In 1924 Harlem, 20-year-old Tommy Tester plays bad jazz and runs minor scams. When an old man offers him $500 to play at his house, he knows there's a catch. It's just not what he expects.
Tor Novella
65 free-to-read stories from Tor Novella
In a world where we learned to talk to elephants in the 1800s, we get two stories about how elephants were associated with radioactivity, how they (and people) were abused, and what came of it all.
Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children helps kids who passed through a portal to another world and returned unable to cope with this one.
Murderbot heads to the RaviHyral Mining Facility to learn the truth about why it went rogue and killed its own clients many years ago.
A “security bot” assigned to support a survey team impresses them with its competence as a series of things go wrong. What they don’t know is that it has disabled the governor that prevents it from hurting people.
The Civil War left the US in pieces, and New Orleans is a free city. A teenage cutpurse overhears a plot by Confederate officers to steal a powerful magic weapon, and she sets out to stop them.
Vellitt Boe teaches math at a university in the dreamworld. When her star student elopes with a dreamer from the real world, she goes after them.
It's been centuries since the robots of Panga gained self-awareness and laid down their tools; centuries since they wandered, en masse, into the wilderness, never to be seen again; centuries since they faded into myth and urban legend. One day, the life of...
Minh works restoring ecosystems destroyed during the collapse, and she’s intrigued by an opportunity to restore the Tigris/Euphrates valley by using a time machine to gather samples from 4,000 years ago.
Young Aqib has a bright future as a noble, but he meets an enchanting foreigner who makes him consider risking everything.
Binti sneaks away from her home in a future Namibia so she can attend the galactic university. The Himba never leave home, so her parents disapprove, and the universe isn't quite ready for her either.
An exiled augur who sold her soul to save her brother's life is offered one last job before serving an eternity in hell. When she turns it down, her client sweetens the pot by offering up the one payment she can't resist—the chance to have a future where...
Born during the Rodney King riots, Kev struggles his whole life against structural racism that prevents him from living up to his potential. His sister Ella, gifted with enormous psionic powers, wants to help, but fears doing more harm than good.
Twin sisters, Jack and Jill, escape from overbearing parents into The Moors, a fantasy land where werewolves and vampires are real.
In San Francisco in 2015, an old Japanese woman spends her last days dealing with mysterious unfinished business involving the 1940 disappearance of a friend who illustrated pulp magazines.
The Protector’s twin children threaten her absolute rule. Their magic is almost as strong as hers, and they pursue technology as well.
Quiet, thoughtful princess Thanh was sent away as a hostage to the powerful faraway country of Ephteria as a child. Now she’s returned to her mother's imperial court, haunted not only by memories of her first romance, but by worrying magical echoes of a...
When a wormhole opens up in the furniture store where they work, teenage Ava and her non-binary ex are ordered to go in it to hunt for a missing customer.
Handling a routine haunting is a bit mundane for an agent of the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments and Supernatural Entities, but no one ever heard of a haunted tram car before.
Yet when her mom brings home a six-foot tall crane with a menacing air, the girl is powerless to prevent her mom letting the intruder into her heart, and her children’s lives. Utterly enchanted and numb to his sharp edges, her mom abandons the world around...
Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children caters to children who went to a portal world, came back, and can’t cope. No one planned on the arrival of a child born in a portal world, much less one asking for help—from a dead person.
Esther needs to escape from a theo-fascist America before people find out she’s a lesbian, so she runs away with the women who run a travelling library, but they’re not what she thinks they are.
Bookish Katherine enters a world ruled by the requirement to “give fair value,” ruthlessly enforced by magic. As she learns how to live there, she likes it. But does she like it enough to leave home forever?
Two teenage girls, Lin, the last Jewel, and Sima, the last Lapidary, struggle to fight the invaders who've taken the kingdom by treachery.
Murderbot’s hunt for evidence against the GrayCris corporation leads it to a supposedly abandoned terraforming facility it thinks was a cover for illegally extracting alien remnants.
Emmett buys an old book at a venerable book store’s going-out-of-business sale and finds a World-War-II-era letter from a young man to his lover. Trying to learn who the author was, he finds one surprise after another.
Jack returns from the Moors and begs her classmates to help her steal her body back from her sister before the Master can turn it into a vampire.
At 12, Junior thinks his dead father has returned to protect his family. There’s a lot Junior doesn’t know about his father—living or dead.
Winslow Houndstooth takes a federal commission to clear feral hippopotamuses from the Mississippi valley, but he has another target in mind.
Derek is LitenVärld's most loyal employee. He lives and breathes the job, from the moment he wakes up in a converted shipping container at the edge of the parking lot to the second he clocks out of work 18 hours later. But after taking his first ever sick...
After a year at college offworld, Binti comes back to Africa for a visit. Her relatives aren’t pleased with how she’s changed nor with the violent alien friend she brings with her.
The day Fatima forgot her name, Death paid a visit. From hereon in she would be known as Sankofa—a name that meant nothing to anyone but her, the only tie to her family and her past. Her touch is death, and with a glance a town can fall. And she...
With a war brewing and her own family under attack, Binti takes the initiative in trying to make peace.
Muderbot’s recent exploits targeting GrayCris have hurt the company enough that it has kidnapped Murderbot’s friend, Mensah, thinking she was behind it all. It has to rescue her, even though this may be a trap.
Off the coast of West Africa, decades after the dangerous rise of the Atlantic Ocean, the region’s survivors live inside five partially submerged, kilometers-high towers originally created as a playground for the wealthy. Now the towers’ most affluent rule...
Content warnings 2
death-of-a-loved-oneviolence
As Lana transcribes the endless circular arguments of Parliament, the debates grow tenser and more desperate. Due to long-standing tradition, a hung vote will cause Parliament to flood and a return to endless war. Lana must rely on an unlikely pair of...
A world dying from ecological catastrophe sends four people back in time to try to find seeds that can grow in the new environment, but someone is trying to stop them.
Sariman investigates the suspicious deaths of everyone at a Tensorate research lab, who seem to have been killed by a monster they made themselves.
An 11-year-old asks a private eye to murder his stepdad, because "he's a monster--and you're a monster too."
Forged in the fires of the Western Front and reborn in the cafes of Paris, Leslie believes he can handle whatever is thrown at him—but Spar Creek holds a darkness beyond his nightmares. Something ugly festers within the local congregation, and its malice...
Content warnings 3
abusetransphobiaviolence
Imprisoned in an infinite labyrinth under an alien planet, Bianca searches for a way to escape, but though her lover doubts it’s even possible.
In a secondary world a bit like Victorian England but with real magic and real monsters, an ancient forest guardian meets a young man determined to learn his secrets.
In which The Forces of Evil try to destroy our favorite caterers-to-the-supernatural and find they have their plates full
A group of young, anarchist, demon hunters come to a town where some of the dead are walking.
Signalman investigates the origins of a mysterious fungus that killed some cultists in California.
Mokoya and her brother use their powerful magic to defend Bataanar from external attack which her mysterious new love interest may be involved with.
Just before Christmas, the ghost of a little boy appears in the vicarage and disturbs the vicar and her two friends.
In a small Western Queensland town, a reserved young woman receives a note from one of her vanished brothers—a note that makes her question memories of their disappearance and her father’s departure.
The cleric Chih finds themself and their companions at the mercy of a band of fierce tigers who ache with hunger. To stay alive until the mammoths can save them, Chih must unwind the intricate, layered story of the tiger and her scholar lover—a woman of...
Alice is an unhappy black lesbian aristocrat living in a Steampunk 1788 England. Prudence is a time traveler from 2145 unhappy with how the Time War is going. This is what happens when they meet.
Fellian is a Lamplighter, able to provide illumination through magic. A group of rebel Monarchists free her from indentured servitude and take her on a journey to rescue trapped compatriots from an underground complex of mines. Along the way they get...
As Idir takes the British citizenship test, terrorists break into the examination room, and they take an unhealthy interest in him.
The philosopher Saloninus makes a deal with the Devil. Except he approaches the Devil, not the other way around, and the Devil is worried it's a trick.
Anima is an extrasensory human tasked with surveilling and protecting Ora’s citizens via a complex living network called the Gleaming. Although ær world is restricted to what æ can see and experience through the Gleaming, Anima takes pride and comfort in...
Amahle is a Light Chaser – one of a number of explorers, who travel the universe alone (except for their onboard AI), trading trinkets for life stories. But when she listens to the stories sent down through the ages she hears the same voice talking...
Even the Wild Man of Greenhollow can’t ignore a summons from his mother, when that mother is the indomitable Adela Silver, practical folklorist. Henry Silver does not relish what he’ll find in the grimy seaside town of Rothport, where once the ancient wood...
About twenty years from now, a reality show that pays young men to go into public places and stage mass shootings is the most popular show in America. Tonight will be the show of a lifetime.
Danna takes a job with a wealthy English family to look after a special-needs child who turns out to be more special than she had imagined.
Three men came from space to kill a woman in a small town on a tidally locked world. The narrator isn’t precisely trying to stop them, but he sure does keep getting in their way.
In the dried-out ruins of an Iowa town, anarchists cope with a demon deer they summoned to protect themselves from “predators” but which seems to have its own definition of the word.
After the events of The Tempest, Miranda finds herself in Milan worrying about her father’s behavior and trying to find out what really happened to her mother.
Deacon James plays the blues, but on a train ride a new melody gets into his head. Something powerful enough to change people’s lives—or end them.
College friends Henry, Maggie, and Russell decide to play archeologist in the back yard of an old, abandoned house, but things get serious when they find the deformed skeleton of a child.
A few centuries from now, on a dying Earth, Kir joins a team trying to build an interstellar teleportation device. Unfortunately, to get funding they have to incorporate the crew from a reality show.
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.