Science Fiction Stories

Mr. Coombes was sick of life. He walked away from his unhappy home, and, sick not only of his own existence but of everybody else's, turned aside down Gaswork Lane to avoid the town, and, crossing the wooden bridge that goes over the canal to Starling's Cottages, was presently alone in the damp pine woods and out of sight and sound of human habitation. He would stand it no longer. He repeated aloud with blasphemies unusual to him that he would stand it no longer...

The exercise is supposed to use blanks. Then a collision cuts drone operator Beth Miller off from command, soldiers report casualties, and a drone fires live rounds despite an acknowledged weapons hold. With civilians trapped and her lieutenant badly injured, Beth must decide what to trust—and how to protect the people in the street when her controls no longer guarantee control.

I woke up in a room, and everything in the world changed. A book about hardship, friendship, survival, and, of course, aliens.

Dang vines! Beats all how some plants have no manners--but what do you expect, when they used to be men!

An artist is in Staffordshire to depict the industrial landscape; the manager of the ironworks discovers his affair with his wife, and takes him on a tour of the factory, where there are dangerous features.

One saw Monson's Flying Machine from the windows of the trains passing either along the South-Western main line or along the line between Wimbledon and Worcester Park,-to be more exact, one saw the huge scaffoldings which limited the flight of the apparatus. They rose over the tree-tops, a massive alley of interlacing iron and timber, and an enormous web of ropes and tackle, extending the best part of two miles...

A young man volunteers to go and stay overnight in the Red Room? The room is known to be haunted and there are many myths and legends about death that are brought up during the story.... when his fear has taken his sense of reasoning and he tries to leave the room and accidently knocks him out. When he finally wakes up the next morning he realises that there was nothing supernatural about the room but only peoples fear of the unknown.

"What if I die under it?" The thought recurred again and again, as I walked home from Haddon's. It was a purely personal question. I was spared the deep anxieties of a married man, and I knew there were few of my intimate friends but would find my death troublesome chiefly on account of their duty of regret. I was surprised indeed, and perhaps a little humiliated, as I turned the matter over, to think how few could possibly exceed the conventional requirement.

Sometimes a story is best told by omission--!

Here he is again, the irrepressible Septimus Spink, in a tale as rollicking as an elder giant juggling the stars and the planets in his great, golden hands and laughing mirthfully as one tiny world--our own--goes spinning away from him into caverns measureless to man.