Search Worlds Without End

When evidence of an advanced civilization is discovered by SETI astronomers, an expedition into the far reaches of the galaxy is planned and an eclectic team of scientists is chosen to make the trip. But because the origin of the alien signals is thousands of light-years away, the crew will age only a few years while millennia pass on Earth. And though they are ready to face the ramifications of such a voyage, none of the starfarers are prepared for what awaits them at the outer edge of the cosmos--or back at the planet they once called home.

The Avatar

The Boat of a Million Years

In the immeasurable past a mysterious alien race known as The Others left mankind a challenging legacy, a 'gate' to the unexplored reaches of the stars. Humanity has utilized the gate to painstakingly colonize the Phoebus star system but has left the rest of the galaxy unexplored. In the midst of turbulent political upheaval on Earth, the exploratory ship Emissary leaves through the gate on a voyage of discovery. When the Emissary returns ahead of schedule the Social Welfare Party on Earth impounds the ship and imprisons its crew - and forbids all future space exploration. Dan Broderson, an entrepreneur and adventurer, commandeers a commercial spaceship from his own company and travels to Earth to find the Emissary. He locates the ship, confounds its captors and rescues some of the explorers, including the first alien to visit the solar system. But Broderson has to flee through the gate unprepared, to become a wanderer among the stars in search of The Others. They alone have the knowledge that will enable his ship to return home.

Others have written SF on the theme of immortality, but in The Boat of a Million Years, Poul Anderson made it his own. Early in human history, certain individuals were born who live on, unaging, undying, through the centuries and millenia. We follow them through over 2000 years, up to our time and beyond-to the promise of utopia, and to the challenge of the stars.

A milestone in modern science fiction, a New York Times Notable Book on its first publication in 1989, this is one of a great writer's finest works.

Three Worlds to Conquer

Sympathetic Centaur-like Jovians are in danger of extinction by cruel invaders from another region of the planet. At the same time their friends, the human colonists of Ganymede, are threatened by a powerful space warship commanded by a dictatorial militarist. Eventually, the two groups find ingenious ways to help each other defeat their respective enemies.

(Wikipedia)

World without Stars

Light From Uncommon Stars

A mythic tale of space travelers marooned on a planet engulfed in the flames of war and of the immortal hero who endeavors to save them in the name of love.

In a far-future era, death is virtually no more, banished except in the case of severe, violent trauma, enabling mankind to spend what were once entire lifetimes exploring the farthest reaches of the vast universe. When the interstellar vessel Meteor is dispatched to investigate a distant orb circling a giant red sun, an error in calculations sends the ship crashing into a different world altogether, casting its surviving crew into the heart of a savage, planetwide war of primitive alien tribes. With no means of escape and hostiles on every side, the situation appears hopeless for Captain Felip Argens. But for the mission's true leader--crewman, adventurer, and ship's bard Hugh Valland--impossible is not an option. If necessary, he will alter destiny to end the terrible conflict and bring his men safely back home, even if it takes decades, or centuries, or longer--for a remarkable love patiently awaits Valland's return to Earth. It is she who sustains him, who inspires his actions, his courage, his song, with a love that is a miracle, a memory, a tragedy, and a dream.

One of the most thoughtful and lyrical works by the incomparable Poul Anderson--winner of seven Hugo Awards and three Nebula Awards over the course of his acclaimed career--World without Stars is a thrilling deep-space adventure and a magnificent feat of world building by a luminary of science fiction's golden age.

Ryka Aoki

Shizuka Satomi made a deal with the devil: to escape damnation, she must entice seven other violin prodigies to trade their souls for success. She has already delivered six.

When Katrina Nguyen, a young transgender runaway, catches Shizuka's ear with her wild talent, Shizuka can almost feel the curse lifting. She's found her final candidate.

But in a donut shop off a bustling highway in the San Gabriel Valley, Shizuka meets Lan Tran, retired starship captain, interstellar refugee, and mother of four. Shizuka doesn't have time for crushes or coffee dates, what with her very soul on the line, but Lan's kind smile and eyes like stars might just redefine a soul's worth. And maybe something as small as a warm donut is powerful enough to break a curse as vast as the California coastline.

As the lives of these three women become entangled by chance and fate, a story of magic, identity, curses, and hope begins, and a family worth crossing the universe for is found.

A Woman of the Iron People

Eleanor Arnason

Lixia and the members of her human crew are determined not to disturb the life on the planet circling the Star Sigma Draconis which they have begun exploring. But the factions on the mother ship hovering above the planet may create an unintended chaos for both the life on the planet and the humans exploring it. As the anger increases on the ship, the ground crew becomes more and more affected by the conflict and begins to rely on their instincts to keep the project moving forward. Unexpected danger plagues the mission as Lixia is determined to expand her knowledge.

Providence

Max Barry

The video changed everything. Before that, we could believe that we were safe. Special. Chosen. We thought the universe was a twinkling ocean of opportunity, waiting to be explored.

Afterward, we knew better.

Seven years after first contact, Providence Five launches. It is an enormous and deadly warship, built to protect humanity from its greatest ever threat. On board is a crew of just four--tasked with monitoring the ship and reporting the war's progress to a mesmerized global audience by way of social media.

But while pursuing the enemy across space, Gilly, Talia, Anders, and Jackson confront the unthinkable: their communications are cut, their ship decreasingly trustworthy and effective. To survive, they must win a fight that is suddenly and terrifyingly real.

Farewell to the Master

Harry Bates

This is a reprint of the 1940 first-contact Sci Fi classic short story by Harry Bates that inspired the two movies titled "The Day the Earth Stood Still." This annotated edition includes a new introduction with a biography of Harry Bates and history of the story, plus the story, as well as a listing of more than 200 first-contact book titles.

The humanoid alien Klaatu and the giant robot Gnut suddenly materialize in Washington, D.C., in a time-travel space ship. Two unfathomable beings from somewhere else in the universe. The murder of Klaatu ruins Earth's attempt to peacefully welcome the first interstellar visitors. And one man tries to solve the mystery of why Gnut remains silent, imperious, and unassailable.

The Spacetime Pit Plus Two

Stephen Baxter
Eric Brown

The Spacetime Pit Plus Two collects three collaborative stories by two of science fiction's finest writers. Never before published in one volume, the triptych showcases the authors' ability to create narratives on a vast scale, and yet never to lose sight of the all-important human element.

In the award-winning 'The Spacetime Pit', spacer Katerina Wake crash-lands on a primitive alien world and faces certain death unless she can harness her ingenuity, and technical know-how, to bend the destiny of an entire race to her will...

'Green-Eyed Monster' follows Richard as he wakes up after a night on the tiles to find himself inhabiting the body of a toad - and that's just the start of his troubles...

In 'Sunfly', Onara and her people live on a world very different from our own - a vast ribbon encircling a sun. But a change is coming to the land, a mysterious narrowing that threatens not only the stability of her world, but the very order of everything she has taken for granted.

Table of Contents:

9 - Introduction (The Spacetime Pit Plus Two) - essay by Eric Brown
13 - The Spacetime Pit - (1996) - novelette by Stephen Baxter and Eric Brown
53 - Green-Eyed Monster - (2000) - short story by Stephen Baxter and Eric Brown
77 - Sunfly - (1995) - short fiction by Stephen Baxter and Eric Brown

Galaxias

Stephen Baxter

What would happen to the world if the sun went out?

New epic sci-fi from Stephen Baxter, the award-winning author whose credits include co-authorship of the Long Earth series with Terry Pratchett.

By the middle of the 21st century, humanity has managed to overcome a series of catastrophic events and maintain some sense of stability. Space exploration has begun again. Science has led the way.

But then one day, the sun goes out. Solar panels are useless, and the world begins to freeze

Earth begins to fall out of its orbit.

The end is nigh.

Someone has sent us a sign.

Eclipse

K. A. Bedford

Watching HMS Eclipse through the geosynch spaceport window, Officer James Dunne, a newly minted graduate of the Royal Interstellar Service Academy, thinks his first assignment will be routine... an easy going excursion on an aging deep-space cruiser, heading into the Dark, on a mission to explore the farthest reaches of known space.

James had always wanted to be a part of the romantic final frontier. Now, he thought, his lifelong dream was about to come true.

In fact, he was about to begin the greatest challenge, and worst nightmare, of his already-too-short service career!

Although repeatedly warned "not to rock the boat", it soon becomes obvious that it is too late for the young Officer!

He is drafted into the First Contact Team where he realizes two things: (1) that his contribution to the Interstellar Space Service might easily turn out to be that of a 'replaceable warm body' and (2) that disrespecting junior officers, like Dunne himself, often suffer 'unfortunate' and sometimes fatal 'accidents' out in the Dark.

Dunne's survival will depend on his ability to separate power from perversion while enduring the corruption and control of others!

The Space Traders

Derrick Bell

Extraterrestrials arrive on Earth and offer to the United States gold, safe nuclear power and other technological advances, in exchange for the government's handing over of all black US citizens. The story posits that the people and political establishment of the U.S. would make such a transaction and pass a referendum to enable it.

First appeared in Faces at the Bottom of the Well which is a book of non-fictional essays.

This novelette may be found in Dark Matter.

Beautyland

Marie-Helene Bertino

At the moment when Voyager 1 is launched into space carrying its famous golden record, a baby of unusual perception is born to a single mother in Philadelphia. Adina Giorno is tiny and jaundiced, but she reaches for warmth and light. As a child, she recognizes that she is different: She possesses knowledge of a faraway planet. The arrival of a fax machine enables her to contact her extraterrestrial relatives, beings who have sent her to report on the oddities of Earthlings.

For years, as she moves through the world and makes a life for herself among humans, she dispatches transmissions on the terrors and surprising joys of their existence. Then, at a precarious moment, a beloved friend urges Adina to share her messages with the world. Is there a chance she is not alone?

A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire

Michael Bishop

It seemed like a good idea; even a noble experiment. But the outcome was sheer hell.

When the Balduin brothers escaped from the tedium of the human hive of Atlanta, Georgia, they had a mission. They were to voyage to the planet Trope. Contact a tribe there known as the Ouemartsee. And transport it to Glaparca for a useful purpose.

But suddenly the Balduin brothers discovered that they were in the slavetrade, and that the Ouemartsee had made one of them a God...

Vor

James Blish

FIRST CONTACT!

The glowing ovoid plummeted downward, the whole sky screaming like a metallic banshee as the air boiled away from its sides. A supersonic bang broke over the forest, but the thing was already gliding down to Earth. As the ovoid settled in among the trees, the entire forest burst into flames. A thin black line appeared and etched a perfect circle on the side of the metal egg, then thickened into a door. The air was rent by a searing hiss. Slowly, the strange being - soon to be known to all mankind as VOR - began to emerge...

Note: An expansion of "The Weakness of RVOG" (1949), which was co-written with Damon Knight.

The Martian Chronicles

Ray Bradbury

Leaving behind a world on the brink of destruction, man came to the Red planet and found the Martians waiting, dreamlike. Seeking the promise of a new beginning, man brought with him his oldest fears and his deepest desires. Man conquered Mars?and in that instant, Mars conquered him. The strange new world with its ancient, dying race and vast, red-gold deserts cast a spell on him, settled into his dreams, and changed him forever. Here are the captivating chronicles of man and Mars?the modern classic by the peerless Ray Bradbury.

Existence

David Brin

For a hundred years, people have been abandoning things in space, and Gerald Livingston has to clean up the mess. Only... there's something spinning a little bit higher than he expects. It isn't on the orbital maps. An hour after he grabs the Object and brings it in, rumors fill Earth's infomesh about an "alien artifact." Thrown into the maelstrom of worldwide shared experience, this is a game-changer. A message in a bottle; an alien capsule that wants to communicate. The world reacts as humans always do: with fear and hope and selfishness and love and violence. And insatiable curiosity.

Destroyer of Light

Jennifer Marie Brissett

Having destroyed Earth, the alien conquerors resettle the remains of humanity on the planet of Eleusis. In the four habitable areas of the planet--Day, Dusk, Dawn, and Night--the haves and have nots, criminals and dissidents, and former alien conquerors irrevocably bind three stories:

*A violent warlord abducts a young girl from the agrarian outskirts of Dusk leaving her mother searching and grieving.
*Genetically modified twin brothers desperately search for the lost son of a human/alien couple in a criminal underground trafficking children for unknown purposes.
*A young woman with inhuman powers rises through the insurgent ranks of soldiers in the borderlands of Night.

Their stories, often containing disturbing physical and sexual violence, skate across years, building to a single confrontation when the fate of all--human and alien--balances upon a knife's-edge.

Binary / System

Eric Brown

SURVIVAL IS ALL IN THE MIND

A downed terraforming ship. An ice planet. A hostile alien race. Delia Kemp has had better expeditions.

Stranded, alone and hunted by the native Skelt for her scientific knowledge, Delia is chased across the undiscovered world of Valinda as its long winter comes to an end and a blistering summer approaches.

Strange new companions, phantasmagorical landscapes, and a death-defying dash across Valinda's fiery equator lead Delia ever close to the valley of Mahkanda--where salvation just might be waiting...

On Arcturus VII

Eric Brown

Former pilot and planetary pioneer Jonathan James is tempted out of retirement by an offer he can't refuse. It means going back to the one place he vowed never to return to: Arcturus Seven. A Closed Planet; a hothouse world where every plant and animal is hell-bent on killing and consuming you; the place that cost him the life of the only woman he has ever truly loved.

Jonathan knows the wealthy tycoon seeking to recruit him cannot be trusted, but he has no choice. If he doesn't do it, someone else will, and Arcturus Seven has a secret, one which must never be disclosed, so Jonathan accepts the mission even though it means facing memories he has spent years denying.

On Arcturus VII is a fabulous slice of planetary romance from award-winning author Eric Brown. A sparkling tale of intrigue, adventure, and romance; traditional in style but wholly contemporary in its delivery.

The Kings of Eternity

Eric Brown

1999, on the threshold of a new millennium, the novelist Daniel Langham lives a reclusive life on an idyllic Greek island, hiding away from humanity and the events of the past. All that changes, however, when he meets artist Caroline Platt and finds himself falling in love. But what is his secret, and what are the horrors that haunt him?

1935. Writer Jonathon Langham and Edward Vaughan are summoned from London by their editor friend Jasper Carnegie to help investigate strange goings on in Hopton Wood. What they discover there - no less than a strange creature from another world - will change their lives for ever.

What they become, and their link to the novelist of the future, is the subject of Eric Brown's most ambitious novel to date. Almost ten years in the writing, The Kings of Eternity is a novel of vast scope and depth, full of the staple tropes of the genre and yet imbued with humanity and characters you'll come to love.

The Atlantic Abomination

John Brunner

Originally published in Ace Double D-465 in 1960.

In The Atlantic Abomination, an exploratory expedition to the bottom of the ocean discovers the remnants of a long-lost civilization, and then, the enormous body of an alien being preserved for unknown millennia. An attempt to raise the body unleashes a horror beyond imagining as the creature revives from a long sleep and begins to exert control over men's minds throughout the world.

Zen and the Art of Starship Maintenance

Tobias S. Buckell

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Cosmic Powers: The Saga Anthology of Far-Away Galaxies (2017), edited by John Joseph Adams, and was reprinted in Lightspeed, February 2018. It can also be found in the anthologies The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Twelve (2018), edited by Jonathan Strahan, The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Fifth Annual Collection (2018), edited by Gardner Dozois, The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume 3 (2018), edited by Neil Clarke, and The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018, edited by N. K. Jemisin and John Joseph Adams.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

Bloodchild

Octavia E. Butler

Hugo, Nebula and Locus Award winning novelette.

Years ago a group known as the Terrans left Earth in search of a life free of persecution. Now they live alongside the Tlic, an alien race who face extinction; their only chance of survival is to plant their larvae inside the bodies of the humans.

When Gan, a young, boy, is chosen as a carrier of Tlic eggs, he faces an impossible dilemma: can he really help the species he has grown up with, even if it means sacrificing his own life?

Bloodchild originally appeared in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, June 1984. The story has been reprinted many times. It can be found in the anthologies:

The Year's Best Science Fiction: Second Annual Collection (1985), edited by Gardner Dozois
Best SF of the Year #14 (1985), edited by Terry Carr
The 1985 Annual World's Best SF, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Arthur W. Saha
Nebula Awards 20 (1985), edited by George Zebrowski
The New Hugo Winners (1989), edited by Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg
Foundations of Fear: An Exploration of Horror (1992) edited by David G. Hartwell
Invaders! (1993) edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois
Women of Wonder: The Contemporary Years: SF by Women from the 1970s to the 1990s (1995), edited by Pamela Sargent
The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories (2011), edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer
The Big Book of Science Fiction (2016), edited by Jeff and Ann VanderMeer

The story is included in the collection Bloodchild and Other Stories (1995).

Read the full story for free at the Baen website.

Kindred

Octavia E. Butler

Dana, a modern black woman, is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South. Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning, and Dana has been summoned to save him. Dana is drawn back repeatedly through time to the slave quarters, and each time the stay grows longer, more arduous, and more dangerous until it is uncertain whether or not Dana's life will end, long before it has a chance to begin.

A Darkling Sea

James L. Cambias

On the planet Ilmatar, under a roof of ice a kilometer thick, a team of deep-sea diving scientists investigates the blind alien race that lives below. The Terran explorers have made an uneasy truce with the Sholen, their first extraterrestrial contact: so long as they don't disturb the Ilmataran habitat, they're free to conduct their missions in peace.

But when Henri Kerlerec, media personality and reckless adventurer, ends up sliced open by curious Ilmatarans, tensions between Terran and Sholen erupt, leading to a diplomatic disaster that threatens to escalate to war.

Against the backdrop of deep-sea guerrilla conflict, a new age of human exploration begins as alien cultures collide. Both sides seek the aid of the newly enlightened Ilmatarans. But what this struggle means for the natives--and the future of human exploration--is anything but certain.

Saturn Run

John Sandford
Ctein

The year is 2066. A Caltech intern inadvertently notices an anomaly from a space telescope -- something is approaching Saturn, and decelerating. Space objects don't decelerate. Spaceships do.

A flurry of top-level government meetings produces the inescapable conclusion: Whatever built that ship is at least one hundred years ahead in hard and soft technology, and whoever can get their hands on it exclusively and bring it back will have an advantage so large, no other nation can compete. A conclusion the Chinese definitely agree with when they find out.

The race is on, and an remarkable adventure begins -- an epic tale of courage, treachery, resourcefulness, secrets, surprises, and astonishing human and technological discovery, as the members of a hastily thrown-together crew find their strength and wits tested against adversaries both of this earth and beyond.

RUR & War with the Newts

Karel Capek

Written against the background of the rise of Nazism, War With the Newts concerns the discovery in the South Pacific of a sea-dwelling race, which is enslaved and exploited by mankind. In time they rebel, laying siege to the strongholds of their former masters in a global war for supremacy. R.U.R., or Rossum's Universal Robots, seen by many as a modern interpretation of the 'golem' myth, is regarded as the most important play in the history of SF. It introduced the word 'robot' and gave the genre one of its most enduring tropes.

The Identity Matrix

Jack L. Chalker

While backpacking in Alaska, Victor Gonser, a 35 year old PhD in political science, finds himself trapped in the body of a 13 year old Tlingit Indian girl. A little later he is forced from there into the spectacularly beautiful body of an 18 year old blonde. He finds that the switches are part of a skirmish for Earth by two alien races... And that is just the beginning.

Hestia

C. J. Cherryh

An early Cherryh novel about colonists on an alien world and their interactions with the catlike natives, centering on a young engineer sent to solve the colonists' problems, and his relationship with one of the natives. Major themes in this novel include sexual liberation, sexual aberration, hypocrisy of social mores, and responsibility toward indigenous peoples.

Story of Your Life

Ted Chiang

This novella originally appeared in the anthology Starlight 2, (1998), edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden, and was reprinted in Lightspeed, December 2012. It can also be found in the anthologies:

The Year's Best Science Fiction: Sixteenth Annual Collection (1999), edited by Gardner Dozois
Year's Best SF 4 (1999), edited by David G. Hartwell
Nebula Awards Showcase 2001, edited by Robert Silverberg
Best of the Best: 20 Years of the Year's Best Science Fiction (2005), edited by Gardner Dozois
The Big Book of Science Fiction (2016), edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer

The story is included in the collection Stories of Your Life and Others.

Adapted into the movie The Arrival in 2016.

A Meeting With Medusa

Nebula winning and Hugo nominated novella.

In leading an expedition through the many-layered Jovian atmosphere in the hydrogen balloon craft Kon-Tiki, Captain Howard Falcon discovers a world where bioluminescent air plankton produce brilliant atmospheric sea-fire, predatory manta-ray creatures dominate the skies, and enormous jellyfish-like beings grow to be over a mile across.

This story was originally published in the December 1971 issue of Playboy and has been reprinted many times. It is incuded in the collections The Wind from the Sun (1972), The Sentinel (1983) and The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke (2000). It is half of the Tor Double A Meeting with Medusa / Green Mars (1988). It can be found in numerous anthologies. Among them Nebula Award Stories Eight (1973), edited by Isaac Asimov, Best SF: 1971 (1972) edited by Harry Harrison and Brian W. Aldiss, The Best Science Fiction of the Year (1972) edited by Terry Carr, The Arbor House Treasury of Science Fiction Masterpieces (1983), edited by Robert Silverberg and Martin H. Greenberg and The SFWA Grand Masters, Volume 2 (2000), edited by Frederik Pohl.

Childhood's End

The Fountains of Paradise

When the silent spacecraft arrived and took the light from the world, no one knew what to expect. But, although the Overlords kept themselves hidden from man, they had come to unite a warring world and to offer an end to poverty and crime.

When they finally showed themselves it was a shock, but one that humankind could now cope with, and an era of peace, prosperity and endless leisure began.

But the children of this utopia dream strange dreams of distant suns and alien planets, and begin to evolve into something incomprehensible to their parents, and soon they will be ready to join the Overmind...and, in a grand and thrilling metaphysical climax, leave the Earth behind.

Arthur C. Clarke
Frederik Pohl

Vannemar Morgan's dream is to link Earth to the stars with the greatest engineering feat of all time;a 24,000-mile-high space elevator. But first he must solve a million technical, political, and economic problems while allaying the wrath of God. For the only possible site on the planet for Morgan's Orbital Tower is the monastery atop the Sacred Mountain of Sri Kanda. And for two thousand years, the monks have protected Sri Kanda from all mortal quests for glory. Kings and princes who have sought to conquer the Sacred Mountain have all died.Now Vannemar Morgan may be next.

The Last Theorem

The final work from the brightest star in science fiction's galaxy. Arthur C Clarke, who predicted the advent of communication satellites and author of 2001: A Space Odyssey completes a lifetime career in science fiction with a masterwork.

30 light years away, a race known simply as the One Point Fives are plotting a dangerous invasion plan, one that will wipe humankind off the face of the Earth...

Meanwhile, in Sri Lanka, a young astronomy student, Ranjit Subramanian, becomes obsessed with a three-hundred-year-old theorem that promises to unlock the secrets of the universe. While Ranjit studies the problem, tensions grow between the nations of the world and a UN taskforce headed up by China, America and Russia code-named Silent Thunder begins bombing volatile regimes into submission.

On the eve of the invasion of Earth a space elevator is completed, helped in part by Ranjit, which will herald a new type of Olympics to be held on the Moon. But when alien forces arrive Ranjit is forced to question his own actions, in a bid to save the lives of not just his own family but of all of humankind.

Co-written with fellow grand master Frederik Pohl, The Last Theorem not only provides a fitting end to the career one of the most famous names in science fiction but also sets a new benchmark in contemporary prescient science fiction. It tackles with ease epic themes as diverse as third world poverty, the atrocities of modern warfare in a post-nuclear age, space elevators, pure mathematics and mankind's first contact with extra-terrestrials.

The Star

When They Come from Space

Hugo Award winning short story. It originally appeared in Infinity Science Fiction, November 1955. The story has been reprinted many times. It can be found in the anthologies:

A Century of Science Fiction (1962), edited by Damon Knight
The Hugo Winners, Volume 1: (1955-61) (1963), edited by Isaac Asimov
Science Fiction for People Who Hate Science Fiction (1966), edited by Terry Carr
Modern Science Fiction (1974), edited by Norman Spinrad
Decade: The 1950s (1976) edited by Brian W. Aldiss and Harry Harrison
Fantastic Worlds: Myths, Tales, and Stories (1979), edited by Eric S. Rabkin
New Stories from the Twilight Zone (1991), edited by Martin H. Greenberg
The Ascent of Wonder: The Evolution of Hard SF (1994), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer
The SFWA Grand Masters, Volume 2 (2000), edited by Frederik Pohl
Galileo's Children: Tales Of Science vs. Superstition (2005) edited by Gardner Dozois
The Big Book of Science Fiction (2016), edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer

It is included in the collections The Other Side of the Sky (1958), The Nine Billion Names of God (1967) and The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke (2000).

Eight Keys to Eden

Mark Clifton

FROM THE HUGO WINNING NOVELIST Not long after the colonists landed on the uninhabited planet every human made artifact - ship communicators, tools--disappeared! Even their clothes! Here is an enthralling science alien planet puzzle from the man writer, critic and Nebula award winner Barry Maltzberg calls "One of the twelve most influential science fiction writers." When, Eden--the Earth colony eleven light years goes silent and fails to answer any communications from the mother planet, Earth's government goes into a panic. Has something tragic happened on a world already proven to have no intelligent, dangerous lifeforms? Or, are the colonists purposely disregarding the messages for some reason of their own? What could be the real explanation for the mysterious silence of a disciplined, scientific colony? /p>

To learn the answer, Earth's leaders turn to the Extrapolators- the honored group of men and women with an almost superhuman ability to see to the core of any problem. Soon the Es assign a probationary Extrapolator, Calvin Gray, to the hazardous journey to Eden, where he will win full admission into the ranks to the Extrapolators if he solves whatever problems he finds there. But, even with his special Extrapolator training, Grey is not prepared for the extent ort nature of the disaster that has struck the colony Eden--thrown back to an almost subhuman state of existence without houses, tools, equipment, or clothing.

Here is a suspenseful science fiction from Mark Clifton, who, with his collaborator, Frank Riley, won the 1955 Hugo Award for best science fiction novel of the year for, They'd Rather Be Right. Galaxy magazine's editors called Clifton's work: "Full of excitement. Richly rewarding. Genuinely mature philosophy tinged with gentle irony."

Mark Clifton

CLASSIC HUMOROUS SF FROM A HUGO WINNING AUTHOR!

Ralph Kennedy, unassuming personnel psychologist, thought he had headaches when he was faced with clients who had psychic talents they couldn't control. (What Thin Partitions Renaissance E Books 2003). Now, through a case of mistaken identity, Kennedy is pressed into service by Space Navy, as an expert in extraterrestial psychology. The Space Navy doesn't have any aliens--or anything for Kennedy to do--they just want to be prepared. When his attempts to clear up the confusion bog down due to a mirthful mix-up of records, Kennedy has somehow convinced the thick-headed bureaucrats running the Navy that he is their man.

But just as boredom sets in and he is dreaming of suicide, a mysterious Black Fleet of alien saucers appears over Washington and demands the Earth government surrender to it or the entire planet will be destroyed. Kennedy finds everyone turning to him for advice he doesn't have. Then he and the world are saved--or are they?--by the intervention of a squadron of glowing, globe-like ships which beat off the Black Fleet.

But when the rescuing aliens from the globes emerge from their ships, Kennedy faces the biggest challenge of his life. For their appearance raises more problems than it solves: The aliens are god-like human beings in white suites and white hats. Earth is so grateful at being rescued, Kennedy finds he is the only one who is troubled by the alien's providential arrival and appearance.

Here is humorous science fiction with a point by the co-author of the Hugo winning novel, They'd Rather Be Right.

Armada

Ernest Cline

Zack Lightman has spent his life dreaming. Dreaming that the real world could be a little more like the countless science-fiction books, movies, and videogames he's spent his life consuming. Dreaming that one day, some fantastic, world-altering event will shatter the monotony of his humdrum existence and whisk him off on some grand space-faring adventure.

But hey, there's nothing wrong with a little escapism, right? After all, Zack tells himself, he knows the difference between fantasy and reality. He knows that here in the real world, aimless teenage gamers with anger issues don't get chosen to save the universe.

And then he sees the flying saucer.

Even stranger, the alien ship he's staring at is straight out of the videogame he plays every night, a hugely popular online flight simulator called Armada--in which gamers just happen to be protecting the earth from alien invaders.

No, Zack hasn't lost his mind. As impossible as it seems, what he's seeing is all too real. And his skills--as well as those of millions of gamers across the world--are going to be needed to save the earth from what's about to befall it.

It's Zack's chance, at last, to play the hero. But even through the terror and exhilaration, he can't help thinking back to all those science-fiction stories he grew up with, and wondering: Doesn't something about this scenario seem a little... familiar?

At once gleefully embracing and brilliantly subverting science-fiction conventions as only Ernest Cline could, Armada is a rollicking, surprising thriller, a classic coming of age adventure, and an alien invasion tale like nothing you've ever read before--one whose every page is infused with the pop-culture savvy that has helped make Ready Player One a phenomenon.

Terra Nullius

Claire G. Coleman

"Jacky was running. There was no thought in his head, only an intense drive to run. There was no sense he was getting anywhere, no plan, no destination, no future. All he had was a sense of what was behind, what he was running from. Jacky was running."

The Natives of the Colony are restless. The Settlers are eager to have a nation of peace, and to bring the savages into line. Families are torn apart, reeducation is enforced. This rich land will provide for all.

This is not Australia as we know it. This is not the Australia of our history books. This TERRA NULLIUS is something new, but all too familiar.

This is an incredible debut from a striking new Australian Aboriginal voice.

Beyond the Gates

Catherine Wells

Marta, a graduate student researching indigenous life on isolationist Dray's Planet, discovers an animal that can't be indigenous, but which can't have come from anywhere else. The puzzle convinces the Children of the Second Revelation to bring two Unbelievers into their closed society. As the rival offworld scientists trek into the harsh desert to determine the creature's origins, Marta stumbles onto another mystery: why do folk tales speak of roarings and screechings from the planet's second continent, the uninhabitable Land Beyond the Gates? And why are the Faithful forbidden to set foot there?

Religious leaders will not sanction a trip to the uncharted land they deem uninhabitable. Marta must keep her expedition from coming to their attention, while keeping her difficult offworlders on task. After that, uncovering the secrets of the prohibited place ought to be the easy part. But they still have to live to tell the tale...

Close Encounters

Andy Duncan

Nebula Award winning novelette. It originally appaered in the collection The Pottawatomie Giant and Other Stories (2012). The first publication in the US was in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, September-October 2012. The story can also be found in The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Seven (2013), edited by Jonathan Strahan, The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirtieth Annual Collection (2013), edited by Gardner Dozois, Year's Best SF 18 (2013), edited by David G. Hartwell and Nebula Awards Showcase 2014, edited by Kij Johnson. The story is included in the collection An Agent of Utopia (2018).

How to Mars

David Ebenbach

For the six lucky scientists selected by the Destination Mars! corporation, a one-way ticket to Mars--in exchange for a lifetime of research--was an absolute no-brainer. The incredible opportunity was clearly worth even the most absurdly tedious screening process. Perhaps worth following the strange protocols in a nonsensical handbook written by an eccentric billionaire. Possibly even worth their constant surveillance, the video of which is carefully edited into a ratings-bonanza back on Earth.

But it turns out that after a while even scientists can get bored of science. Tempers begin to fray; unsanctioned affairs blossom. When perfectly good equipment begins to fail, the Marsonauts are faced with a possibility that their training just cannot explain.

Quarantine

Greg Egan

It causes riots and religions. It has people dancing in the streets and leaping off skyscrapers. And it's all because of the impenetrable gray shield that slid into place around the solar system on the night of November 15, 2034.

Some see the bubble as the revenge of an insane God. Some see it as justice. Some even see it as protection. But one thing is for certain -- now there is the universe, and the earth. And never the twain shall meet.

Or so it seems. Until a bio-enhanced PI named Nick Stavrianos takes on a job for an anonymous client: find a girl named Laura who disappeared from a mental institution by the most direct possible method -- walking through the walls.

Schild's Ladder

Greg Egan

The Age of Death ended countless millennia ago. No longer burdened by limited lifespans, the immortal humans who populate inhabited space now have the luxury to travel vast distances effortlessly and to tinker with the intricate mechanics of spacetime. But one such experiment in quantum physics has had a catastrophic and unanticipated result, creating an enormous, rapidly expanding vacuum -- a region of new physics -- with the frightening potential to devour countless inhabited solar systems.

Tchicaya abandoned his homeworld four thousand years ago to travel the universe, freely choosing, as have others of his bent, to endure the hardships of distance and loneliness for the sake of knowledge and experience. Aboard the Rindler, a starship trawling the border of the allconsuming novo-vacuum, he feels his endless life has new purpose. For the Rindler is the center for the scientific study the phenomenon -- a common ground for Preservationists and Yielders alike, those working to halt and destroy the encroaching worlds-eater ... and those determinedto investigate its marvels while allowing its growth to continue unchecked. Tchicaya has allied himself firmly with the latter camp.

The passing decades -- and inevitable expansion of the void -- widen the great rift between the two factions, intensifying what was once simply ideological differences into something more angry, explosive, and dangerous. And the arrival of Tchicaya's fiery first love, Mariama, and her immediate embracing of the Preservationist cause, intensifies an inner turmoil he has been struggling with since his distant childhood.

But everything onboard the Rindler -- and, ultimately, in the inhabited universe itself-is on the cusp of further cataclysmic change, as the Yielders' explorations threaten to transform discord into violent action and potential xenocide. For new evidence suggests that something unthinkable is developing at an astounding rate deep within the mysterious, 600-light-years-wide void -- something neither Tchicaya and his compatriots nor Mariama and hers could ever have imagined possible: life.

A Half-Built Garden

Ruthanna Emrys

On a warm March night in 2083, Judy Wallach-Stevens wakes to a warning of unknown pollutants in the Chesapeake Bay. She heads out to check what she expects to be a false alarm?and stumbles upon the first alien visitors to Earth. These aliens have crossed the galaxy to save humanity, convinced that the people of Earth must leave their ecologically-ravaged planet behind and join them among the stars. And if humanity doesn't agree, they may need to be saved by force.

But the watershed networks that rose up to save the planet from corporate devastation aren't ready to give up on Earth. Decades ago, they reorganized humanity around the hope of keeping the world liveable. By sharing the burden of decision-making, they've started to heal our wounded planet.

Now corporations, nation-states, and networks all vie to represent humanity to these powerful new beings, and if anyone accepts the aliens' offer, Earth may be lost. With everyone's eyes turned skyward, the future hinges on Judy's effort to create understanding, both within and beyond her own species.

The Deepest Rift

Ruthanna Emrys

In the deepest canyon in the inhabited worlds, giant mantas soar through the air and leave patterned structures behind. A team of sapiologists seek to prove that these delicate filaments are true language, not just bee's dance. But time has run out, and their reckoning is upon them. Will they prove that their research is valid, or will they be scattered to the corners of the galaxy?

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

Masters of Space

E. E. "Doc" Smith
E. Everett Evans

The Masters had ruled all space with an unconquerable iron fist. But the Masters were gone. And this new, young race who came now to take their place -- could they hope to defeat the ancient Enemy of All?

The Book of Strange New Things

Michel Faber

Peter - devoted pastor, dedicated missionary, and loving husband to his wife, Bea - has just accepted a demanding and perilous new job. He's to travel to a new planet, Oasis, to work for a mysterious corporation called USIC. He's tasked with reaching out to the indigenous race, to make sure they are as peaceful as they seem. Resolutely devout and strengthened by his letters from Bea at home, Peter undertakes his job with complete focus. The Oasans are shockingly open to his teachings, but things start to unravel when Bea's missives from Earth take a dark tone. Earth appears to be coming apart at the seams: typhoons and earthquakes are devastating whole countries and governments are crumbling. Even the hospital where she works has ceased to function. Their unearthly divide is testing Peter and Bea's relationship to a startlingly degree. Peter is thrown into crisis. USIC might be hiding its true motives in developing Oasis, and the Oasans themselves are frustratingly opaque. Bea's desperate letters are only fomenting his doubt. Peter is suddenly faced with an impossible-and dangerous-decision: to follow his faith, or follow his heart. His life depends on it.

Eifelheim

Michael Flynn

In 1349, one small town in Germany disappeared and has never been resettled. Tom, a contemporary historian, and his theoretical physicist girlfriend Sharon, become interested. Tom indeed becomes obsessed. By all logic, the town should have survived, but it didn't and that violates everything Tom knows about history. What's was special about Eifelheim that it utterly disappeared more than 600 years ago?

Father Deitrich is the village priest of Oberhochwald, the village that will soon gain the name of Teufelheim, in later years corrupted to Eifelheim, in the year 1348, when the Black Death is gathering strength across Europe but is still not nearby. Deitrich is an educated man, knows science and philosophy, and to his astonishment becomes the first contact between humanity and an alien race from a distant star when their interstellar ship crashes in the nearby forest. It is a time of wonders, in the shadow of the plague.

Tom and Sharon, and Father Deitrich, have a strange and intertwined destiny of tragedy and triumph in this brilliant SF novel by the winner of the Robert A. Heinlein Award.

Saturn Rukh

Robert L. Forward

In the near future five intrepid men and women have been paid a billion dollars each to risk the first voyage into the upper atmosphere of Saturn. The goal: to convert atmospheric chemicals into fuel to power interplanetary spaceships.

But no one anticipates a crash landing on one of the enormous flying creatures known as rukhs that live in Saturn's atmosphere.

Starman

Alan Dean Foster

An innocent alien from a distant planet learns what it means to be a man in love.

When his spacecraft is shot down over Wisconsin, Starman arrives at the remote cabin of a distraught young widow, Jenny Hayden, and clones the form of her dead husband. The alien convinces Jenny to drive him to Arizona, explaining that if he isn't, he'll die. Hot on their trail are government agents, intent on capturing the alien, dead or alive. En route, Starman demonstrates the power of universal love, while Jenny rediscovers her human feelings for passion.

Sarah Canary

Karen Joy Fowler

The Washington Territory, 1873. The woman who appeared without warning in the forest clearing was small, dressed all in black, and of indeterminate age. Her hair was cropped and she was babbling in some incomprehensible tongue. Chin Ah Kin thought she might be a ghost-lover--an immortal sent by the gods to enchant him. His more practical uncle thought otherwise: a white woman in a Chinese railway workers' camp could only be trouble. He ordered Chin to return her to her white world.

Thus begins Sarah Canary, Karen Joy Fowler's bewitching odyssey of the Old West that speaks across a hundred years of American experience. As Sarah Canary and her raging entourage move across the green landscape of the Pacific Northwest, each new encounter with America's boisterous frontier offers intriguing insights into the extravagant myths and legends of the past which have evolved into the pillars of our national heritage. Part adventure story, part history lesson, part flight of marvelous fantasy, Sarah Canary achieves that true rarity of excellence: a novel of ideas and wit that can raise tears as well as laughter.

The Orchid Cage

Herbert W. Franke

On a distant planet, not too different from Earth, there stands a mechanized city with no visible inhabitants. Obviously of a highly developed civilization, the question is, who built it, where are they. and what can humans learn from them?

Triptych

J. M. Frey

IN THE NEAR FUTURE, humankind has mastered the arts of peace, tolerance, and acceptance. At least, that's what we claim.

But then they arrive. Aliens--the last of a dead race. Suffering culture shock of the worst kind, they must take refuge on a world they cannot understand; one which cannot comprehend the scope of their loss. Taciturn Gwen Pierson and super-geek Basil Grey are Specialists for the Institute--an organization set up to help alien integration into our societies. They take in Kalp, a widower who escaped his dying world with nothing but his own life and the unfinished toy he was making for a child that will never be born. But on the aliens' world, family units come in threes, and when Kalp turns to them for comfort, they unintentionally, but happily, find themselves Kalp's lovers.

And then, aliens--and the Specialists who have been most accepting of them--start dying, picked off by assassins. The people of Earth, it seems, are not quite as tolerant as they proclaim.

Touring with the Alien

Carolyn Ives Gilman

Sturgeon and Hugo Award-nominated Novelette

This story originally appeared in Clarkesworld, Issue 115, April 2016. It can also be found in the anthologies:

The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume 11 (2017), edited by Jonathan Strahan
The Best Science Fiction of the Year Volume 2 (2017), edited by Neil Clarke
The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Fourth Annual Collection (2017), edited by Gardner Dozois
Not One of Us: Stories of Aliens on Earth (2018), edited by Neil Clarke

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

Singing the Dogstar Blues

Alison Goodman

Seventeen-year-old Joss is a rebel, and a student of time travel at the prestigious Centre for Neo-Historical Studies. This year, for the first time, the Centre has an alien student: Mavkel, from the planet Choria, who has somehow survived the usually fatal loss of his linked partner Kelmav. And Mavkel has chosen Joss, of all people, as his roommate and study partner. She gradually realises that she is expected to link with him, as she is the most open of all the students.

Then Mavkel gets sick. Joss quickly realizes that his will to live is draining away. The only way she can help Mavkel is by breaking the Centre's strictest rules - and that means going back in time to change history.

The new Firebird edition of Alison Goodman's acclaimed first genre-bending adventure features a short story about Joss and Mav's after-book adventures, originally published in Firebirds Rising.

Nine Last Days on Planet Earth

Daryl Gregory

Hugo Award-nominated Short Story

When the seeds rained down from deep space, it may have been the first stage of an alien invasion--or something else entirely. How much time do we have left, and do we even understand what timescale to use? As a slow apocalypse blooms across the Earth, planets and plants, animals and microbes, all live and die and evolve at different scales. Is one human life long enough to unravel the mystery?

This story is included in the anthologies The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of the Year: Volume Thirteen (2019), edited by Jonathan Strahan, and The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume Four (2019), edited by Neil Clarke.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com

Gift from the Stars

James E. Gunn

The age-old question about alien existence and human contact is explored in a new way in this collection of six novellas, previously anthologized in ANOLOG magazine. When disillusioned aerospace engineer Adrian Mast buys a book at a remainder sale, the last things he expects to find in its appendix are alien spacecraft designs. With the help of the bookstore owner, Adrian tracks down the author—only to find him in a mental institution anguishing over the intentions of the aliens who sent the designs to him. By bluffing a bureaucrat intent on thwarting their progress, the two friends continue their quest for the stars and go ahead with the spacecraft designs. Having successfully launched their ship 15 years later, the questions that remain are: What were the intentions of the aliens? and Is mankind ready to face what's out there?

The Listeners

James E. Gunn

After fifty-one long years of patient waiting, the message has finally arrived. They have dedicated their lives to trying to decipher the eerie silence that resounds from space and now there is finally a sound after decades of quiet. In the beginning there is a hail of celebration, the Project has finally produced results, but then the questions begin. What does the message mean? Could it be 'we come in peace' or 'get ready for world domination'?

The message baffles Earth. Only one man has the power to make the decision and it could mean intergalactic warfare if he makes the wrong choice. Director MacDonald holds in his hands the fate of Earth, the universe and the Project, which is dedicated to answering questions that have plagued humanity for centuries. Will he make the correct choice?

Camouflage

Joe Haldeman

Two aliens have wandered Earth for centuries. The Changeling has survived by adapting the forms of many different organisms. The Chameleon destroys anything or anyone that threatens it.

Now, a sunken relic that holds the key to their origins calls to them to take them home--but the Chameleon has decided there's only room for one.

Mindbridge

Joe Haldeman

In the space of a few years, Joe Haldeman has come to be recognized as one of the best writers of science fiction of our time. Mindbridge, a novel at once traditional in ist plot and a daring new departure in its structure, is certain to add to this reputation.

Jacque LeFavre live in the formidable world of the future. A pioneer in interstellar colonization, he is the co-discoverer of a creature that acts as a psychic link... allowing one person to sense directly the thoughts and emotions of another. But he learns the terrible price fo this power when his partner suddenly dies.

Older, disillusioned, he is one of a team that confronts the L'vrai, a race of angelic beauty but with a callous disregard for life. They are expanding through the universe and view humankind as a removable obstacle. LeFavre's assignment: establsih a telepathic link with a L'vrai leader and find an alternative to the interstellar war that threatens the extinction of one of the two races.

Alien Contact

Marty Halpern

Are we alone? From War of the Worlds to Invasion of the Body Snatchers, ET to Close Encounters, creators of science fiction have always eagerly speculated on just how the story of alien contact would play out. Editor Marty Halpern has gathered together some of the best stories of the last 30 years, by today's most exciting genre writers, weaving a tapestry that covers a broad range of scenarios: from the insidious, to the violent, to the transcendent.

Contents:

Introduction: Beginnings... - (2012) - essay by Marty Halpern
The Thought War - (2008) - shortstory by Paul J. McAuley
How to Talk to Girls at Parties - (2006) - shortstory by Neil Gaiman
Face Value - (1986) - shortstory by Karen Joy Fowler
The Road Not Taken - (1985) - novelette by Harry Turtledove
The Aliens Who Knew, I Mean, Everything - (1984) - shortstory by George Alec Effinger
I Am the Doorway - (1971) - shortstory by Stephen King
Recycling Strategies for the Inner City - (1990) - shortstory by Pat Murphy
The 43 Antarean Dynasties - (1997) - shortstory by Mike Resnick
The Gold Bug - (2007) - novelette by Orson Scott Card
Kin - (2006) - shortstory by Bruce McAllister
Guerrilla Mural of a Siren's Song - (1989) - shortstory by Ernest Hogan
Angel - (1987) - shortstory by Pat Cadigan
The First Contact with the Gorgonids - (1992) - shortstory by Ursula K. Le Guin
Sunday Night Yams at Minnie and Earl's - (2001) - novella by Adam-Troy Castro
A Midwinter's Tale - (1988) - shortstory by Michael Swanwick
Texture of Other Ways - (1999) - shortstory by Mark W. Tiedemann
To Go Boldly - (2009) - shortstory by Cory Doctorow
If Nudity Offends You - (1988) - shortstory by Elizabeth Moon
Laws of Survival - (2007) - novelette by Nancy Kress
What You Are About to See - (2008) - shortstory by Jack Skillingstead
Amanda and the Alien - (1983) - shortstory by Robert Silverberg
Exo-Skeleton Town - (2000) - novelette by Jeffrey Ford
Lambing Season - (2002) - shortstory by Molly Gloss
Swarm - (1982) - novelette by Bruce Sterling
MAXO Signals: A New and Unfortunate Solution to the Fermi Paradox - (2007) - shortstory by Charles Stross (variant of MAXO Signals 2005)
Last Contact - (2007) - shortstory by Stephen Baxter
About the Contributors (Alien Contact) - (2012) - essay by uncredited

Chocky

John Wyndham

At first they thought that Matthew was just goining through a phase of talking to himself. And like many parents, they waited for him to grow out of it. But as time passed it became worse, not better. Matthew's conversations with himself grew more and more intense. It was like listening to one end of a telephone conversation while someone argued, cajoled and reasoned with another person you couldn't hear or see. Then Matthew began doing things he couldn't do before. Like counting in binary code mathematics. So he told them about Chocky, the person who lived in his head. Whoever or whatever Chocky was, it wasn't childish imagination. It was far too intelligent and frightening for that.

Stowaway to Mars

John Wyndham

Aircraft designer Dale Currance undertakes a journey to Mars in an effort to capture the prize being offered to the first man to complete an interplanetary journey, but a female stowaway throws his plans into disarray.

The Midwich Cuckoos

John Wyndham

In the sleepy English village of Midwich, a mysterious silver object appears and all the inhabitants fall unconscious. A day later the object is gone and everyone awakens unharmed – except that all the women in the village are discovered to be pregnant. The resultant children of Midwich do not belong to their parents: all are blonde, all are golden eyed. They grow up too fast and their minds exhibit frightening abilities that give them control over others and brings them into conflict with the villagers just as a chilling realisation dawns on the world outside . . .

The Midwich Cuckoos is the classic tale of aliens in our midst, exploring how we respond when confronted by those who are innately superior to us in every conceivable way.

The Midwich Cuckoos was made into a feature film title The Village of the Damned.

Man of Two Worlds

Brian Herbert
Frank Herbert

Frank Herbert's last published novel, a charming and witty science fiction adventure coauthored with his son Brian. What if the entire universe were the creation of alien minds? After an unfortunate spaceship accident, the hedonistic and ambitious human Lutt Hansen, Jr., finds himself sharing his body and mind with a naive alien dreamer. The two have to survive numerous dangers, schemes and assassination attempts... but can they survive each other?

The Black Cloud

Fred Hoyle

Earth was dying...

One fourth of its population was dead. The rest had little time to live.

A mass of interstellar matter had invaded the solar system, fling planets out of orbit and blocking off the sun. In that titanic disaster, Man had one small chance to survive: Appeal to an alien intelligence that might exist and that might - or might not - care enough to help!

The Little Homo Sapiens Scientist

S. L. Huang

A dark retelling of The Little Mermaid from the author of HUNTING MONSTERS

I suppose if this is going to be recorded somewhere for posterity, I should set the record straight. The ghostwriter will probably cut it all, but hey, it's the principle of the thing.

Dr. Cadence Mbella is the world's most celebrated scholar of the atargati: sentient, intelligent deep-water beings who are most definitely not mermaids. When Cadence decides to release a captive atargati from scientific experimentation and interrogation, she knows her career and her life is forfeit. But she still yearns for the atargati--there is still so much to know about their physiology, their society, their culture. And Cadence would do anything to more fully understand the atargati... no matter what the cost.

Rian Hughes

At Jodrell Band in England Observatory in England, a radio telescope has detected a mysterious signal of extraterrestrial origin--a message that may be the first communication from an interstellar civilization. Has humanity made first contact? Is the signal itself a form of alien life? Could it be a threat? If so, how will the people of Earth respond?

Jack Fenwick, artificial intelligence expert, believes that he and his associates at tech startup Intelligencia can interpret the message and find a way to step into the realm the signal encodes. What they find is a complex alien network beyond anything mankind has imagined.

Drawing on Dada, punk and the modernist movements of the twentieth century, XX is assembled from redacted NASA reports, artwork, magazine articles, secret transcripts and a novel within a novel. Deconstructing layout and language in order to explore how ideas propagate, acclaimed designer and artist Rian Hughes's debut novel presents a compelling vision of humanity's unique place in the universe, and a realistic depiction of what might happen in the wake of the biggest scientific discovery in human history.

Operation Terror

Murray Leinster

Operation Terror, written by one of the giants of the golden age of sci-fi, is a thrilling tale about a rather unconventional type of alien invasion. The story tells of an unidentified, large object that touched down in Boulder Lake Park, Colorado. What had initially been perceived as a meteor turned out to be a large, unusual alien vessel carrying many strange beings with paralyzing rays that could render their victims blind.

Can the lone survivors who have yet to be caught by the aliens actually escape? And is it really an alien attack, or a coordinated offensive that is secretly based on a Russian agenda?

Sidewise in Time

Murray Leinster

Six selected short stories from the master of pulp, Murray Leinster - pen name of William Fitzgerald Jenkins, whose prolific career spanned the first six decades of the 20th Century.

Contents:

1 - Introduction (Sidewise in Time) - essay
9 - Sidewise in Time - (1934) - novella
77 - Proxima Centauri - (1935) - novella
140 - A Logic Named Joe - (1946) - short story [as by Will F. Jenkins]
160 - De Profundis - (1945) - short story
175 - The Fourth-Dimensional Demonstrator - (1935) - short story
191 - The Power - (1945) - short story

The Wailing Asteroid

Murray Leinster

There was no life on the asteroid, but the miles of rock-hewn corridors through which the earth party wandered left no doubt about the purpose of the asteroid.

It was a mighty fortress, stocked with weapons of destruction beyond man's power to understand.

And yet there was no life here, nor had there been for untold centuries.

What race had built this stronghold? What unimaginable power were they defending against? Why was it abandoned? There was no answer, all was dead.

But--not quite all.

For in a room above the tomb-like fortress a powerful transmitter beamed its birdlike, fluting sounds toward earth. Near it, on a huge star-map of the universe, with light-years measured by inches, ten tiny red sparks were moving, crawling inexorably toward the center.

Moving, at many times the speed of light, with the acquired mass of suns... moving, on a course that would pass through the solar system.

The unknown aliens would not even see our sun explode from the force of their passing, would not even notice the tiny speck called Earth as it died....

The History of the Invasion Told in Five Dogs

Kelly Jennings

This short story oginally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, May-June 2017. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Fifth Annual Collection (2018), edited by Gardner Dozois.

Spar

Kij Johnson

A lone survivor of a space shipwreck is trapped in a raft with an alien, and is pitted against it in a sexual competition for survival and dominance.

Read this story online for free at Clarkesworld.

The Space Between Us

Douglas Johnstone

When three people suffer strokes after seeing dazzling lights over Edinburgh, then awake completely recovered, they're convinced their ordeal is connected to the alien creature discovered on a nearby beach... an adrenaline-soaked, deeply humane, life-affirming first-contact novel...

Connecting will change everything...

Lennox is a troubled teenager with no family. Ava is eight months pregnant and fleeing her abusive husband. Heather is a grieving mother and cancer sufferer. They don't know each other, but when a meteor streaks over Edinburgh, all three suffer instant, catastrophic strokes...

...only to wake up the following day in hospital, miraculously recovered.

When news reaches them of an octopus-like creature washed up on the shore near where the meteor came to earth, Lennox senses that some extra-terrestrial force is at play. With the help of Ava, Heather and a journalist, Ewan, he rescues the creature they call 'Sandy' and goes on the run.

But they aren't the only ones with an interest in the alien... close behind are Ava's husband, the police and a government unit who wants to capture the creature, at all costs. And Sandy's arrival may have implications beyond anything anyone could imagine...

Spaceman of Bohemia

Jaroslav Kalfar

Orphaned as a boy, raised in the Czech countryside by his doting grandparents, Jakub Procházka has risen from small-time scientist to become the country's first astronaut. When a dangerous solo mission to Venus offers him both the chance at heroism he's dreamt of, and a way to atone for his father's sins as a Communist informer, he ventures boldly into the vast unknown. But in so doing, he leaves behind his devoted wife, Lenka, whose love, he realizes too late, he has sacrificed on the altar of his ambitions.

Alone in Deep Space, Jakub discovers a possibly imaginary giant alien spider, who becomes his unlikely companion. Over philosophical conversations about the nature of love, life and death, and the deliciousness of bacon, the pair form an intense and emotional bond. Will it be enough to see Jakub through a clash with secret Russian rivals and return him safely to Earth for a second chance with Lenka?

First Contact

Damon Knight

Contents:

7 - Introduction (First Contact) - essay by Damon Knight
9 - First Contact - (1945) - novelette by Murray Leinster
45 - Doomsday Deferred - (1949) - short story by Murray Leinster [as by Will F. Jenkins]
62 - The Hurkle Is a Happy Beast - (1949) - short story by Theodore Sturgeon
72 - Not Final! - [Jovians - 1] - (1941) - short story by Isaac Asimov
92 - The Blind Pilot - (1960) - short story by Nathalie Henneberg (trans. of Au pilote aveugle 1959) [as by Charles Henneberg]
111 - The Silly Season - (1950) - short story by C. M. Kornbluth
128 - Goldfish Bowl - (1942) - novelette by Robert A. Heinlein [as by Anson MacDonald]
164 - In Value Deceived - (1950) - short story by H. B. Fyfe
177 - The Waveries - (1945) - short story by Fredric Brown
203 - In the Abyss - (1896) - short story by H. G. Wells

The Best of Damon Knight

Damon Knight

Table of Contents:

Dark of the Knight - (1976) - essay by Barry N. Malzberg
Introduction (The Best of Damon Knight) - (1976) - essay by Damon Knight
Not With a Bang - (1950) - shortstory
To Serve Man - (1950) - shortstory
Cabin Boy - (1951) - novelette
The Analogues - (1952) - shortstory
Babel II - (1953) - novelette
Special Delivery - (1954) - novelette
Thing of Beauty - (1958) - novelette
Anachron - (1954) - shortstory
Extempore - (1956) - shortstory
Backward, O Time - (1956) - shortstory
The Last Word - (1957) - shortstory
Man in the Jar - (1957) - shortstory
The Enemy - (1958) - shortstory
Eripmav - (1958) - shortstory
A Likely Story - (1956) - shortstory
Time Enough - (1960) - shortstory
Mary - (1964) - novelette
The Handler - (1960) - shortstory
The Big Pat Boom - (1963) - shortstory
Semper Fi - (1964) - shortstory
Masks - (1968) - shortstory
Down There - (1973) - shortstory

E. T. the Extra-Terrestrial in His Adventure on Earth

William Kotzwinkle

Captivating audiences of all ages, this timeless story follows the unforgettable journey of a lost alien and the 10-year-old boy he befriends. Join Elliot, Gertie, and Michael as they come together to help E.T. find his way back home.

An Alien Light

Nancy Kress

This science fiction novel tells how the human race is at war with the Ged, a species that is baffled by mankind's ability to turn violence upon itself. In order to defeat the humans, the Ged must first understand them, but they don't anticipate that they will meet opposition from a few humans.

Savior

Nancy Kress

Sturgeon Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, June 2000. The story can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Eighteenth Annual Collection (2001), edited by Gardner Dozois. It is included in the collections Nano Comes to Clifford Falls: And Other Stories (2008) and AI Unbound: Two Stories of Artificial Intelligence (2012).

Leviathan's Deep

Jayge Carr

Delyafam is our world! And these "human" strangers had best move warily here! I am the Kimassu Lady; my duty is to restore equity. "Madame Judge-and-jury," Neill, the dead Terren walking, calls me. "Grem; policechief." Words. Terre words. Though I have learned their language, I cannot understand them. So many differences: their "technology"; their "war"; their males unnaturally the rulers; their lack of all female virtues, especially honor.

Neill claims we are outgunned, outmanned, and outscienced. Worse, my ethical, fiercely conservative people are contemptuous of dangers they cannot understand and will not see; dare I defy... yet I must somehow drive these "guests" who-would-be-conquerors from our blue seas. I restore equity. There--must--be--a--way......

A moving fascinating tale of two opposed alien cultures.

Dark City

Frank Lauria

It's always raining in the City. And it always seems to be Night as well.

Separated from his wife, John Murdoch awakens alone in a strange hotel to learn he is wanted for a series of brutal killings but he can't remember if he did or didn't commit these murders.

Is John Murdoch mentally disturbed, or is he is the only salvation from the violent killings that are happening? In his search for the answers, John Murdock will uncover an iceberg of secrets which will shatter his world.

The Shape of Silence

Stephen Leigh

First contact was never supposed to be like this. A sudden rift appears in near-earth space, causing electronic components to permanently fail and cause total chaos. As Earth's fragile technological society disintegrates, no one can answer the obvious question - what is the rift, and who or what has created it.

A new generation comes to age attempting to answer these questions, and Taria Spears, an anthropologist, is selected as part of the crew on the exploratory ship Lightbringer. Lightbringer's mission is to investigate the worm-hole like Rift and, if possible, to pass through it to find out what lies on the other side, and to seek some answers.

But what if all they find is an alien culture where sound, not sight is the primary sense?

Eden

A six-man crew crash-lands on Eden, fourth planet from another sun. The men find a strange world that grows ever stranger, and everywhere there are images of death. The crew's attempt to communicate with this civilization leads to violence and to a cruel truth-cruel precisely because it is so human.

Fiasco

The planet Quinta is pocked by ugly mounds and covered by a spiderweb-like network. It is a kingdom of phantoms and of a beauty afflicted by madness. In stark contrast, the crew of the spaceship Hermes represents a knowledge-seeking Earth. As they approach Quinta, a dark poetry takes over and leads them into a nightmare of misunderstanding.

His Master's Voice

Scientists studying the phenomenon of neutrino radiation suddenly realize that the cosmic emissions are conveying a message for humanity, and the race is on to decode the alien transmission.

Solaris

Rejoice: A Knife to the Heart

Who's testing whom? When Kris Kelvin arrives at the planet Solaris to study the ocean that covers its surface, he is forced to confront a painful, hitherto unconscious memory embodied in the living physical likeness of a long-dead lover. Others examining the planet, Kelvin learns, are plagued with their own repressed and newly corporeal memories. Scientists speculate that the Solaris ocean may be a massive brain that creates these incarnate memories, its purpose in doing so unknown.

The first of Lem's novels to be published in America and now considered a classic, SOLARIS raises a question: Can we truly understand the universe around us without first understanding what lies within?

Lem himself, who read English fluently, repeatedly voiced his disappointment about the Kilmartin-Cox translation of the French translation, and it has generally been considered second-rate. In 2011, the first direct Polish-to-English translation by Bill Johnston was released as an audiobook narrated by Alessandro Juliani, and then as an e-book.

Radiomen

Eleanor Lerman

There are two themes to Radiomen. First, if there are aliens interacting with our world they are likely just as confused about who or what God is as human beings are; and second, whoever they are, they're probably just as fond of dogs as we are.

Laurie, a woman who works at a bar at Kennedy airport doesn't remember that when she was a child, she met an alien on the fire escape of a building where her uncle kept a shortwave radio. The radio is part of a universal network of repeaters maintained by an unknown alien race; they use the network to broadcast prayers into the universe.

She meets a psychic who is actually part of a Scientology-like cult called the "Blue Awareness," as well as a late-night radio host. All have their own reasons for unraveling the mystery of the lost radio network.

Laurie is given a strange dog by her neighbor, an immigrant and a member of the Dogon tribe - people who believe they were visited by aliens long ago and repeat a myth about how the aliens brought dog-like animals with them. All Dogon dogs are supposedly descended from that animal.

As conflict develops between the Blue Awareness leader and the other characters, the Dogon acts as an intermediary between the humans, who want to understand why the aliens need the radio network, and the aliens who need the humans to help them find a lost element of the universal network.

Girl in Landscape

Jonathan Lethem

One the irrepressibly inventive Jonathan Lethem could weld science fiction and the Western into a mesmerizing novel of exploration and otherness, sexual awakening and loss. At the age of 13 Pella Marsh loses her mother and her home on the scorched husk that is planet Earth. Her sorrowing family emigrates to the Planet of the Archbuilders, whose mysterious inhabitants have names like Lonely Dumptruck and Hiding Kneel--and a civilization that and frightens their human visitors.?

On this new world, spikily independent Pella becomes as uneasy envoy between two species. And at the same time is unwilling drawn to a violent loner who embodies all the paranoid machismo of the frontier ethic. Combining the tragic grandeur of John Ford's The Searchers and the sexual tension of Lolita and transporting them to a planet light years, Girl in Landscape is a tour de force.

Enemy Mine

Barry B. Longyear

Hugo, Nebula and Locus award winning novella. It originally appeared in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, September 1979. At least three different versions of the novella have been published. It can be found in the anthologies The Best Science Fiction Novellas of the Year #2 (1980) edited by Terry Carr, Nebula Winners Fifteen (1981), edited by Frank Herbert, Baker's Dozen: 13 Short Science Fiction Novels (1985) edited by Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg and Charles G. Waugh, and The Hugo Winners, Volume 5: (1980-82) (1986), edited by Isaac Asimov. It is half of Tor Double #6: Enemy Mine/Another Orphan (1989, with John Kessel) and is included in the collection Manifest Destiny (1980).

The story was made into the movie Enemy Mine directed by Wolfgang Petersen and starring Dennis Quaid and Louis Gossett, Jr. in 1985. The movie in turn was the basis van the novelization Enemy Mine (1985), written in collaboration with David Gerrold.

Steven Erikson

An alien AI has been sent to the solar system as representative of three advanced species. Its mission is to save the Earth's ecosystem - and the biggest threat to that is humanity. But we are also part of the system, so the AI must make a choice. Should it save mankind or wipe it out? Are we worth it?

The AI is all-powerful, and might as well be a god. So it sets up some conditions. Violence is now impossible. Large-scale destruction of natural resources is impossible. Food and water will be provided for those who really, truly need them. You can't even bully someone on the internet any more. The old way of doing things is gone. But a certain thin-skinned US president, among others, is still wedded to late-stage capitalism. Can we adapt? Can we prove ourselves worthy? And are we prepared to give up free will for a world without violence?

And above it all, on a hidden spaceship, one woman watches. A science fiction writer, she was abducted from the middle of the street in broad daylight. She is the only person the AI will talk to. And she must make a decision.

Omega Sol

Scott MacKay

Dr. Cameron Conrad becomes humanity's ambassador for the world's first contact with an extraterrestrial species, who are bent on a task that will destroy the human race, unless Cameron can convince the aliens that humanity is worth saving.

Learning the World

Ken MacLeod

Humanity has spread to every star within 500 light-years of its half-forgotten origin, coloring the sky with a haze of habitats. Societies rise and fall. Incautious experiments burn fast and fade. On the fringes, less modified humans get on with the job of settling a universe that has, so far, been empty of intelligent life.

The ancient starship But the Sky, My Lady! The Sky! is entering orbit around a promising new system after a four hundred year journey. For its long-lived inhabitants, the centuries have been busy. Now a younger generation is eager to settle the system. The ship is a seed-pod ready to burst.

Then they detect curious electromagnetic emissions from the system's Earth-like world. As the nature of the signals becomes clear, the choices facing the humans become stark.

On Ground, second world from the sun, a young astronomer searches for his system's outermost planet. A moving point of light thrills, then disappoints him. It's only a comet. His physicist colleague Orro takes time off from trying to invent a flying-machine to calculate the comet's trajectory. Something is very odd about that comet's path.

They are not the only ones for whom the world has changed.

"We are not living in the universe we thought we lived in yesterday. We have to start learning the world all over again."

On a Planet Alien

Barry N. Malzberg

Folsom's Planet - An Alien land yet so familiar. If the mission were a success, Folsom's planet would bear his name for eternity. The barbarians would be civilized; the planet would join the Federation; the Federation's integrity would be preserved. But Hans Folsom had to be on guard. The aliens were intractable, his crew possibly traitorous. There was an incident during the voyage he couldn't quite remember. And a prophetic runic stone Had ancient spacemen visited here in the past? Did that explain the strange religions, the ancient ruins, the mysterious runic stone?

Sandkings (collection)

George R. R. Martin

When Simon Kress returned to his home planet of Baldur from an offworld business trip, he was amused to find that his tank of Earth piranhas had cannibalized themselves into extinction, and of the two exotic animals that roamed his estate, only one remained. Now, in search of some new pets to satisfy his cruel pursuit of amusement, Simon finds a new shop in the city where he is intrigued by a new lifeform he has never heard of before ... a collection of multi-colored sandkings. The curator explains that the insect-like animals, no larger than Simon's fingernails, are not insects, but animals with a highly-evolved hive intelligence capable of staging wars between the different colors, and even religion--in the form of worship of their owner. The curator's warning to Simon about the regularity of their feeding, unfortunately, was not taken seriously.... "Outer Limits" Episode, Hugo Award Winner, Locus Poll Award Winner, Nebula Award Winner

Table of Contents

Nimisha's Ship

Anne McCaffrey

Nimisha Boynton-Rondymense was the body-heir of Lady Rezalla and, as such, was the heiress of one of the First Families on Vega III. But even as a child she eschewed the formalities of her aristocratic background and was happiest in her father's shipyard. By the time she was in her twenties she was the designer of the most advanced space yacht in the galaxy, and was owner of the Rondymense shipyards.

It was on a test of her Mark 5 prototype that things went wrong. In an empty space field, suitable for test runs, she was suddenly confronted with the boiling white pout of a wormhole, was sucked in, only to be thrown out into an unknown dimension of space. She was not the first. As she explored this new, unfamiliar section of the universe she found traces of ships that had been marooned over many centuries.

Not knowing if she would ever return to the world she knew, Nimisha chose to land on 'Erewhon' - fascinating, terrifying, beautiful and frightening - and inhabited not only by three survivors of a previous Vegan ship but by something else...

Cryptic

Jack McDevitt

Nebula Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, April 1983. The story can also be found in the antholgoy The Year's Best Science Fiction: First Annual Collection (1984), edited by Gardner Dozois, and the collections Standard Candles (1996) and Cryptic: The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt (2009).

Read the full story for free at the Baen website.

Infinity Beach

Jack McDevitt

We are alone. That is the verdict, after centuries of Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence missions and space exploration. The only living things in the Universe are found on the Nine Worlds settled from Earth, and the starships that knit them together. Or so it's believed, until Dr. Kimberly Brandywine sets out to find what happened to her clone-sister Emily, who, after the final, unsuccessful manned SETI expedition, disappeared along with the rest of her ship's crew.

Following a few ominous clues, Kim discovers the ship's log was faked. Something happened out there in the darkness between the stars, and she's prepared to go to any length to find answers. Even if it means giving up her career...stealing a starship...losing her lover. Kim is about to discover the truth about her sister -- and about more than she ever dared imagine.

The Hercules Text

Jack McDevitt

From a remote corner of the galaxy a message is being sent. The continuous beats of a pulsar have become odd, irregular... artificial. it can only be a code. Frantically, a research team struggles to decipher the alien communication. And what the scientists discover is destined to shake the foundations of empires around this world - from Wall Street to the Vatican.

Sacrifice of Fools

Ian McDonald

Protestants, Catholics, aliens... Just another division in Belfast

When the alien Shian come to Earth, they offer technology in exchange for a home. Belfast, Northern Ireland, is where eighty thousand of them settle. From that point on, the already-divided city takes on yet another partition. The Shian integrate themselves into the city's culture, becoming one more set of faces in the crowd. Now, a series of ghastly murders has stunned the city and affected both the Shian and the humans.

Andy Gillespie, a Loyalist and former criminal, is immediately named the main suspect in the killings. To clear his name, he must find the true perpetrators, and in order to do so, he must get help from any source possible--be it Protestant, Catholic, or extraterrestrial.

Shortlisted for the James Tiptree Jr. Award, Sacrifice of Fools depicts a city at once familiar and peculiar. Belfast resident Ian McDonald's interpretation of his hometown is one in which the people live their lives to the best of their abilities; one in which they have to deal with the basics of life with extraterrestrials, from language barriers to surprising new fetishes. Here, Belfastians discover how little things truly change.

The Moon and the Sun

Vonda N. McIntyre

In seventeenth-century France, Louis XIV rules with flamboyant ambition. In his domain, wealth and beauty take all; frivolity begets cruelty; science and alchemy collide. From the Hall of Mirrors to the vermin-infested attics of the Chateau at Versailles, courtiers compete to please the king, sacrificing fortune, principles, and even the sacred bond between brother and sister.

By the fiftieth year of his reign, Louis XIV has made France the most powerful state in the western world. Yet the Sun King's appetite for glory knows no bounds. In a bold stroke, he sends his natural philosopher on an expedition to seek the source of immortality -- the rare, perhaps mythical, sea monsters. For the glory, of his God, his country, and his king, Father Yves de la Croix returns with his treasures: one heavy shroud packed in ice...and a covered basin that imprisons a shrieking creature.

Embassytown

China Miéville

China Miéville doesn't follow trends, he sets them. Relentlessly pushing his own boundaries as a writer-and in the process expanding the boundaries of the entire field-with Embassytown, Miéville has crafted an extraordinary novel that is not only a moving personal drama but a gripping adventure of alien contact and war.

In the far future, humans have colonized a distant planet, home to the enigmatic Ariekei, sentient beings famed for a language unique in the universe, one that only a few altered human ambassadors can speak.

Avice Benner Cho, a human colonist, has returned to Embassytown after years of deep-space adventure. She cannot speak the Ariekei tongue, but she is an indelible part of it, having long ago been made a figure of speech, a living simile in their language.

When distant political machinations deliver a new ambassador to Arieka, the fragile equilibrium between humans and aliens is violently upset. Catastrophe looms, and Avice is torn between competing loyalties-to a husband she no longer loves, to a system she no longer trusts, and to her place in a language she cannot speak yet speaks through her.

Solar Express

L. E. Modesitt, Jr.

You can't militarize space. This one rule has led to decades of peaceful development of space programs worldwide. However, increasing resource scarcity and a changing climate on Earth's surface is causing some interested parties to militarize, namely India, the North American Union, and the Sinese Federation.

The discovery of a strange artifact by Dr. Alayna Wong precipitates a crisis. What appears to be a hitherto undiscovered comet is soon revealed to be an alien structure on a cometary trajectory toward the sun. Now there is a race between countries to see who can study and control the artifact dubbed the "Solar Express" before it perhaps destroys itself.

Leading the way for the North American Union is Alayna's friend, Captain Christopher Tavoian, one of the first shuttle pilots to be trained for combat in space. But, as the alien craft gets closer to its destination, it begins to alter the surface of the sun in strange new ways, ways that could lead Alayna to revolutionary discoveries-provided Chris can prevent war from breaking out as he navigates among the escalating tensions between nations.

Solar Express is a thrilling, new, hard science fiction novel from New York Times bestselling author L. E. Modesitt, Jr.

Remnant Population

Elizabeth Moon

For forty years, Colony 3245.12 has been Ofelia's home. On this planet far away in space and time from the world of her youth, she has lived and loved, weathered the death of her husband, raised her one surviving child, lovingly tended her garden, and grown placidly old. And it is here that she fully expects to finish out her days--until the shifting corporate fortunes of the Sims Bancorp Company dictates that Colony 3245.12 is to be disbanded, its residents shipped off, deep in cryo-sleep, to somewhere new and strange and not of their choosing. But while her fellow colonists grudgingly anticipate a difficult readjustment on some distant world, Ofelia savors the promise of a golden opportunity. Not starting over in the hurly-burly of a new community... but closing out her life in blissful solitude, in the place she has no intention of leaving. A population of one.

With everything she needs to sustain her, and her independent spirit to buoy her, Ofelia actually does start life over--for the first time on her own terms: free of the demands, the judgments, and the petty tyrannies of others. But when a reconnaissance ship returns to her idyllic domain, and its crew is mysteriously slaughtered, Ofelia realizes she is not the sole inhabitant of her paradise after all. And, when the inevitable time of first contact finally arrives, she will find her life changed yet again–in ways she could never have imagined....

The Weave

Nancy Jane Moore

The Weave tells a first-contact story in which humans, seeking to exploit the much-needed resources of a system inhabited by creatures they assume are "primitive" and defenceless, discover their mistake the hard way. Human Caty Sanjuro, a seasoned marine and dedicated xenologist, and native Sundown, a determined astronomer, struggle to establish communication across the many barriers that divide their species, at first because they share a passionate interest in alien species, but finally because they know that only they can bridge the differences across species threatening catastrophe for both sides.

The Mountain in the Sea

Ray Nayler

Rumors begin to spread of a species of hyperintelligent, dangerous octopus that may have developed its own language and culture. Marine biologist Dr. Ha Nguyen, who has spent her life researching cephalopod intelligence, will do anything for the chance to study them.

The transnational tech corporation DIANIMA has sealed the remote Con Dao Archipelago, where the octopuses were discovered, off from the world. Dr. Nguyen joins DIANIMA's team on the islands: a battle-scarred security agent and the world's first android.

The octopuses hold the key to unprecedented breakthroughs in extrahuman intelligence. The stakes are high: there are vast fortunes to be made by whoever can take advantage of the octopuses' advancements, and as Dr. Nguyen struggles to communicate with the newly discovered species, forces larger than DIANIMA close in to seize the octopuses for themselves.

But no one has yet asked the octopuses what they think. And what they might do about it.

Vessel

Lisa A. Nichols

After Catherine Wells's ship experiences a deadly incident in deep space and loses contact with NASA, the entire world believes her dead. Miraculously -- and mysteriously -- she survived, but with little memory of what happened. Her reentry after a decade away is a turbulent one: her husband has moved on with another woman and the young daughter she left behind has grown into a teenager she barely recognizes.

Catherine, too, is different. The long years alone changed her, and as she readjusts to being home, sometimes she feels disconnected and even, at times, deep rage toward her family and colleagues. There are periods of time she can't account for, too, and she begins waking up in increasingly strange and worrisome locations, like restricted areas of NASA. Suddenly she's questioning everything that happened up in space: how her crewmates died, how she survived, and now, what's happening to her back on Earth.

Usurper of the Sun

Housuke Nojiri

The mysterious Builders have brought humanity to the edge of extinction; can they be reasoned with, or must they be destroyed? Aki Shiraishi is a high school student working in the astronomy club and one of the few witnesses to an amazing event--someone is building a tower on the planet Mercury. Soon, the Builders have constructed a ring around the sun, threatening the ecology of Earth with an immense shadow. Aki is inspired to pursue a career in science, and the truth. She must determine the purpose of the ring and the plans of its creators, as the survival of both species--humanity and the alien Builders--hangs in the balance.

Breed to Come

Andre Norton

Men fled their polluted war ravaged planet, leaving behind a virus from their insidious experimentations. Yet, the animals of the planet thrived, each generation stronger and more intelligent than the last. In the ruins of a university, a huge group of cats, more brilliant than common, sought to master the works of man. They found that the Demons (Mankind) were real. And there was real danger (from Humans) if they ever returned to earth. Then one day a spaceship came.

The People of the Crater

Andre Norton

A flight to a lost world of Antarctica. Garin Featherstone has been sent to explore a mysterious blue haze that was spotted in the polar region. There he discovers a lost civilization and a strange environment of vivid green lands, crimson tree trunks, and golden rivers. He must save Thrala of the light against the lizard men.

This is Andre Norton's first professional published story from 1947. Even the Grand Dame of science fiction had to have her first sale. And she shows her strengths in her first fantastic adventure story.

Lagoon

Nnedi Okorafor

When a massive object crashes into the ocean off the coast of Lagos, Nigeria's most populous and legendary city, three people wandering along Bar Beach (Adaora, the marine biologist- Anthony, the rapper famous throughout Africa- Agu, the troubled soldier) find themselves running a race against time to save the country they love and the world itself... from itself. Lagoon expertly juggles multiple points of view and crisscrossing narratives with prose that is at once propulsive and poetic, combining everything from superhero comics to Nigerian mythology to tie together a story about a city consuming itself.

At its heart a story about humanity at the crossroads between the past, present, and future, Lagoon touches on political and philosophical issues in the rich tradition of the very best science fiction, and ultimately asks us to consider the things that bind us together--and the things that make us human.

There was no time to flee. No time to turn. No time to shriek. And there was no pain. It was like being thrown into the stars.

Nemesis

Isaac Asimov

In the twenty-third century pioneers have escaped the crowded earth for life in self-sustaining orbital colonies. One of the colonies, Rotor, has broken away from the solar system to create its own renegade utopia around an unknown red star two light-years from Earth: a star named Nemesis. Now a fifteen-year-old Rotorian girl has learned of the dire threat that nemesis poses to Earth's people--but she is prevented from warning them. Soon she will realize that Nemesis endangers Rotor as well. And so it will be up to her alone to save both Earth and Rotor as--drawn inexorably by Nemesis, the death star--they hurtle toward certain disaster.

The Gods Themselves

Isaac Asimov

Only a few know the terrifying truth--an outcast Earth scientist, a rebellious alien inhabitant of a dying planet, a lunar-born human intuitionist who senses the imminent annihilation of the Sun. They know the truth--but who will listen? They have foreseen the cost of abundant energy--but who will believe? These few beings, human and alien, hold the key to the Earth's survival.

Number Thirty-Nine Skink

Suzanne Palmer

This short story originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, March-April 2017. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Fifth Annual Collection (2018), edited by Gardner Dozois.

The Painter of Trees

Suzanne Palmer

Sturgeon Award-winning Short Story

This story was first published in Clarkesworld, Issue 153, June 2019, and has been anthologized in The Year's Best Science Fiction Vol. 1: The Saga Anthology of Science Fiction 2020, edited by Jonathan Strahan.

Read or listen to this story for free at Clarkesworld Magazine.

West of the Sun

Edgar Pangborn

After eleven years in space, the Argo landed on the dangerous, unknown planet Lucifer. The crew faced an untamed world of huge, carnivorous birds with wolverine heads and flashing black teeth; furred, ten-foot-tall men; and red-skinned, man-eating pygmies. They fought for mere survival. But their duty was to colonize and populate the planet ... with four men and only two women!

Flying to Valhalla

Charles Pellegrino

As Christopher and Clarice Wayville pilot the relativistic spacecraft Valkyrie toward the inhabited fourth world of Alpha Centauria A, they prepare for the first contact with an intelligent and benign marsupial species. But upon arrival, Chistopher becomes haunted by memories of his own death on the same planet.

The Killing Star

George Zebrowski
Charles Pellegrino

The late 21st century seems like a good time to be alive. Earth is at peace. Humans now command self-replicating machines that create engineering marvels on enormous scales. Artificial habitats dot the solar system. Anti-matter driven Valkyrie rockets carry explorers to the stars at nearly the speed of light. All seems well.

Then, from the uncaring black of space come swarms of relativistic missiles. Though they are merely boulder-sized hunks of metal, they move fast enough to hit with the force of many nuclear arsenals. They are impossible to track and impossible to stop. Humanity is all but wiped out by the horrific bombardment.

A handful of survivors desperately struggle to escape the alien mop-up fleet. They hide close to the sun, inside asteroids, beneath the crusts of moons, within ice rings, and in the fathomless depths of interstellar space. But most are hunted down and slaughtered.

The last man and woman on Earth are captured as zoo specimens. In the belly of an alien starship, a squid-like being relates to them the pitiless logic behind human-kind's execution: the moment humans learned to travel at relativistic speeds was the moment mankind simply became too dangerous a neighbor to have around. Nothing personal.

Jem: The Making of a Utopia

Frederik Pohl

The discovery of another habitable world might spell salvation to the three bitterly competing power blocs of the resource-starved 21st century; but when their representatives arrive on Jem, with its multiple intelligent species, they discover instead the perfect situation into which to export their rivalries. Subtitled, with savage irony, 'The Making of a Utopia', Jem is one of Frederik Pohl's most powerful novels.

The Ants of Flanders

Robert Reed

This novella originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, July-August 2011. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Ninth Annual Collection (2012), edited by Gardner Dozois, and Not One of Us: Stories of Aliens on Earth (2018), edited by Neil Clarke.

Year Zero

Rob Reid

Low-level entertainment lawyer Nick Carter thinks it's a prank, not an alien encounter, when a redheaded mullah and a curvaceous nun show up at his office. But Frampton and Carly are highly advanced (if bumbling) extraterrestrials. The entire cosmos, they tell him, has been hopelessly hooked on American pop songs ever since "Year Zero" (1977 to us), resulting in the biggest copyright violation since the Big Bang and bankrupting the whole universe. Nick has just been tapped to clean up this mess before things get ugly. Thankfully, this unlikely galaxy-hopping hero does know a thing or two about copyright law.

Now, with Carly and Frampton as his guides, Nick has forty-eight hours to save humanity--while hoping to wow the hot girl who lives down the hall from him.

Substrate Phantoms

Jessica Reisman

The space station Termagenti--hub of commerce, culture, and civilization--may be haunted. Dangerous power surges, inexplicable energy manifestations, and strange accidents plague the station. Even after generations of exploring deep space, humanity has yet to encounter another race, and yet, some believe that what is troubling the station may be an alien life form.

Jhinsei and his operations team crawl throughout the station, one of many close-knit working groups that keep Termagenti operational. After an unexplained and deadly mishap takes his team from him, Jhinsei finds himself--for lack of a better word--haunted by his dead teammates. In fact, they may not be alone in taking up residence in his brain. He may have picked up a ghost--an alien intelligence that is using him to flee its dying ship. As Jhinsei struggles to understand what is happening to his sanity, inquisitive and dangerous members of the station's managing oligarchy begin to take an increasingly focused interest in him.

Haunted by his past and the increasing urgent presence of another within his mind, Jhinsei flees the station for the nearby planet Ash, where he undertakes an exploration that will redefine friend, foe, self, and other. With Substrate Phantoms, Jessica Reisman offers an evocative and thought-provoking story of first contact, where who we are is questioned as much as who they might be.

Eversion

Alastair Reynolds

Doctor Silas Coade has been tasked with keeping his crew safe as they adventure across the galaxy in search of a mysterious artifact, but as things keep going wrong, Silas soon realizes that something more sinister is at work, and this may not even be the first time it's happened.

In the 1800s, a sailing ship crashes off the coast of Norway. In the 1900s, a Zepellin explores an icy canyon in Antarctica. In the far future, a spaceship sets out for an alien artifact. Each excursion goes horribly wrong. And on every journey, Dr. Silas Coade is the physician, but only Silas seems to realize that these events keep repeating themselves. And it's up to him to figure out why and how. And how to stop it all from happening again.

Pushing Ice

Alastair Reynolds

Some centuries from now, the exploration and exploitation of the Solar System is in full swing. On the cold edge of the system, Bella Lind, captain of the huge commercial spacecraft Rockhopper IV, helps fuel this new gold rush by attaching mass-driver motors to organic-rich water-ice comets to move them back to the inner worlds. Her crew are tough, blue-collar miners, engineers and demolition experts. Around Saturn, something inexplicable happens: one of the moons leaves its orbit and accelerates out of the Solar System. The icy mantle peels away to reveal that it was never a moon in the first place, just a parked spacecraft, millions of years old, that has now decided to move on. Rockhopper IV, trapped in the pull, is hurled across time and space into the deep, distant future, arriving in a vast, alien-constructed chamber. And the crew are not alone, for each chamber contains an alien culture dragged into this cosmic menagerie at the end of time. The crew of the Rockhopper IV know a lot about blowing up comets, but not much about first contact with ultra-advanced aliens.

They have two things to worry about: can they (and their new alien allies) negotiate their way through each harrying contact? And can they assimilate the avalanche of knowledge about their own future - including all the glittering, dangerous technologies that are now theirs for the taking - without destroying themselves in the process?

Troika

Alastair Reynolds

Hugo-nominated Novella

In novels such as Chasm City and Revelation Space, Alastair Reynolds established himself as an indisputable master of the far-flung intergalactic epic. Reynolds brings that same deceptively effortless mastery to the shorter fictional forms, a fact that Troika, his elegant, compulsively readable new novella, amply demonstrates.

Troika tells the story of men and women confronting an enigma known as the Matryoshka, a vast alien construct whose periodic appearances have generated terror, wonder, and endless debate. During its third "apparition" in a remote corner of the galaxy, a trio of Russian cosmonauts approach this enigma and attempt to penetrate its mysteries. What they discover--and what they endure in the process--forms the centerpiece of an enthralling, constantly surprising narrative.

Troika is at once a wholly original account of First Contact and a meditation on time, history, and the essentially fluid nature of identity itself. Suspenseful, erudite, and gracefully written, it is a significant accomplishment in its own right and a welcome addition to a remarkable body of work.

Galileo's Dream

Kim Stanley Robinson

In a novel of stunning dimensions, the acclaimed author of the MARS trilogy brings us the story of the incredible life -- and death -- of Galileo, the First Scientist. Late Renaissance Italy still abounds in alchemy and Aristotle, yet it trembles on the brink of the modern world. Galileo's new telescope encapsulates all the contradictions of this emerging reality.

Then one night a stranger presents a different kind of telescope for Galileo to peer through. Galileo is not sure if he is in a dream, an enchantment, a vision, or something else as yet undefined. The blasted wasteland he sees when he points the telescope at Jupiter, of harsh yellows and reds and blacks, looks just like hell as described by the Catholic church, and Galileo is a devout Catholic. But he's also a scientist, perhaps the very first in history. What he's looking at is the future, the world of Jovian humans three thousand years hence. He is looking at Jupiter from the vantage point of one of its moons whose inhabitants maintain that Galileo has to succeed in his own world for their history to come to pass.

Their ability to reach back into the past and call Galileo "into resonance" with the later time is an action that will have implications for both periods, and those in between, like our own. By day Galileo's life unfurls in early seventeenth century Italy, leading inexorably to his trial for heresy. By night Galileo struggles to be a kind of sage, or an arbiter in a conflict ...but understanding what that conflict might be is no easy matter, and resolving his double life is even harder. This sumptuous, gloriously thought-provoking and suspenseful novel recalls Robinson's magnificent Mars books as well as bringing to us Galileo as we have always wanted to know him, in full.

Alien Influences

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Bountiful is a sun-scorched, inhospitable planet, offering only one comfort to its small band of human colonists: the powerful intoxicant they create from native plants an export to other worlds. But an unspeakable disaster devastates the colony. Six of its children are found dead, their bodies marked in a bizarre parody of the puberty rites of the Dancers, Bountiful's enigmatic sentient race. Even more horrifying is the news that the murderers are not the Dancers -- but eight other children of the colony.

What happens when small children are changed by their environment, made into something other, not wholly human or alien? What will become of a society irrevocably torn by nightmarish acts carried out by its most innocent members? And how far will one young man go in his obsessive quest to bring healing to eight shattered children... even if he must cross the boundaries of death itself?

When It Changed

Joanna Russ

This story, about an all-female society suddenly faced with the presence of men, is one of the most famous tales in science fiction.

It has been collected in The Zanzibar Cat (1983) and anthologized in Again, Dangerous Visions (1972), Nebula Award Stories 8 (1973), The New Women of Wonder (1978), The Best of the Nebulas (1989), The Road to Science Fiction 3: From Heinlein to Here (1979), Sisters of the Revolution: A Feminist Speculative Fiction Anthology (2015) and The Big Book of Science Fiction (2016).

Read this story online for free at the Sci Fiction archive.

Ship of Fools

Richard Paul Russo

Home to generations of humans, the starship Argonos has wandered aimlessly throughout the galaxy for hundreds of years, desperately searching for other signs of life. Now, a steady, unidentified transmission lures them toward a nearby planet, where the grisly remains of a former colony await the crew. Haunted by what they have seen, the crew has no choice but to follow when another signal beckons the Argonos into deep space and into the dark heart of an alien mystery...

Published in the UK as Unto Leviathan

Condomnauts

Yoss

Set a course for intercourse in this raucous space opera from Yoss, "Cuba's premiere science-fiction writer" (VICE), where humans explore the limits of the Milky Way--and their libidos.

In the 24th century, Josué Valdés' rise from an orphan in the slums of Rubble City, Cuba to one of the galaxy's most accomplished explorers was nothing short of meteoric. On the streets, Josue raced cockroaches for cash--until he discovered his true-calling: as a sexual ambassador for humanity and the Nu Barsa colony.

Every so-called "condomnaut" knows that diplomacy and trade deals depend on sexual pacts in the galactic community--and every encounter becomes a close encounter. While some condomnauts have been raised and genetically enhanced to meet the needs of any tentacled insectoid in the galaxy, Josué is a natural whose ego could eclipse the big dipper. Our intrepid condomnauts travel light years across the galaxy and discover that old rivalries--and prejudices--are never far behind. When the first extragalactic beings arrive in the Milky Way, and with them the potential to negotiate for extraordinary new technologies, Josué must call upon every ounce of his talent to seal the deal for his colony and all of humanity.

Indirectly investigating current sexual mores, Cuban science fiction rock star Yoss plays upon stereotypes while making it clear that under Communist Cuba what is daring is not always funny and vice versa. Following the success of Super Extra Grande and A Planet for Rent, Yoss brings us another uproarious space adventure with Condomnauts, a wildly inventive and unapologetic tale that would make even Barbarella blush.

Sublimation Angels

Jason Sanford

Nebula-nominated Novella

On an alien planet where the atmosphere has frozen, humans must continually mine the icy air simply to survive. But for Chicka, a young man struggling with the death of his identical twin brother, survival isn't enough. He wants to understand both the rigid nature of their harsh society and why his brother was killed for questioning their place in the universe.

John DeNardo of SF Signal gave Sublimation Angels "five stars" and called the novella "A captivating story about freedom, rebellion, and seeking the truth." Science fiction author Colin Harvey said this is "One of the best novellas of the year, written by a writer whose reputation grows with each story."

Sublimation Angels was a finalist for the Nebula Award for Best Novella, won the Interzone Readers' Poll for best story in 2010, and was longlisted for the British Fantasy Award.

Calculating God

Calculating God is the new near-future SF thriller from the popular and award-winning Robert J. Sawyer. An alien shuttle craft lands outside the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. A six-legged, two-armed alien emerges, who says, in perfect English, "Take me to a paleontologist."

It seems that Earth, and the alien's home planet, and the home planet of another alien species traveling on the alien mother ship, all experienced the same five cataclysmic events at about the same time (one example of these "cataclysmic events" would be the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs). Both alien races believe this proves the existence of God: i.e. he's obviously been playing with the evolution of life on each of these planets.

From this provocative launch point, Sawyer tells a fast-paced, and morally and intellectually challenging, SF story that just grows larger and larger in scope. The evidence of God's universal existence is not universally well received on Earth, nor even immediately believed. And it reveals nothing of God's nature. In fact. it poses more questions than it answers.

When a supernova explodes out in the galaxy but close enough to wipe out life on all three home-worlds, the big question is, Will God intervene or is this the sixth cataclysm?

Calculating God is SF on the grand scale.

Factoring Humanity

In the near future, a signal is detected coming from the Alpha Centauri system. Mysterious, unintelligible data streams in for ten years. Heather Davis, a professor in the University of Toronto psychology department, has devoted her career to deciphering the message. Her estranged husband, Kyle, is working on the development of artificial intelligence systems and new computer technology utilizing quantum effects to produce a near-infinite number of calculations simultaneously.

When Heather achieves a breakthrough, the message reveals a startling new technology that rips the barriers of space and time, holding the promise of a new stage of human evolution. In concert with Kyle's discoveries of the nature of consciousness, the key to limitless exploration -- or the end of the human race -- appears close at hand.

Sawyer has created a gripping thriller, a pulse-pounding tour of the farthest reaches of technology.

Rollback

Dr. Sarah Halifax decoded the first-ever radio transmission received from aliens. Thirty-eight years later, a second message is received and Sarah, now 87, may hold the key to deciphering this one, too... if she lives long enough.

A wealthy industrialist offers to pay for Sarah to have a rollback-a hugely expensive experimental rejuvenation procedure. She accepts on condition that Don, her husband of sixty years, gets a rollback, too. The process works for Don, making him physically twenty-five again. But in a tragic twist, the rollback fails for Sarah, leaving her in her eighties.

While Don tries to deal with his newfound youth and the suddenly vast age gap between him and his wife, Sarah struggles to do again what shed done once before: figure out what a signal from the stars contains.

Starplex

read "Agent to the Stars" online

Twenty years after the discovery of artificial wormholes launches Earth space exploration to unforeseeable heights, Starplex Director Keith Lansing investigates a mysterious vessel that soon threatens the station with intergalactic war.

Discovery is superseding understanding. And when an unknown vessel — with no windows, no seams, and no visible means of propulsion — arrives through a new wormhole, an already battle-scarred Starplex could be the starting point of a new interstellar war . . .

Agent to the Stars

John Scalzi

The space-faring Yherajk have come to Earth to meet us and to begin humanity's first interstellar friendship. There's just one problem: They're hideously ugly and they smell like rotting fish.

So getting humanity's trust is a challenge. The Yherajk need someone who can help them close the deal.

Enter Thomas Stein, who knows something about closing deals. He's one of Hollywood's hottest young agents. But although Stein may have just concluded the biggest deal of his career, it's quite another thing to negotiate for an entire alien race. To earn his percentage this time, he's going to need all the smarts, skills, and wits he can muster.

Fuzzy Nation

John Scalzi

Fuzzy Nation is John Scalzi's reboot of the classic H. Beam Piper novel Little Fuzzy. You can read about how the story came to be on John's blog Whatever.

The Rule of Three

Lawrence M. Schoen

This Nebula Award nominated novelette originally appeared in Future Science Fiction Digest, Issue 1, December 2018.

Read the full story for free at Future Science Fiction Digest.

A Wreath of Stars

Bob Shaw

Ironically, for Gilbert Snook, who considered himself the human equivalent of a neutrino, a particle able to travel through the Earth without disturbing any other particle, it all started with the panic that followed the sighting of the anti neutrino planet as it approached Earth. Earth was unaffected but Snook ended up in a small African Republic teaching English to diamond miners. Then the miners started seeing ghosts and Snook found himself at the centre of a bizarre and far reaching scientific discovery and in the middle of some very dirty political infighting.

Downward to the Earth

Gundersen returned to Holman's World seeking atonement for his harsh years as colonial governer. But now this lush, exotic planet of mystery was called by its ancient name of Belzagor, and it belonged once again to its native alien races, the nildoror and the sulidoror. Drawn by its spell, Gundersen began a harrowing pilgrimage to its mist-shrouded north, to witness a strange ritual rebirth that would alter him forever.

Passengers

Nebula Award winning and Hugo Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in the anthology Orbit 4 (1968), edited by Damon Knight. The story can also be found in the Nebula Award Stories Five (1970), edited by James Blish, The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume III (1981), edited by Arthur C. Clarke and George W. Proctor, The Arbor House Treasury of Horror and the Supernatural (1981), edited by Barry N. Malzberg, Martin H. Greenberg and Bill Pronzini, The Best of the Nebulas (1989), edited by Ben Bova, and Foundations of Fear: An Exploration of Horror (1992), edited by David G. Hartwell. It is included in the collections The Cube Root of Uncertainty (1970), Moonferns and Starsongs (1971), The Best of Robert Silverberg (1976), Phases of the Moon (2004), and To the Dark Star: 1962-69: The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Vol. 2 (2007).

The Masks of Time

The New Atlantis and Other Novellas of Science Fiction

Vornan-19 fell from the sky, naked, and landed on the Spanish steps in Rome on Christmas afternoon toward the end of the Millennium. And for Leo Garfield things would never be the same. For he is an acknowledged expert in the time reversal properties of sub-atomic particles... and Vornan-19 claims to come from far in the future. Whether or not he is telling the truth, a nervous and edgy world accepts the charming and magnetically charismatic Vornan as some kind of messiah. Even Garfield and his fellow scientists fall under Vornan's spell. But, has he really traveled across time -- or is he just a charlatan and a fraud?

In a dark near-future, global warming and a ruined ecology is causing the continents to sink into the oceans just as the towers of Atlantis re-emerge above the sea.

Table of Contents:

Introduction - (1975) - essay by Robert Silverberg
Silhouette - (1975) - novella by Gene Wolfe
The New Atlantis - (1975) - novelette by Ursula K. Le Guin
A Momentary Taste of Being - (1975) - novella by James Tiptree, Jr.

The Seed of Earth

Originally appeared in Ace Double F-145 (1962).

The computer had chosen them - a small cross-section of humanity to serve Mankind's Destiny. Out of seven billion people on Earth mechanical chance had selected them as involuntary colonists on an unknown planet. In seven days they would be on their way, on a sink-or-swim mission to a lonely world beyond the limits of the Solar System.

It was a summons each had privately dreaded, yet always been prepared for. But no one had prepared them for the vicious attacks of sinister aliens...

Tower of Glass

Simeon Krug has a vision--and the vast wealth necessary to turn dream into reality. What he wishes is to communicate with the stars, to answer signals from deep space. The colossal tower he's constructing for this purpose soars above the Arctic tundra, and the seemingly perfect androids building it view Krug as their god. But, Krug is only flesh-and-blood, and when his androids discover the truth, their anger knows no bounds... and it threatens much more than the tower.

Shakespeare's Planet

After a thousand years in space, the earth vessel lands on a remote planet capable of supporting human life. Inside the explorer ship an almost inaudible hum fills the silence; computer lights blink softly, signaling the awakening of the cryogenically preserved crew.

But only one crew member awakens from his artificial sleep. A systems malfunction has killed the others. Carter Horton is alone.

Horton learns almost immediately that the planet is inhabited by a bizarre creature who calls himself Carnivore. And the creature addresses him in English, the language he had learned from an earlier traveler who called himself Shakespeare. Now, Shakespeare is dead, and Horton soon learns that he and Carnivore, too, face certain peril unless they can get away from this strange planet.

Leaving is no simple affair. Carnivore, and before him, Shakespeare, had come to the planet via an inner-space tunnel, one of many such tunnels that exist throughout the galaxy. But this tunnel has broken down and works only one way--the wrong way--and there is no exit. And Horton's explorer ship is a thousand years obsolete--incapable of returning them to civilization.

The creature called Carnivore and the earthman, Horton, are marooned on a planet of mysterious ruins bespeaking a catastrophic end to a once-grand civilization. The portentous signs they begin to encounter intimate some dire, ominous happening will soon befall them--unless they can repair the inner-space tunnel and leave Shakespeare's Planet.

The Big Front Yard

Time Is the Simplest Thing

Despite the fact that The Big Front Yard is a novella, it won the 1959 Hugo Award for best novelette. It originally appeared in Astounding Science Fiction, October 1958. The story can also be found in the anthologies The Hugo Winners, Volume 1 (1962), edited by Isaac Asimov, The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume Two B (1973), edited by Ben Bova, and The Great SF Stories 20 (1958) (1990), edited by Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg. It is included in the collections The Worlds of Clifford Simak (1960), Skirmish: The Great Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak (1977), Over the River and Through the Woods (1996) and The Big Front Yard: And Other Stories (2015).

A telepath inadvertently acquires a powerful alien consciousness and must run for his life to escape corporate assassins and hate-filled mobs in this enthralling science fiction masterwork

Space travel has been abandoned in the twenty-second century. It is deemed too dangerous, expensive, and inconvenient--and now the all-powerful Fishhook company holds the monopoly on interstellar exploration for commercial gain. Their secret is the use of "parries," human beings with the remarkable telepathic ability to expand their minds throughout the universe. On what should have been a routine assignment, however, loyal Fishhook employee Shepherd Blaine is inadvertently implanted with a copy of an alien consciousness, becoming something more than human. Now he's a company pariah, forced to flee the safe confines of the Fishhook complex. But the world he escapes into is not a safe sanctuary; Its people have been taught to hate and fear his parapsychological gift--and there is nowhere on Earth, or elsewhere, for Shepherd Blaine to hide.

A Hugo Award nominee, Time Is the Simplest Thing showcases the enormous talents of one of the true greats of twentieth-century science fiction. This richly imagined tale of prejudice, corporate greed, oppression, and, ultimately, transcendence stands tall among Simak's most enduring works.

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