Science Fiction Stories

What happens when technology advances faster than life? A sad but hopeful tale.

"$1,000 a Plate" takes place on Mars' moon Deimos, at a time when it has been highly commercialized and visitor friendly. The enterpreneurial casino business has arrived to entice the tourist trade to part with their dollars, while research and exploration is taking place via astronomers and their telescopes searching the heavens in Deimos' crystal clear atmosphere. But there is a problem...

From Twenty Miles Away Stabbed the "Atom-filtering" Rays to Allen Baker in His Cell in the Death House.

Jules is a young man barely a century old. He's lived long enough to see the cure for death and the end of scarcity, to learn ten languages and compose three symphonies...and to realize his boyhood dream of taking up residence in Disney World.Now in the keeping of a network of "ad-hocs" who keep the classic attractions running as they always have,Now, they are under attack. A new group has taken over the Hall of the Presidents, and is replacing it with...

Fate throws two young Earthians into desperate conflict with the primeval monsters of an electron's savage jungles.

A strange man of metal comes to Earth on a dreadful mission.

Because this is a masculine world, the author of this fairytale is usually identified as the wife of Poul Anderson. But a few more incisive cameos of fantasy such as this, and Mr. Anderson may come to be identified as Karen's husband.

It may be that there is a weapon that, from the viewpoint of the one it's used on, is worse than lethal. You might say that death multiplies you by zero; what would multiplication by minus one do?

The shortest distance between two points may be the long way around--and a path of dishonor may well turn into the high road to virtue.

A man vanished--right out of this world. And where he went--