The ship lost most of its historical records some years back, and the narrator tries to use music to maintain a connection with distant Earth.
Asimov's
146 free-to-read stories from Asimov's
"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...
Tess is writing an article about a new disease that causes women to give birth to clones of themselves.
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.
One of the last live bands struggles to do performances in a mostly-online world.
"Sunset is beginning, a sweep of red across the sky chasing the blue over the remains of the ship’s stern, dragging darkness behind it like a thick sheet over the day’s face and declaring it done. Stars, such as they are, will come on soon, one row at a...
"The air in the classroom was warm and still, the teacher’s voice a lullaby, with stress falling on syllables like the patter of sparse, heavy raindrops on the roof tiles. Omar fought to keep his eyes open, reading the words on the blackboard backward to...
"The ship was a billion years old, and it was dying. The incalculable energies that had forced open the metric to permit its passage were all but spent, and now the relentless quintessence was taking over again: pulling the metric tighter, so that from...
A Beast comes to the comet where one of the last humans hides with her son. But she’s prepared a surprise for it—if it works.
Sera does a great job at search and rescue, but she has conflicts with her handler, who has trouble coping with an enhanced intelligence dog.
After terrorists spring her from cryo-prison, talented hacker Girasol goes into cyberspace to help them target the rich businessman who put her in prison in the first place.
A refugee from drowned New York City tries to reconnect with his teenage son during a break from the menial work he does on ice boats.
En route to α Centauri, the ship AI awakens a psychotherapist to help a crew member who thinks she’s seeing monsters.
On the moon, Laurie returns from investigating the aftermath of a large, nearby impact with nothing interesting to report. Until a second “Laurie” turns up a few minutes later.
A Chinese woman living in the Bay Area needs to raise money to get her daughter into Stanford. She tries to sell her English-language proficiency, but even after fifteen years, it’s not good enough. But her native fluency in Mandarin is worth a lot, if...
A young woman is murdered in Armstrong City, Luna, and both the police and organized crime want to understand why. Captivating.
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...
"You see them, the shadows, everywhere. They look like the person you knew, maybe someone you were related to, maybe someone you loved. Always someone you lost. But they aren’t that someone. That’s the infuriating and the comforting part. They can’t be...
"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...
"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...
"For a long time, I wondered what kind of person would volunteer to have their skin exposed to temperatures cycling between the melting point of aluminium and the night-time surface temperature of Mercury, riding a wave of thermal torment that would drive...
"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,...
An obsolete “Panda Pillow” finds itself in the middle of an airplane disaster, where its programming to comfort and defend doesn’t really work. Or does it?
"He spoke once, the words whispered by frozen lips on a face so frostbitten he looked like a porcelain doll. I found him below the summit as our expedition bottlenecked before the Hillary Step on our final ascent of Mount Everest. And above the bottleneck,...
Content warnings 2
body-horrordeath
A Russian fighter pilot in the battle of Stalingrad comes back from a mission to find a wounded alien stuck under the wing of her airplane.
A Fleet training ship passes close to a “scrapheap” of abandoned ships, and Teenage Nadim, leads a group of his friends to “borrow” a scout ship and check it out.
Claire meets a handsome older man at a dinner party held in a virtual reality where something has gone subtly wrong.
"Thomas stood at the top of the weedy stone path that led down the gently sloping hill to where a ramshackle cottage sat sprawled out against the backdrop of a hostile, unforgiving sea. The lingering gray of the morning’s storm had not yet fully let go its...
"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...
"Mr. Mukoro was sitting at the front of his verandah at about 5:30 a.m. The faint glint of early dawn revealed the figure passing his frontage. It was Chinedu Okah, and he stopped to greet. “Bros, how you dey? You’re up early oh.” “No,” Mr. Mukoro replied....
Alien technology has been a big boon for some Americans, but everyone else has slid into poverty. Little Jennie knows things should be better, and over time, she tries different ways to change her world.
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.
A young man spends all he has to care for his sister who lies in a coma. Or so it seems.
Over eleven years, a farm boy grows to a man on the Canadian prairie while new technology utterly changes the world he lives in.
As a tsunami bears down on LA, James and his fiancé Hu struggle to escape before it hits.
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.
A gifted young man is obsessed with flying machines, not least because they’re outlawed.
Ten-year-old Polly wishes she could see fairies like her friend Isabelle can. She wishes a lot of things. Not all wishes should come true.
"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...
"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...
"The history of sea and air travel is replete with mysterious disappearances. Since the times when Egyptian galleys and Phoenician trading vessels sailed the Mediterranean, ships have set out upon sun-freckled waters, their captains and crew confident in...
"Per Ludecus woke with his face pressed to black marble. He remembered almost nothing. He had no idea where he was or how he had got there. He was laid out too artfully to have just stumbled and blacked out. It was more as if he had stretched out to sleep,...
"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...
"Did you know,” the Ijt Ambassador said, as she sipped gently at her soup with her long, blue, curling tongue, “that your predecessor, in an act of yofishi —” the translator choked on the word, but Station Commander Ennie Niagara knew that it meant...
In an alternate 1950s with robots, spaceships, and flying cars, the US Army sends a robot father to the son of a dead soldier.
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.
On a decades-long journey to another star, two men take shifts managing the sleeping crew, but after a year or two, they’re ready to kill each other.
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.
Sophie explains the events that led to her fall from grace—that is, how she accumulated enough “unlike” votes to be forced out of college.
Mikkel isn't very bright, but he cleverly supplements his janitorial job by scavenging useful items his superiors discard and bringing them home to his wife--then one day he brings home a mutant baby.
"The motorcade was late. Security, Robert Dayson thought. You couldn’t have too much security, not since the bombings in Atlanta and Portland and Austin. Not with so many fringe groups so threatening about . . . everything. “The Unrest” the media were...
"November 1938 “What we are looking for,” said the doctor, “are photographs to help us document the treatment’s effect upon the patient. We need a picture before the treatment and afterward. Those are for the hospital files. But we also want photos taken...
"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...
"Orli staggered out of the door of her suite, her workbag over her shoulder, her hands shaking. The back of her right shoe had crumpled under her heel after she’d slid her foot into the supposedly comfortable loafer (lies, all the claims about comfort here...
"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...
"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...
"Pusetso’s research assistant lay in pieces on the floor with his head between his chest, back open, cracked solar panels splayed on the office table. A mess of tangled multicolored wires dangled from the bottom of his torso—rainbow innards. His legs, the...
"Po arrived on the back of the west wind, in the back of a gray pickup, on a day when the noon sun could have killed her. It was Po’s good fortune that the worst of the trip was made in late afternoon and, Kim thought, that she wore a white hoodie—dirty,...
"The lancet liver fluke is a parasitic worm that needs a vector to carry it from its snail host to its mammalian host, so the larval parasite is excreted by the snail to be eaten by an ant. Once inside the ant, the parasite moves to the brain and changes...
"The two boys had almost crested the hill. “Keep up,” the first boy said. “I’m telling you: You want to see this. It’s not a eunuch. It’s something else. I saw it for myself.” “We aren’t supposed to be here,” the second boy said. “What if the other...
"I like to think I was kidnapped. I like to think that some thugs grabbed me, and tossed me into their ship, and I ended up here six months later, through no fault of my own. I like to think that, but the records show something else entirely, and my memory...
"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....
"Just twenty minutes after he had arrived at the Trainview Café, Felix was back out on the station platform. He walked along its length, holding a cup of tea that he had purchased at the café, looking up and down the empty tracks, searching in vain for...
"Lacey had been alone in the dorm for three weeks when she finished her Shakespeare paper. All the electronics had been down even before the evacuation, but she’d anticipated that. She’d printed out a copy of the draft while she still could. After everyone...
"Sergey hummed under his breath as he walked to the Marith temple. His steps retraced a path he knew so well, he could have walked it at night, in the dark, even under assault. Yet the Marith enclave was the most peaceful place he’d ever been—so calm that...
"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...
"Bek scuttled over the needle field on the Waste of Mosses, far from Roktown and the monastery in Hom Valley. Turbulent winds scattered the neat rows of falling iron carbonyl snows. The steely needles here grew jagged, making the magnetic fields on the...
"Kyle heard the hiss and rattle of a small air compressor, punctuated by periodic beeps from somewhere near his head. He wondered why he couldn’t see them; then he realized his eyes were closed. So he opened them. Shari was right there, face tight with...
"Tirell stood on the platform at the edge of the forest, looking out at the banks of red clouds. As he waited for Anna’s glider to come swooping down, his eyes were drawn to the swirling patterns below, where stronger winds set the thicker clouds roiling,...
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.
The prince’s huntsman finds himself trapped in an abandoned castle, prisoner of a once-human beast.
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.
"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...
"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...
"When my parents heard I was selected to serve in the Alariel’s shining palaces, I think it broke them. Letters made of actual paper were so expensive that I ran as soon as the drone handed the envelope to me. I banged open the front door of our tiny...
"It’s a little awkward,” Major William Bristol said, after they’d been briefed. “That your ancestors owned my ancestors?” Captain Johnny Winstead raised an eyebrow and tilted his chair back from the conference table, which had been painted sea green. “I...
"Inevitably, they found her. She came back to her tiny apartment and clicked on the light to find a massive young man, wearing the signature black jeans and sweatshirt of Combine, standing in her living room. The dim light glinted off his earpiece, the...
"I see my first berb of the day before breakfast. I’m standing on the porch, drinking a cup of coffee and looking out over the Mojave to the east. Dawn has come. The desert is a hundred yellows: citron to pineapple, canary to corn, daffodil to flame. Out...
"Kuro?” I say softly. The back of the SUV is open, but all the carriers are still covered, and I can’t tell which is which. “Hello,” Kuro croaks. Middle row, left side. I resist the urge to turn and see if anyone is watching me. With my body blocking as...
"Llopa gave me leave for the first time in basically forever, so I hopped twenty-six gates across three systems to Menelik Station intending to spend a solid solar day in its legendary mile-square waterslide labyrinth—laughing through an endless looping...
"Olina preached respect. Respect for the culture, respect for the people, respect for the problems that might lie ahead. She had headed dozens of recovery teams, successful and unsuccessful. The successful ones succeeded because they practiced respect. She...
"In her dream, Kaitlyn Holman is walking her collie on her street in her town with her wife. They have just reached the pond, the three of them, and Kait has unleashed the collie to let it try once again to herd the geese, when a shadow approaches,...
"I raised my voice as I ordered two burgers and two fries from the Lo-Qual menu, so everyone in line could hear me. The order would come in the burnt orange bag-ofshame that announced to the world that I was too poor to eat off the standard menu (just as...
"Up here, at the edge of the biggest of the table mountains, had to be the best running track ever. Up here, Charlotte could really breathe. And sharpen her wits at the same time. Her apron shoes pounded in along the rocky track. She’d brought them from...
"Serious spacers don’t parade around their starships half dressed. Or wearing tight clothing and heels so high they could puncture a floor. Serious spacers wear no make-up, don’t dress their hair, and never ever ever wear jewelry. Serious spacers hate girl...
"Sal looked at the motionless red dot on the screen. With two fingers she zoomed in. The dot was on U.S. 50 in Nevada, miles from anything that even had a name. She grabbed the GPS coordinates. The nearest service station was seventy kilometers from there....
"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...
"A twinge of nausea rose, but Kym drove it back, swallowed in a dry throat, and looked down at the list again... The whole idea of a list of targeted names sickened her, but this had to be done. It would require all her strength and more fortitude. She had...
"Heaven welcomed me with the smell of disinfectant and a strange strumming tune. Funny; I never believed there was an afterlife, let alone like this. I was cold, beyond shivering. My body was made of stone, and my mind trapped in it. Or was this Hell?"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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...
"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...
"Dimitri Potanin held the tail of the maroon silk dressing gown aloft in one hand, not wishing it—a Fujian Original—to bunch underneath as he lay down on the sleek, padded deckchair. The chair, attuned to his neural implant, tipped slightly to meet his...
"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...
"I request a poison pill, in case I decide to kill myself today.” “It is your right to do so,” says the interrogator, “Here is your pill.” This is the scripted question and the standard answer. Both the interrogator and the captive scientist have recited...
"Well, at least we’ll finally be able to get some hours.” “Ruthless.” “I’m serious. Maybe they’ll finally be forced to make one of us full time.” “It’ll never happen. They’ll just hire another part-timer.” The two workers were in the break room. In the...
"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...
"She left her heart in Paris, a kidney in Berlin. In Barcelona, blinking in the sunlight, she felt tiny new ears grow down one side of her face. The sound multiplied. Vale vale vale! Rapid-fire Spanish, Catalan, Asteroid Pidgin, a robotnik beggar shaking...
"Phil and Dierdre met on the street in that part of town known as The Crumble. They hadn’t seen each other in a long time. Her hair was bleached, her lipstick too red, and her youth hidden behind crow’s feet and wrinkles. Still, he recognized her...
"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...
"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...
"Konstantinov’s Company found the hostages just a few hours after setting out on the trail of the True raiders who’d taken them. Leaving behind the tar sands mine, its extraction plant, and the smoldering ruin of its tank farm, the fresh graves and...
"Ernestine couldn’t understand why the only adult left who would help her was dead. There had been fewer of them around, strangers disappearing in the streets. Her neighbors, her mum. It wasn’t that they ran away, exactly. It’s just that they were no...
"Rose Hathaway was discharged with a General Service medal, a one-off payment from the Armed Forces Compensation Office, and damage from a psych bomb jangling in her head. Although she was still haunted by glimpses of ghosts and a general feeling of...
"It is part of my process to be both places at once, so that while I am sitting on the stool at your bedside with my segmented fingers plugged into your cerebrum, I am also inside your first memory of walking. In the undamaged parts of your braincase lay...
"Sannali Emenev did two things with his life: he read a book with one page, and he ran a city. Neither of these was his official role. There were eight judges in Junpalto. Every one of the eight of them got up in the morning, pulled a stretchy cap over...
"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...
"1 Now after the wars the world of men was of one nation and of one government, but much divided all the same (for the bonds that held them were weak); 2 And it came to pass, as the seas dried up and the sun was darkened in smoke, that they journeyed to...
"There was a girl named Helga, whose parents owned a summerhouse outside Reykjavik. It was so far out that it had no neighbors, except an old farmer who kept a small flock of sheep. “Mostly for company these days,” he said. “And to keep my dogs...
"So when my phone started up, jittering on the nightstand, I knew right away what it had to be. I pushed off the covers and went out on the balcony, holding the rail thinking, God, not again. Tokyo all lit up and crazy at this unholy hour of three a.m.,...
"Eddie Bennett wasn’t Eddie Bennett in this timeline but, instead, a professor named Elizabeth Stern, who was getting in a brisk dawn walk for some much-needed exercise before teaching her graduate seminar, “Applications for Personal Finance,” at Niagara...
"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...
"Operation Cherry Blossoms will not change the final outcome, though there will be carnage, to be sure, when his three planes attack. Three planes, that is all. Two will defend the third, the one that carries the new superbomb the Germans call Das Biest....
"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...
"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...
"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...
"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?”...
"Three days into their journey, and the strangers—humans and one janusian couple—felt as if they had become respectable friends. A convincing illusion, and essential. The male janusian, rooted firmly into his wife’s broad back, was eager to outline the situation."
"One hundred and fifty years ago, before plans for the star port on Ius Prime were finalized, ships launched out of Ciudad Orilla on the northern-most edge of Yaguni. One of those ships, the Maria Segunda, took off on a Monday to explore the rim of the...
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.
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.
"There could not have been a better time to be alive. Every nation on the planet had evolved into a democracy, we hadn’t been tangled in a war for over a hundred years, and technology had removed virtually every possibility of poverty. Work if you like, go...
Years ago, Irem went to the stars, but the results were disappointing, and now she’s trying to settle back into an Istanbul grown strange to her.
"They didn’t believe me," I said. “They didn’t believe that I wasn’t supposed to be here—that I woke up wrong.” I lost track of time again. My attention shifted toward the floor, drawn to a crack in the tile. It was causing quite a ruckus in my mind. The...
Over 100 years in China, we track Qiao Fue and his illegitimate daughter Lian Mee as they separately try to revolutionize AI and bioengineering.
When Gary catches his girlfriend teleporting, he struggles to convince her to go public about her ability.
Zep invents a board that can surf through time, and he and Del have an excellent adventure.
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 team trying to save humanity travels tens of thousands of light years to steal someone else’s star.
Baris watches helplessly as Hazan’s obsession with her work destroys her.
A couple of children are lost on the dangerous Barren Isle, which still has the original flora and fauna of Coyote. The search and rescue team will have their hands full.
August has come to town to kill a man, but first he decides to spend the night with a woman.
In a world where children’s genetic makeup changes to match a step parent’s, a divorced father deals with the imminent loss of his child.
A badly-damaged Fleet ship of long-obsolete design appears out of foldspace. There seem to be 200 people on board, but they’re not trying to communicate. Captain Dauber has to try to rescue them, even though it may be a trap.
Her marriage is crumbling around her, and now her new refrigerator is delivering food items from her past.
On Ariel, some people have modified themselves to fly. Other people can't accept that. Anna is going to need to choose sides.
"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...
"Vee doesn’t get why we don’t just dash across the border. The cut-off between New Dirt and the Monument Valley Republic is wide open, at least to her organic eyes. It’ll conserve resources, she argues, which is like-true. I explain that the MVR have...
On a dangerous mission outside, Henriette finds a duplicate of herself who fell from another universe. There’s something suspicious about her doppleganger, who insists they need to mount a mission to save the world.