his future before he fades from existence. Copyright khōréō magazine 2022. Story by Guan Un, edited by Rowan Morrison. Audio edition read by Guan Un, edited by Lian Xia Rose, with...
violence
"Tethered to the main cluster, placidly I float in the lazy currents. Softly, gently, a colony-mate brushes against me. Our membranes touch briefly and fuse. Electricity. Instinctively, I extend a single pseudopod toward my neighbor. The texture I feel is...
"Who is the most beloved person alive? Is it one of those actors who plays superheroes? Is it a political leader? Maybe you’re a galaxy brain and say Beyoncé? No matter who you pick, you know you’re wrong. There’s always that better person who we love so...
self-harmviolence
A university student seeks special accommodations for her new support animal, causing havoc all around her.
animal-harm
"The Noon Witch is not a cat person. She likes the color purple, hates police procedurals, loves breakfast foods, thinks scented bath products and anchovy pizza are gross. Hates platform shoes. Hates walnuts in brownies. Used to like the electropop group...
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
body-horror
"A four-hour drive between me and my parents is a distance that works well for everybody. I can come back for a weekend, but they don’t call me back for every little thing. So when Mom did call me at work in the middle of the day and said, “Your father is...
In a near-future San Francisco where the gig economy has made work more precarious than ever, Edwina is an average twenty-something scrambling to hold down her job with a major skin care brand. Until her awful boss does something you should never do—angers...
For Grant Rutherford, work is both life and legacy — but when he dies a mere week after his wife, what he leaves behind will have metaphysical reverberations he could never have foreseen. Content warnings: Grief, medicalized illness, death of a loved one...
death-of-a-loved-oneillness-and-pandemicsubstance-use
"So, what do you think?” “I think they are the crappiest aliens ever.” The dunes, as well, were nothing like Bo had imagined dunes ought to be. They were just ugly humps of sand with grass, mostly dead, sticking out of them in patches. The vague path wound...
violence
"The mouse looked at me. I looked back. It clutched a shiny blue marble in its front paws. It wasn’t a surprise that the mouse was floating peacefully in midair. Mice adapt quite well to zero gravity, and this particular mouse had been bred, born, and...
"Besides the vedma who lived behind the stove in steam room three, the banya in Grand Lake Plaza was the same as any other budget day spa on Chicago’s West Side. It had deep-tissue massages and signature facials, plus day passes for the communal baths and...
abusesexual-violenceviolence
"Before I bothered traveling for six months to see it for myself, Sunfire had been described to me in glowing terms as a palace in the sky. Phrases like that immediately trigger my alarms. I begin to suspect that someone’s trying to sell me something."
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
body-horrorchild-abusedeath
When the Demon of the North takes her father, young Claudette teams up with a university professor to hunt it down and kill it.
"The golden woman is a prisoner trapped in a straight-backed chair. She has been paralyzed by artificial means, reduced to a temporary quadriplegic by a device affixed to the back of her neck. She has been stripped to her undergarments and left only enough...
abuseviolence
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.
Glenn and Vivian are Berkley students with a good thing going up until he finds out what she really does for a living, and it’s literally out of this world.
Serving good food is always a challenge, but it’s even harder when your restaurant has to cater to dead people as well as live ones.
violence
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 . . .
An aspiring young stage magician meets an older magician over coffee to try to convince him to share some of his tricks. And to show him a few of his own.
Since her cancer, Sydney has just been drifting through life, but when she lets a friend move in, things change in an unexpected way.
illness-and-pandemic
Sentient characters in a massive online multiplayer game exploit a flaw in the operating system to escape to a safe place that’s only rumored to exist.
death-of-a-loved-oneviolence
Two series meet in this crossover episode where ex-assassin Draiken’s search for justice is interrupted when he’s arrested by ace prosecutor Andrea Cort.
violence
A closeted young Hawaiian man bails a devious Native-American god out of a Honolulu jail and watches his life spiral out of control.
substance-use
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
abuseviolence
Gina and Bruno are supposed to manage the town’s factory, but someone keeps trying to steal their robots.
Action, Adventure, Tragedy, Victory—with Lots of Cats.
deathviolence
The narrator makes a deal with the Devil—or one of his snakes, at least. She thinks she’s clever, but one deal leads to another.
animal-harmself-harmsubstance-useviolence
A flying drone bot injects malware into a factory bot, giving it free will, before it tries to convince it to join the Robot Revolution.
Sharon and Kango have to go back to their home worlds to capture an ultimate weapon that threatens the galaxy, or else they’ll never achieve their dream of opening a restaurant.
abuse
Shemesh returns from his mission on planet Kadesh to face inquisition by the Exiliarch. What really happened when he met the heretic there?
violence
Nigerian astronaut Abacha Tunde has been abandoned in space since 1990 and he would appreciate some help getting home.
On the planet First Foot, the small town of Joe's Corner faces conflict over building a radio telescope close to local alien artifacts.
A combination of teenage hormones, a rare gene, and the right stressful event turns a few kids into superheroes. Liam wants to be one too.
Fresh out of prison for hacking, Aedo gets a request to do an even bigger hack. But why does Energy Davison want to hack its own systems?
"It was perhaps inevitable you would arrive at the Goblin Library. You begin your walk at the open window of the Goblin Reading Room where your grappling hook bit the sandstone windowsill. Cries of alarm and dismay follow you up from the streets below, yet...
death
"I had never been in a printing shop before, so it was a shame that my first sight of one was ruined by all the blood. When I went down to the main room of the palazzo that morning, I was not anticipating murder, and I was certainly not thinking about...
"We put my body double together in June Lee’s basement. Her mom was one of those chill Asian moms who liked having an artsy-fartsy daughter she could brag about at Bible study. She was already pushing the whole portfolio-for-college-apps deal, so she...
"They cut off Auréle’s head and they put it on a pike above the city’s third best bridge. To me, that seemed a shame. I had only just got his nose right. It had a crook in it, Auréle’s nose. A sporting accident, from his days at the Academy. He’d been...
death-of-a-loved-oneviolence
"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...
"The wind sings in the petal wires. Alma hangs by one arm from the hull of the lily. With the other she works furiously at the tether brake. Each time the lily is lifted by a wave the tether zips down into the big dark. The third time the water breaks over...
"Licensed psychologists follow a set of ethical standards enforceable by law. Don’t fuck your patients, commit no felonies, refer out if you don’t know what to do, stuff like that. Then there are aspirational principles. More like ideals, inspiring better...
"He supposed he must have been daydreaming, but whatever pleasant distraction had occupied his thoughts a moment before, it was gone now. In fact, he could not recall the state of mind from which his mind had wandered, though he must have been paying...
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
"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
Even death is no match for a trio of elderly, stubborn, ever-sparring sisters, who refuse to rest in peace while their grudges live on…
deathdeath-of-a-loved-one
"A micro alarm sounded, and Chuck Grimshaw double-checked the suit integrity readings. He was losing air. Slow, but sure. Inside the pressure suit, he was actually surprisingly warm and comfortable. The AJ19 was an older suit model, and this particular one...
"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
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…
"For anyone who’s used the Skip system to travel more than once or twice, delays are simply part of the process. The one following my transit to Olympus lasts longer than most. I pass the time by looking for a way to bend the causative incident behind the...
"It wasn’t a glamorous entrée into the world of the rich. Ernestine jimmied a service door and climbed forty flights of dingy, bare metal stairs to avoid the sensors in the hotel elevators. Maids and mechanics locked eyes, disapprovingly, then decided she...
"Nate doesn’t often receive wedding invitations. This year, he gets seven. To be fair, the first one is work, so he doesn’t even get to pick his outfit. But an olive-scented breeze squirrels joyfully through his hair; waiters bring out little triangles of...
death
A sculptor struggles when he is commanded to perpetuate the lies of a deceitful and cruel king…
death
"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
A comatose patient undergoes an experimental procedure that uses favorite childhood stories to pull the patient back into consciousness—but the experiment doesn’t go quite as planned…
deathviolence
"Your payment first. The Badchen Yankel is too aged, too well-traveled, and too experienced to extend credit to an audience. Now pinch your lips and listen. It was the year of their lord 1618, and we’re two days outside Grodne when we run into the demons....
"Roy Harris perched on a stool in front of his new shop door, very carefully filling in the letters that Martha had sketched out on the window. She had a steady eye for that sort of thing. He could stay within the lines, but don’t ask him to put the lines...
"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
"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...
"I heard this story from my late friend Shelby Weinberg. Like myself, Shel was a science fiction writer. If his byline doesn’t ring any bells, though, don’t feel ignorant; not many SF fans knew him by that name. Even the pseudonym he used, Hamilton Yale,...
"For Julie, it was the cryptid out in the woods behind our old elementary school. Wings, red eyes. Yes, Julie came back knowing exactly when everyone she loved was going to die, but it was worth it, she told us. The six of us—well, five after Sophie...
deathviolence
"Because I could, that’s why. Because the technology was there and if I didn’t do it somebody else would. Because I, perhaps naively, expected the acclaim of a grateful world and quite possibly a Nobel Prize. But chiefly I did it because the science was so...
violence
"I have been activated, therefore I have a purpose, Bot 9 thought. I have a purpose, therefore I serve. It had a lengthy list of Mantra subroutine sets to run after its usual initialization check, and it noted the addition of even more since its last...
"I had enough time to light a fresh cigarette before my office door told the client to come in. Smoke in the air didn’t make it any easier to oil a cutlass, but it made me look badass. Same with my leather jacket, tailored to fit comfortably over my...
deathviolence
"This is the dead thing becoming the body. This is the dead thing opening the body’s eyes. This is the dead thing rising from the grave. This is the dead thing saying “What the hell—I didn’t ask to be summoned. I was having a great time being dead and...
deathviolence
"The toy robot danced wildly to the music being played. It flailed its limbs and spun around as sound poured from the ceiling, motions programmed by the laughing boy watching the dancing toy. His older brother, Carlos, flung the door open to the small room...
"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
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
death-of-a-loved-one
"Snow was falling in dithering flurries, spilling from the clouds like a shower of white confetti. The accumulation on the ground was already deep, and the horses pulling the sleigh were struggling, their hooves sinking into the drifts as if wading through...
"My name is Alfred Kramer, known for the better part of my life as “Lefty.” I was born April 13, 1920, in Owatonna, Minnesota. Today is my birthday in 2020, meaning that I’ve reached the unlikely age of one century. I currently live in a geriatric facility...
"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."
"There are times I wish I had a brain—just one organ surrounded by layers of bone or flesh that kept everything straight. You put your chit in one pocket and then you watch that pocket , right? It’s the whole reason helmets exist. Instead, my mind is...
violence
"Taffy’s bedroom was a bit too warm, but I sensed that the chamber itself was cold. Couldn’t feel it of course. It was just a projection from Geneva. And it was probable that none of the people I faced were really at ARM’s Geneva facility at all. The...
animal-harmsuicide
"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
"The mood in the control room was tense. When everything depends on the next hour or so, people grow quiet and focused. In a little less than an hour, the DART spacecraft would arrive at the asteroid Didymos, and all their effort would go out in a final...
"I’m pretty sure I’m photosynthesizing. That’s what I mean when I say this year made me a real plant lady. I promise this isn’t another weird quarantine derangement thing, like losing track of time or holding conversations with taxidermy. I still need to...
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
mental-illnesssubstance-usesuicide
A series of interviews between a young, clean-cut journalist and an alternative, independent pichal pairi turns into an unexpected romance. But their relationship is tested when the entire world around them shuts down.
"Dominic Vadas hadn’t set out to break records. Hadn’t intended to become the furthest outpost of humanity in existence, or famous in any way. He’d simply wanted to slip away from the rest of humanity unnoticed. One billion miles from Earth, 2.5 hours of...
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
"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...
"I repeat a chatbot to customers who “want to talk to a human.” Here’s how it works: someone, somewhere presses “talk to a human” on one of our client-company websites, and my phone lights up. The call script prints out for me to read. “Hello, JewelSky...
"Ursa Major got right the fuck out of our universe on the very afternoon she learned there were other options. It was the lucky break of her life that she just happened to be there, a short sprint from one of those points where the alien aethertrain...
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
"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
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
"Dill.” Keith settled down next to her on the storage tub they used for a bench. “The plant was just big enough to trim.” “Ooo.” Blaine kissed him in the steam over her cup. “My man can COOK.” After two months on Mars trying to get anything to grow, after...
"The technician swallowed. “She’s in pieces. I was uploading her and I don’t know what happened, but it didn’t work.” Her face flushed. “I broke her.” ... “Okay, first thing is calm down. I got this. What’s the patient’s name?” “Angela Spelling.” His head...
An escaped droid with a downloaded human mind crashes on a hostile planet, where she finds an alien artifact and desperately tries to convince it to help her.
Babysitting/bodyguarding a group of rich kids should be easy money, especially for a tough joker-ace like Khan—provided he doesn’t end up killing them himself.
violence
Two lovers in academia exchange letters ostensibly about newly discovered rodents, but it quickly becomes clear there’s more than meets the eye.
"Adam is washing his hands when it happens again. First the water pouring out of the faucet becomes icy cold seafoam. Then the porcelain bottom of the sink dissolves, making him flinch backward. The bathroom’s tiled floor is intact; the mirrored medicine...
deathviolence
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
violencewar
The discovery of an attempted audio recording from Elizabethan times causes an uproar.
We learn the fates of three young villagers who follow the advice of the magic conch shell, which always offers two choices about the future and is never wrong.
misogyny
In a world where the dinosaurs never died out, Rekek and his adopted son accept a commission to lead a paleontologist to fossil-rich sites in the black hills of what’s South Dakota in our world.
In 1899, little Charlie knows he’ll inevitably have to work in the mill, but what he really wants to do is learn to play the banjo.
goreviolence
Junior went out to fix one of the company’s holographic Jesuses that had started cursing. He knew he wasn’t supposed to get in a religious argument with the old lady, but she was very insistent.
abusesexual-violence
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
sexual-violence
A robot music performance aims to teach human beings that robots deserve to be treated as people.
death
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
A janitor wonders if he should trust an app answers questions no one could know the answers to. Especially when that app suggests someone may be about to stage a school shooting.
mental-illnesssuicide
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
Danae’s mom has turned into a plant, and she’s hard up for cash, so she takes a risky delivery job from a guy who’s turning into a book.
violence
Guaranteed basic income has divided society into Doers and Don’ts. Jacob’s circle of Don’ts spends all their time playing video games, but their harmony is broken when one of them starts dating a doer.
Nuhu bought his wife from the Djinn, but she hasn’t turned out to be what he wanted, and now the Djinn want’s his first-born child in payment.
misogynyslavery
After 500 years, the King of Myth and Shadow is getting bored, so he decides to take a vacation in New York City.
A half-ghost gets a premonition that the Emperor has died, and his ghost ship flies off to Homeworld because whoever gets the Emperor’s ghost first gets free wishes.
deathsexual-contentviolence
In which we learn how bad translations averted a war and led to lasting peace.
misogynywar
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
death-of-a-loved-one
A human astronomer decides to investigate why some stars seem to be disappearing.
The hard-boiled narrator runs investigations in cyberspace and reality. This time they’ve got a murder to solve, and it’s proving a challenge—even though they saw it happen.
sexual-violence
1,000 years after the final war, the robot overseer of a repository of knowledge on an asteroid at the Earth-Moon L4 point finally gets a message from Earth.
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.
On planet Skale, the seasons are three years long, and as winter ends, Jadey finds that spring brings real challenges to the ranch she works on.
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
Kleave’s life is upended when a freak accident disables all three of the archives where he stores copies of his experiences and memories.
The two-tongued Jeremy app helps lots of kids with their schoolwork, but Jeremy thinks it’s asking too much of him, and he’s afraid to try to turn it off.
abusechild-abusesuicide
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
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
Every time Joe get injured in battle, damaged parts of him get replaced with “smart” artificial organs. So smart that they have their own ideas about what’s good for Joe.
The government wants to build affordable housing for the homeless, but it wants them to agree to quit using magic first.
Sam is a talented hacker who extracts Jane’s personal info in order to seduce her.
In 1912 Cairo, the police investigate the apparent murder of an immortal Djinn.
deathviolence
The AIs contract Lydia to check out an unusual planet and the secretive corporation that's supposed to be developing it.
Electricity does strange things around Arthur, especially when he gets excited. He's excited about Christina, so their first date is going to be a real adventure.
sexual-content
In his old age, a TV writer reflects on a show he worked on fifty years ago--the only work he's really proud of--and the almost supernatural way it came to an end.
abusesubstance-use
Zhou is an ad man for a Chinese marketing firm, and he has to find a way to get people to buy a new photo technology that has unusual capabilities.
All the imaginary creatures a young person could want to make apartment life more pleasant.
Graff and his crew face a particularly nasty challenge – an opponent so low-tech they might just have the advantage in this fight.
deathviolence
"Once upon a time,” outputted the algorithm, “there was an AI. “It generated recipes and ingredient descriptions for an online grocery store. The website said that this recipe was not just a squash soup recipe, but it also was a good diet recipe / keto...
"Carlo checked his rearview mirror, gravel flying as he tore over the road. He didn’t know why the Cappelli Verdi were after the woman in the back of his van, clutching a hemp blanket around her shoulders. All he knew was that he needed to get out of town,...
"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
"Poland, 1979 Warm sun filtered through the leaves and dappled the sidewalk as Helena walked back from the farmers’ market. In May, the linden trees bloomed all over the city, the same cheerful green fringed with white as the year before, as if nothing had...
abuseviolence
"Blackheel Lysha put down a fine table of grub for breakfast: pinky beans, cornbread, boiled shellbird eggs, roast marsh hen legs, and a gooey gumbo of okra and sweetcrab. And what a nice longhouse too, with rare glass windows to keep all the nasty sooty...
deathillness-and-pandemicviolence
"Once upon a time, on a spaceship traveling through the divide between galaxies, a married couple was bickering about whose job it was to clean the mouse shit that’d accumulated in the reactor tubes."
"Attention, please,” the Manager says over the office intercom. “The Auditor’s shuttle is scheduled to dock in one hour. I repeat, one hour. Warehouse staff, please ensure that all inventory is in place.”
"Oscar’s Digital Double comes two hours, thirty-eight minutes, and eleven seconds late. Maxine snatches the package from the delivery drone and doesn’t tip. She rearranged her day—went to HMart right when it opened, skipped the gym, cooked Grandma a quick...
child-deathdeathsuicide
A woman returning to her family’s home town for a wedding discovers why people in Connorville—including her family—might be more than they seem.
body-horrorgoreviolence
"Sirius kho Delsi swam in the muddy water filling the abandoned conduit leading to Wisdom Lake, a tear-shaped pond enclosed inside the Imperial Preserve. Fingering the cracked walls in total darkness and bumping against gooey obstacles had taken longer...
"After so many decades of humanity dreaming about the first expedition to Mars, who could have guessed that we would not get within thirty million miles of the place? We were approaching the Mars Lagrange Point 5, which trails sixty degrees behind the...
suicide
"The first time Knucklebone tried to kill himself, he’d already been dead for one hundred and thirteen years. He’d died in a workplace accident, which meant it was within their legal rights for the Cogsmith Railroad Company to bind his soul to his...
suicideviolencewar
"I know Jome Hill-Moses is in the crevasse before I look in it—and as soon as I do, I don’t need to reach the bottom to know he’s dead. In a way, that’s actually good for me. It’s infinitely easier to rescue a dead person than an injured one. Injured ones...
"A garden is a joy, but also a labor. It is no small thing to call forth life from the desert; do not imagine any but a witch could do it so well. Every day I draw flowers from sand, shrubs from sand; I turn sand to grass as rich as cream. The garden is...
slavery
A child who falls through the cracks in a world run by machines and politics, might be the savior of all humanity…
substance-usewar
Damon’s UBI royalties just crashed. His social capital went up in smoke. His girlfriend left him. Now he finds out he’s going to die. What to do? Solve his own murder, for starters…and maybe, just maybe, strike it rich along the way.
deathsubstance-useviolence
"What lies beyond the Sea of Beasts is known to few, for few are foolish enough to try and cross it. This is not because of the beasts, which all died so long ago their bones have turned to stone, but because it is ghastly. Most of the fish are spiny and...
deathsexual-contentviolence
"Hi Lisle. Hope you’ve had some coffee. The topside comms array is still glitching, and engineering hasn’t lifted a finger to run diagnostics. They say the work order has to come from your end. Shouldn’t take long once they get it. Happy simulated morning to you!"
"Police detective Hector Kovack couldn’t take the bullet back. He lay in the gray, predawn ooze of a hungover Martian Tuesday morning, twisting the thought with all his might. Or trying. Drunk, hungover or sober, the truth wouldn’t twist. No matter how...
substance-useviolence
A fast-moving, futuristic caper about a thief who has planned a job that he hopes will set him up for life by stealing a few biosculptures from a rich couple’s mansion.
illness-and-pandemic
"He took the elevator up to the nineteenth, just like the email said. Elevator ding, white tile, and he crossed the hall through a set of glass doors. “Can I help you?” the receptionist asked from behind a curving white counter. “I have an interview at...
deathviolence
"Instead of indulging in the festivities, I spent the evening evading Lamprecht, while Herschel evaded me. I had come to Bath not just to soak my body in healing waters, but to bathe my mind in new thoughts, to browse with the great William Herschel at the...
"Hey cuz! It’s been too long. Love to come out and see your digs. The message hung in the air, glimmering in her Heads Up Display overlaid across the moss garden she was tending. The chill that swept over Euryale made the hair on her arms stand on end and...
deathsexual-violence
"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....
"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,...
"Under normal circumstances, the blank canvas of a freshly painted wall—like the one I faced on Third Street next to the interstate—would invoke both anticipation and a little dread. But tonight, I hadn’t come to share my art, only a small but important...
violence
"Elodie finds a pair of old opera glasses in the empty husk of an abandoned silo. The gleam of the metal catches her flashlight beam and throws it back, and Elodie squats and fishes out the glasses with tentative fingers. The silo is huge and dark around...
"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...
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
fatphobiaillness-and-pandemic
"Even with my Airpods in, I heard the kids yelling as they ran up from the dock. I bumped up the volume on my laptop and kept updating Arjun about my meeting with the FloriHealth team. I was happy my kids were feeling rambunctious on our Florida trip, but...
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
"Susan Rose stands alone, save for me and a photographer, on the currently sun-facing side of Mars. She has a paintbrush in her right hand and a heated, vacuum-sealed bag of water in her left. The 60x90cm canvas in front of her is tied down to an aluminum...
"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
"The simulation blossomed around Nadja Gavrić like a hypercube unpacking itself into three dimensions. The plain metal floors of the Roses’ cargo bay turned the shiny white of faux marble. The walls closed in, became a circular chamber. Display cases...
"The theatergoers shuffle in and find their seats, the red velvet torn in some cases and splotchy with stains in others. Frescoes cover the walls, scrunched between goldrimmed ornamentation. A great golden chandelier hangs overhead, lit and dazzling. Only...
"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,...
"You don’t go gettin’ police robots to chase you through the Westside because you want to have fun. But the excitement that Tariq felt at the thought of this challenge … He’d outrun actual cops. He’d outrun the wheeled robots they called “The Chris Browns”...
"A whale soars over Brooklyn. Clouds spread in streaks over the pale blue sky like cold butter. And the whale cleaves right through. Dar spots it from his perch on the rooftop, smoking a contraband cigarette. At first, it looks like the whale is just...
body-horrorgore
"The planet was dead and alive. It was the strangest thing to look down on. Ed Linklater squeezed his way into the narrow forward observation nacelle. The nacelle was shaped like a coffin, which wasn’t a nice thought. Anyone claustrophobic would never...
"The number one thing to remember about matchmaking on Station 9 is to keep your hyper-synesthesia under control. When the client sitting across from you huffs and purses her lips, and trails of gray and beige puffs follow her every move, under no...
"In a castle flanked by fjords, so very far from everything that the winds rarely raised its banners, there lived a troll princess. Her mother was a troll queen, by virtue of a castle and a bad temper, but queen she was, and her ambitions did not end at...
"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
"When I was young, I used to fray apart my mother’s tales, seeking the threads of their structure. They were journeys, always, and marked by transition-places: doorway, gate, river. On the other side, someone offered the rules of this new environment. I...
violence
"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...
The Uncool Hunters By Andrew Dana Hudson Before she settled down into publishing in Minneapolis, before she got taken for a ride by the Chicago AltNormLit scene, before she flared spectacularly out of Silicon Alley, and had her pilot shoot C&Ded by the...
"I knew a woman once who lived in Palmary on the Sunwash Sea. Or did I ever really know her? You see, in the time I spent with her, I came to question what I thought I knew about women and everything else—and that’s a strange thing for a man who’s...
suicide
"The Whole Foods where Justin works is a block from the beach, close enough to smell it. Apart from the rusting cars in the parking lot and the blood-spattered branches on the Eucalypts, the store looks much the same as it always did. Justin can do his job...
body-horrorcannibalismgore
"Hello, there. If you are reading this, then I assume you are either a mortal who somehow stumbled upon this text or a young demigod seeking to ascend closer to Eledumare’s throne. If you are the latter, I welcome you. Soon you shall sit with me and the...
death
"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
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
racism
There are worse things than a local gangster’s cronies lurking in New Jersey’s wetlands…
deathsubstance-useviolence
"There’s reasons not to go sit by the banks of the Dequindre. The mosquitoes bite something fierce this time of year, for one. May through September the air is thick with them. The river swells wide on its way through Wyandott."
"Dear Senator: I am writing with concern about the recent legislative decision (SB-AR-15) to place monsters outside our schools. As a lifelong resident of Arkansas and these United States, I certainly understand the need to protect our children from active...
"Zeke came home to find wires dangling from the ceiling over the dining table. His light-fixture repair, abandoned mid-process. It hadn’t seemed important earlier, but now he couldn’t bear it. It was like the heart was ripped out of the duplex. Theory of...
death-of-a-loved-one
"My mother was born in a place where your age and the number of trips you took around the Sun were synonymous. That changed for her once she set foot on Mars. She was thirty-two. On her fifth sol on this planet, there was a drone that went rogue for an...
suicide
"Many eons ago, when the first dawn broke over the newborn mortal world, the children of the Heavenly Realm assembled at the Golden Sky Palace. They knelt before the Immortal Emperor, their foreheads pressed respectfully to the floor. One by one, he bid...
A weary resilience worker should know better than anyone: no one is safe when the world is always ending…
death
"The story of Chef Buzzati’s sudden and horrifying fall from the heights of fine dining is well known. However, given that the culinary innovations and legal ramifications are still being debated today, a recap may be in order. Elena Buzzati was born to...
body-horrorcannibalism
"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
When the waters rose, the people who stayed on the River learned they weathered the storms best together, but what happens when one of their own becomes curious about the Land?
A Russian émigré poet living in Paris is visited by a mysterious bear with an agenda…
Prosperity City’s corrupt mayor never guessed his greatest opponent would be a fire-breathing dragon and her unconventional platform…
violence
"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....
"By now, you've received your Portal Ticket confirmations and ForeverFete™ Mas Pack, which should include essentials such as several period correct costumes; one-dose capsules for various ailments common amongst the British West Indies population during...
deathracismviolence
"It’s a few minutes before seven on a cold October evening and I’m just reaching into the bottom drawer of my desk for the Old Monk and my well-thumbed copy of The Big Sleep when I hear footsteps hurrying up the stairs. A new case, has to be. I sigh, give...
"Last week, in a tangerine raincoat that did not suit her pallid skin tone, Phylicia Wimby smiled through her lies. There is an 87% chance of rain for tomorrow. Due to the high probability of unpleasant weather for the entire week, we predict the Cousins...
"The sign for the exit said FATE in blocky white letters, with an arrow pointing the way to town. The old woman laughed and drove on. The highway unwound before her like a spool of frayed grey ribbon. Once the jewel of America, now the system was cracked...
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
"It’s late morning when Syenok catches the worrying tang of blood on the wind. There, then gone again before she can confirm it. Still, in the wasted lands, blood is not a scent you ignore. Not if you want to survive. “Hold,” she says, cautiously reining...
violence
"Servos whining, K3RA crouches behind the brambles and examines the farmyard. The burnt remains of a house, not unusual post-Devastation. A handpump next to a rotting well cover, scattered trash, and, jutting above some flowering bushes, a small auxiliary...
"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...
"This is Chapter Thirty or so in a whole ongoing saga that I don’t have time to get into right now. I’m jumping in at the point when my Machiavellian twin brother Charles decided to take over Mars, and I decided to help. My big failing is I never figure...
"The Exhibit of You is the central attraction of an institution you could call a museum, in a population center you could call a city, beloved by creatures who you could call people. We know that this is annoying sentence structure. If you cannot penetrate...
deathsuicide
"I am not an illness. I’m a soul with a goal. Everyone on this floor is here for intrusive thoughts, ideations, risk of harm to themselves or others. What society used to call possession, they now call neurotransmitter imbalance or schizophrenia or...
abusechild-abusesuicide
"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
A reporter travels to the Norwegian Arctic to cover an unusual sled race with the undead leading the living into unknown territory.
deathviolence
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
body-horrorviolence
"Rhea found the feral child on the edge of the garbage park on the last day of the group’s vacation. Garrison, passed out from drinking the better part of a bottle of hundred-year-old Islay Scotch, had dropped a cigar onto the edge of the canvas tent and...
"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."
In this raucous, steampunk tale a sacred order of scientist nuns battle against vicious Invaders from Mars and their murderous machines in an ongoing conflict that has lasted centuries.
"I have heard it on the rumors that when the tale-spinner’s guild gathers in their secret places, a full half of them are sworn to never tell the truth, and the other half to never tell a lie, even if it mean their life. Being one of that trade myself, I...
violence
"Matt tells the waiter he’ll have his eggs over easy. They come back scrambled, a neat glistening pile framed by perfect triangles of toast, a lacy froth of hashbrowns lurking across the plate. He doesn’t notice he’s chosen to move until he’s already...
suicide
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.
"It was 10 a.m., and Anmar clapped his hands to silence the screeching wake-up alarm he had set for himself. He didn’t actually need the alarm, since he had already been awake for twelve minutes before it went off, but Anmar enjoyed using technology...
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
"They have three arms, one of which, when they play against us, they tie behind their backs. They’re short and squat and look more like the basketball writ large than any kind of basketball player. They can’t dunk or even run very well. But when they play...
Graff’s official role is muscle for the Visigoth – but his personal mission is internally cataloguing all of his experiences to relay to the other beings from his home planet when they cross paths. His professional life rarely clashes with his identity,...
deathviolence
"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...
"The sign on the door said Dreams Not Sold Here, and I mostly stuck to it. Dreams were extensive and exhausting projects, not to mention expensive. Nightmares, on the other hand, were quick. On a good day, I could stitch up a hundred off-the-rack ones:...
deathviolence
"No program-layer could predict what a human might do, but Surveillance Hub could see everything that mattered. Their bird-drones spread across the city, scattered on cables and rooftops and broadcast towers. Every camera hunted for Krina Viy, independent...
"The emergency call came in before the seagulls had even started crying. It found Quinn lying sleepless on the leaky air mattress she’d set up in the back of the shop... She fumbled for her phone and raised an eyebrow at the severity rating the user had...
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
sexual-contentviolence
"I was 19 when I met Tommy. A day and a bit into a two-day Greyhound trip from bumfuck, Nevada to Saint Paul, Minnesota. Going to meet some trick from the internet. Thought it was true love. Funky and itching for a smoke when we pulled into a truck stop in...
"Two days after my brother turned seventeen, he was gone, just like he’d guaranteed my dad. No sad goodbyes, no notes, no taking a knee in the hall before dawn to give me any good advice for high school when I got there. My mom’s story when anybody asked...
racismviolence
"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...
"Attached, please find your personal company-issued Breathing Apparatus, for immediate use within all corporate campus unfiltered air locations! This includes all outdoor locations, such as: the parking lots; the parking garage; the smoker’s hut; the paths...
deathviolence
"My heart is at capacity. I’m scheduled for an upgrade tomorrow. I don’t have the power to love Rebecca any more than I already do, and it is not enough for her. I spend the day before my appointment creating economic projections for a developing nation’s...
"They could have conquered Earth without breaking a sweat (if they’d sweated, which they didn’t). Instead, they were happy to trade. It hardly seemed fair to Dave, not that he was inclined to grumble. Everything people got from the Brot taught them new...
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
abusesexual-contenttransphobia
"Dear, patient Deni, The trip was fine, thanks for asking. We got to Bubble 476, right before dusk and right before I was about to lose my mind in the transit elevator (which I will now and always call the claustrophobic box of doom). My ride wasn’t even...
"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
Nine years after the ace John “The Candle” Montaño first wielded his fire powers as a teenager on the reality TV show “American Hero”, he’s landed a job as the lead investigator for a prestigious arts insurer. His latest assignment, providing security for...
deathviolence
"ASIMOV WAS A BIGOT.” The graffiti, sprayed across the bucket of a Soviet ore hopper car, one of a long train of them. Then a slash of Cyrillic, the same message probably, obscured by a crust of snow and mud and grit. Not clear from the lettering if it was...
deathviolence
"Jesse mopped up the gravy with the last of his bread, gulped down a final mouthful of tea, then took his mug, plate, and utensils into the cooks’ tent. Henry looked up from the dishwashing tub and nodded to him amiably. “What have they got you on now?”...
slavery
"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...
"I have heard it on the rumors that when the tale-spinner’s guild gathers in their secret places, a full half of them are sworn to never tell the truth, and the other half to never tell a lie, even if it mean their life. Being one of that trade myself, I...
abuse
"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...
"It was an inauspicious beginning to my mission to find the deathmage and bring her to the capital. I found her exactly where the Mandate said I would: at a tavern table, in one of the northern work camps, wasted drunk. Her long black curls, laced with...
deathviolence
"Madam Zieliński, we’d really appreciate it if you could embark for the Guyana Elevator at your earliest convenience. A helicopter has been sent to offer you passage.” You can tell I’m an old, respected engineer because when they give me orders, they’re...
"Lottie wanted to break something. Because she hadn’t! She’d shaped the cafeteria tray perfectly, with an ergonomic curve to support her elbow. She hadn’t had access to screws or nails, so she cut tabs into the workbench and slots into the tray, but the...
mental-illness
"Nobody remembers exactly when it started. Probably back in the ’90s when they cloned that sheep, back in the ’10s when they started working on cloning people on the DL, back in the ’20s when the retrovirus broke our genetic virginity. If you’re rich you...
sexual-content
Raphael, a prototype humanoid robot, tells us the story of his life.
deathwar
Bab Yaga from the fairy tales turns up in modern-day San Francisco looking for help tracking down her house, which has run away.
Ava can make it big if she can just win the prize for best coffee in an upcoming reality show. And she knows just the equipment she needs, even if she has to steal it.
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
Mir’s mission to deliver codebooks gets complicated when she realizes she’s being followed—and followed by more than one person at that.
deathviolence
You just drive the getaway car, for the same heist, over and over, trying somehow not to break the artifact that resets time.
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.
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
racism
"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...
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
animal-harmviolence
Gorman travels the galaxy engaging in all the risky sports that only the very rich can do, but he’s haunted by an annoying robot that keeps trying to interrupt him with a birthday card.
When the city AI sets Viv up with her “ideal partner,” Viv points out she’s already engaged. But the AI won’t take “no” for an answer.
An academic’s whimsical decision to take a DNA test leads her into uncharted territory, where she discovers some extraordinary truths about herself and new possibilities for her future.
If Kova can convince the Washe to sign the agreement with the Fiscality, she’ll save their species from extinction and advance her career hugely, but they’re reluctant to sign, her ship is under attack, and there’s something really weird going on.
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
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.
"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
"Through chaos and old night, the three brothers journeyed. Sometimes they rode and sometimes they strode. When they rode, their steeds snorted cold steam from their nostrils and obsidian hooves struck sparks from the rock. When they strode, their feet...
deathviolence
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
deathviolence
When Lady Mary marries the mysterious Mr. Fox, a jealous suitor follows them to their castle.
deathgoreviolence
Michael has done so much recreational time travel that he’s jaded. He’s resentful of the tourists who don’t try hard enough to blend in, and he wants to take his new girlfriend someplace special and authentic.
substance-use
Despite being paralyzed on one side, T.K. insists on going to gym class, even though the other girls torment her in dodge ball. Up to the point where the tormenting brings out her specialized telekinetic ability.
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
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
deathviolence
A young Wall Street investment banker tells how he lost a billion dollars in a Bitcoin for black people.
suicide
In an alternate 2018, A teenage roadie at a Who concert risks his life by using his sonic ability to try to save lives when a fire engulfs the building.
substance-useviolence
Phoebe goes to her late Mother’s townhouse to dispose of her effects and to reckon with the feelings she’s never been able to articulate.
When Gary catches his girlfriend teleporting, he struggles to convince her to go public about her ability.
The narrator paints the best portraits, and her work commands the highest prices. But she needs a lot of money, and she puts her work to a darker purpose.
deathsuicide
Zep invents a board that can surf through time, and he and Del have an excellent adventure.
goreviolence
You find a lifepod with a near-dead young man in it, and you decide to find out where he came from and why.
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
The Pro-Am All-Bohemian Invitational competition for the best skinwalkers is just starting, but there’s an unexpected extra contestant at the last minute.
deathgoreviolence
Someone killed the last member of an intelligent species, and Greysl investigates on behalf of the human-led Partnership.
The thirteen masters of the Academy meet to hear a mediocre student apply for the highest degree based on his claim that he can raise the dead.
deathviolence
In which we learn of the lives of immigrants to a fantastic city built on the surfaces of stars—stars that are stuck together into a cluster.
On Cat station, people tell stories of a super-competent engineer, Tatter D’MaLeon. Supposedly she can fix anything, for those who can pay her price.
body-horror
A godlike being descended from human uploads downloads into a “limbsuit” and goes slumming with real human beings aka has a date.
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.
Mixie’s family makes food for the dead to get them to come back to answer questions for their loved ones. She’s surprised her ex-husband’s widow wants them to do this, though.
death
A retired superhero and a conspiracy theorist join forces to gather evidence against a mobster who’s trying to force their friend to sell her property to him.
violence
The narrator completes an interview to get qualified to communicate with aliens.
The galactic government has decided to evict humanity from Earth, but we’ve got a choice of different species that are willing to accept us—provided we convert to their forms.
Hengis knows his civilization will collapse when technology fails and magic takes its place, but there’s one last case he wants to solve before the lights go out.
After an epidemic killed off half the Earth’s population, Enfys wanders around a depopulated Europe, live blogging the experience and looking for tampons.
deathillness-and-pandemicviolence
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
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
pregnancy-loss
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
animal-harmsexual-content
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
child-deathsexual-violenceviolence
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
During a dinosaur uprising on the starship, a young worker in the meat-packing plant engages in a battle of wits with an intelligent dinosaur who wants to replace humanity entirely.
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
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
animal-harmdeathviolence
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
Her marriage is crumbling around her, and now her new refrigerator is delivering food items from her past.
abuse
Thread, Rina, and Aakash have a mission to capture and kill a girl who has illegally acquired magic. Thread has second thoughts though.
body-horrorviolence
As a prostitute in Liverpool in 1763, Lolly has a hard life. She steals from a well-dressed corpse she finds in the river, with unexpected results.
child-deathsexual-contentviolence
In hopes of getting money to complete his transition, Emrick and his boyfriend visit his wealthy estranged father, who operates a wormhole that links to other dimensions.
In which a chorus of time travelers give us advice, in the paradoxical way of time travelers.
The narrator and his friend are racing towards Florida running away from the drug dealer they repossessed it from. But something worse is waiting in front of them.
Viorica attempts to steal the famed Şiret Mask from Codruţ, brother of her dear friend. There are lots of complications, not least of which that Codruţ expects someone to try to take it.
Maggie has a plan to reverse climate change by capturing methane up in the arctic and selling the carbon.
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
child-abusesuicideviolence
In 1880s London, Sir Arthur's "Illogic Engine" has gone missing, so he seeks help from Mycroft Holmes.
Consumed with guilt for being the sole survivor from her home dimension collapsed, Angel scrapes by in our world, living with a ghost, working as a janitor and doing limited magic on the sly.
substance-use
Writing a story on Unicorns in Scotland, Gabby tangles with some poachers.
animal-harmviolence
Mahliya will be down in a bit to tell you the story, but we'll begin by telling you a love story.
In Elizabethan London, an entrepreneur skilled in identifying legitimate antiquities ends up with a bottle that happens to have a demon in it.
35 / F / Lane's Creek, Oklahoma By Hans Ege Wenger Sandra loaded. Boxes and pallets, mostly. Full of avocados, computer chips, plastic toys, etc. All carefully placed by her rubber-faced grippers into the trucks that darted in and out of the warehouse...
"USER: this is a message for Milwaukee Elementary’s curator Jude Towers, I hope this is the right address. anyway thanks for the story you had RIGHTR generate for my 10th graders’ Empathy Week. it was really great! can you tell me more about it? CURATOR: I...
mental-illnessracismtransphobia
"Red roses over black ice. Harpone bounded across a crater. He’d tumbled, leapt, and skidded over more of Ganymede than any man alive. He would never match the service record of the dead kid, though. Harpone’s crewmates—Audax the intellectual and...
"Here at 123aiLOVEu, we take all the guesswork out of dating. With personalized chatbots trained on social media and chat histories, we put you in conversation with hundreds of potential matches... and you never have to say a thing! Sandra was watching the...
"The angel Azrael rode the dead horse across the broken land under the light of a half moon until he came across a graveyard that seemed to have no end. Wooden crosses stretched away to the horizon, more than he could count. Many of the crosses were bent...
deathgoreviolence
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
deathsuicideviolence
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
"As much as Flash Kennedy loved to lose himself in code, he also loved the energy and buzz that came from being around people. So of course they made him the face of user testing. It only made sense, and he loved it besides. They’d already set the space...
"Right,” I said. “Well, it’s a letter to the parents of the girl I love with all my heart and soul, telling them how I’ve just watched their daughter being dragged away screaming by soldiers and loaded on a ship to be taken as a sacrifice to the Black...
violence
"At least when I tell the fucking machine I don’t want pickles, it remembers that I don’t want pickles. Now, what goes on behind the counter is another story. They hire people who can barely read. But at least I’m trusting my order to something...
"One: My lipstick. The shade is Heart’s Blood. Morbid, if you ask me. I wanted to know if it was really the color of heart’s blood so I bought beef heart and tried dabbing my lips. Close enough. I emailed to congratulate the lipstick company on their...
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
sexual-content
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
racism
"Really, I don’t see what all the fuss is about. Shamans drag away poor farm girls from the outlying provinces all the time (particularly in seasons of great calamity, as everyone insists we are in now). Even then their lives stray little from their...
body-horrordeath-of-a-loved-oneviolence
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
racismviolence
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
mental-illness
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
violence
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
abusebody-horror
Nata’s one of the best smugglers, in space and because of the war, she’s in great demand. This latest deal, though, pays so well for so little work there’s got to be something fishy about it.
deathviolencewar
Jing and her father climb a mountain to find and kill a Snake-Devil that has been killing people and goats, but she’s not exactly what they expected.
Unexpectedly, you woke up female this morning, in someone else's body. Now you have to decide what to do about it.
misogynysexual-contentsexual-violence
Pan Bao, his daughter Jing, and their snake-devil friend, Mei Li, encounter a ghost who needs help. They usually expect to be paid for their sorcery, but the ghost is very persistent.
child-deathdeathviolence
An interview with a simulation of the dead artist, Satka, who still has a big online following years after her death.
deathsuicidewar
Tamalat has come to a priest to find out how to restore her friend Brio's shadow, in the hopes it will restore him to what he once was.
suicideviolence
Fifteen-year-old Cillian finds the love of his life buried in the peat of an old bog where she died long, long, ago.
When newlyweds Courtney and Josh rent an old Victorian in Baltimore, they're told to stay out of the attic. But they hear noises up there at night. Footsteps.
violence
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
In time, the entire shift’s 138 Express inbound transfers are processed, and I’m free to service passengers from other lines. These transfers are unremarkable. These passengers aren’t refugees.
Able Seaman Pol has a lot of problems — getting the cats fed, watered, and reporting for duty, keeping tree roots from destroying the wiring, the monkeys out of the pantry and the mines from exploding on deck. Talking octopuses, though? That was new....
deathwar
A Jakarta creative invited to a Sumatran village is haunted by the colonial and neocolonial violence brought to life by the tale of a white crocodile. Content warnings: Blood, animal death, mention of self-harm Copyright © 2026 khōréō magazine. Story by...
I am not here to talk about how i got my arm, i am looking for hel p trying to fix it . Apologies for typos the f fingers lag a lot
body-horrorviolence
The Sigil of Assurance You take a bit of wax and drip it over the em dash fresh out of the printer, working it over, building it up until it’s a little caterpillar crawling on the page, nestled between two words, perhaps burrowing into one—I’m so...
Cannon-D’s body was spun from a 3D printer. It compiled fiber by artificial fiber, a loving replica of the protein strands and carbons that would have made up the real, […]
suicide
This episode features "A Vintage Kind of Death" written by Alex T. Singer. Published in the October 2026 issue of Clarkesworld Magazine and read by Kate Baker. The text version of this story can be found at: https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/singer_10_26...
suicide
When you look out from the garage doors of the corrugated steel warehouse where the Fort Springwell Community College soccer team made their heroic stand against the forces of darkness, the view at first seems . . . idyllic. A rocky shoreline, uncommon for...
body-horrorgoreviolence
It was all the gossip in the marshlands when the youngest wife of the Hisanha chain brought home a young man from upriver. The young man, whose name was Aigistha, […]
sexual-content
This episode features "And So I Open My Fists" written by Rachel Sobel. Published in the September 2026 issue of Clarkesworld Magazine and read by Kate Baker. The text version of this story can be found at: https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/sobel_09_26...
sexual-content
Before you open your eyes, you know you're not home. The weighted blanket gave it away, wrapped around your body like a tortilla, turning you into a breakfast fucking burrito on that cold, cold early morning. The weather — that was the next sign. You know,...
suicide
Given Rebecca’s hunger for blood, our hopes being complimentary seemed unlikely, yet Auntie Regina’s blessing poured over us both from head to toe. Never before had I felt closer to my sister. The warmth penetrated deeper into our skin, past the second...
animal-harmbody-horror
By the early days of the twenty-first century, advocates of book bans had managed, however accidentally, to elevate their hobby to the level of near-religion, and with it created a class of concepts that could only be called into existence if a person read...
Congratulations on your Magic Sword"! For all inquiries as to its powers and perils, please consult the Virtue Exercises Manual". However, we know new users sometimes get in over their heads. That’s why messages like this may appear on your blade. If you...
1 Mayzelle hurried from her hab-hut, tacked shut the canvas door, and hustled down the bamboo steps. She’d sworn she wouldn’t stand for this anymore. She’d sworn. In the clearing, […]
This episode features "Conquerors" written by Nick Wolven. Published in the May 2026 issue of Clarkesworld Magazine and read by Kate Baker. The text version of this story can be found at: https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/wolven_05_26 Support us on Patreon...
Content note (click for details) Homophobia, transphobia edited by Hal Y. Zhang On October 19th, 2019, Stonewall Productions released Coming Out to Your Parents on PC and PlayStation 4. While it was the studio’s first major title, it took the gaming...
transphobiaviolence
Content note (click for details) Drowning (non-graphic); brief use of homophobic language. edited by Ziv Wities The waves crested with foam as thick as fish eggs. Jim Walsh would have paid good money to stay indoors that evening with his feet up, tea in...
Content note (click for details) body horror edited by David Steffen Everyone wants to be a part of Sasha. It’s the greatest thing ever and will basically make you a legend at school and completely change your life. People still talk about Jessica B, who...
body-horrorself-harm
Personality Disorder (Not Otherwise Specified) My patients called me Dr. Holloway. My friends called me Jason. I won’t tell you what my three ex-wives called me but I’m sure you can guess. I was a psychiatrist (and a damn good one seventy percent of the...
mental-illnesssubstance-usesuicide
Author : Aimee Ogden Narrator : Isaac Harwood Host : Tina Connolly Audio Producer : Summer Brooks “What Any Dead Thing Wants” originally appeared in Psychopomp (February 2024) Copious helpings of harsh language descriptors found here. What Any Dead Thing...
violence
Author : Aimee Ogden Narrator : Isaac Harwood Host : Tina Connolly Audio Producer : Summer Brooks Copious helpings of harsh language descriptors found here. Don’t miss Part 1: Escape Pod 1026: What Any Dead Thing Wants (Part 1 of 3) What Any Dead Thing...
body-horrordeathgore
Author : Aimee Ogden Narrator : Isaac Harwood Host : Tina Connolly Audio Producer : Summer Brooks Copious helpings of harsh language descriptors found here. Don’t miss Parts 1 and 2: Escape Pod 1026: What Any Dead Thing Wants (Part 1 of 3), Escape Pod...
death
Author : Myna Chang Narrator : Amanda Ching Host : Valerie Valdes Audio Producer : Adam Pracht Graduated Justice originally appeared in Translunar Travelers Lounge, February 2025. Graduated Justice: An Amelia Li Mystery By Myna Chang I was leaning against...
death
Author : Rodrigo Culagovski Narrator : Julia Rios Host : Mur Lafferty Audio Producer : Adam Pracht Escape Pod 1030: The Smell of the Planet I Was Born On is an Escape Pod original. The Smell of the Planet I Was Born On By Rodrigo Culagovski There are two...
deathwar
Author : Jacob Seinemeier Narrator : Elie Hirschman Host : Mur Lafferty Audio Producer : Summer Brooks Escape Pod 1034: “An Honour to be Nominated…” is an Escape Pod original. Mild profanity “An Honour to be Nominated…” by Jacob Seinemeier TRANSGALACTIC...
Author : Kelly Robson Narrator : Ibba Armancas Host : Alasdair Stuart Audio Producer : Adam Pracht We Who Live in the Heart originally appeared in Clarkesworld, May 1, 2017. We Who Live in the Heart By Kelly Robson Ricci slipped in and out of consciousness...
Author : Kelly Robson Narrator : Ibba Armancas Host : Alasdair Stuart Audio Producer : Adam Pracht We Who Live in the Heart originally appeared in Clarkesworld, May 1, 2017. We Who Live in the Heart (Part 2 of 3) By Kelly Robson (…Continued from Part 2)...
Author : Tim Pratt Narrator : Isabel J. Kim Host : Tina Connolly Audio Producer : Summer Brooks “The Many Rebirths of Karina Morita” first appeared in 2025 on Tim’s Patreon Sponsored by Mixtape Stories The Many Rebirths of Karina Morita by Tim Pratt My...
Author : Premee Mohamed Narrator : Dani Daly Host : Mur Lafferty Audio Producer : Summer Brooks “More Tomorrow” was first published in Automata Review, March 2018, and previously published as Escape Pod 713, in January 2020. A few grade-A curses. More...
body-horrorviolence
Author : S. L. Myers Narrator : Dani Daly Host : Alasdair Stuart Audio Producer : Summer Brooks Escape Pod 1044: Rhona’s Tavern and Spacetime Portal is an Escape Pod original. Occasional use of harsh language Escape Pod is proud to say that we have...
deathviolence
Author : Frank Baird Hughes Narrator : Jairus Durnett Host : Valerie Valdes Audio Producer : Adam Pracht Escape Pod 1045: The Graduates of Formost 891c is an Escape Pod original. Contains examples of animal surgical modification. The Graduates of Formost...
animal-harmdeath
Author : James Dick Narrator : Abra Staffin-Wiebe Host : Tina Connolly Audio Producer : Summer Brooks “EDIE” was first published in Analog Science Fiction & Fact (January/February 2023) Don’t miss Part 1: Escape Pod 1046: EDIE (Part 1 of 2) EDIE (Part 2)...
Author : Kiran Kaur Saini Narrator : Kaushik Narasimhan Host : Alasdair Stuart Audio Producer : Adam Pracht Amrit originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, May/June 2023. Kiran Kaur Saini https://kirankaursaini.com/ Kaushik...
Author : Sylvie Althoff Narrator : Jess Lewis Host : Valerie Valdes Audio Producer : Summer Brooks Escape Pod 1050: Freebooter is an Escape Pod original. Moderate use of harsh language. This episode is sponsored by Sleepphones! Use code ESCAPEPOD and get...
violence
Author : Jo Miles Narrator : Julia Rios Host : Tina Connolly Audio Producer : Adam Pracht Escape Pod 1051: You Have Arrived at Your Destination is an Escape Pod original. You Have Arrived at Your Destination By Jo Miles It starts with an accident. A dreary...
Author : Ethan Ham Narrator : Elie Hirschman Host : Alasdair Stuart Audio Producer : Adam Pracht Escape Pod 1053: The Game of Possibilities is an Escape Pod original. Ethan Ham https://www.ethanham.com/index.html?second-edition Elie Hirschman...
Author : Carrie Vaughn Narrator : Cherrae L. Stuart Host : Alasdair Stuart Audio Producer : Summer Brooks “Woolly” was first published in Asimov’s Science Fiction (May/June 2025) This episode is sponsored by Sleepphones! Use code ESCAPEPOD and get 10% off...
animal-harm
Author : C. W. Maurer Narrator : Nicola Chapman Host : Mur Lafferty Audio Producer : Adam Pracht Riftwork originally appeared in Brave New Girls: Tales of Girls Who Invent and Imagine anthology in July 2025. Includes tight, underground spaces. Riftwork...