Recommended Sf/f Stories
"Never judge a book by its movie."--J.W. Eagan
Daniel Abraham, Michaela Rossner,
Sage Walker, & Walter Jon Williams
"Tauromaquia" in
Eleanor Arnason
"Potter of Bones" in Asimov's Sept. 2002. A whimsical sf tale whose narration is part folktale, part history of science, part (alien) anthropology. Haik, a potter, discovers the principles of evolution in fossils, and perhaps even love. I was charmed by the narration and the sensibleness of the society depicted.
Isaac Asimov
"The Bicentennial Man." Sf. Asimov's short stories don't need any introduction from a fledgling like me. This one's a gem: Andrew the robot who wants to become human...and finds a way to become accepted as one by "real" humans, but at what cost?
Paolo Bacigalupi
"The Calorie Man" in F&SF Oct./Nov. 2005. Sf. The protagonist and his friend live in a world dominated by biotech firms. Everything is given in terms of calories and joules. Nothing comes for free. Calorie-smuggling is verboten and vigilantly policed.The protagonist, who is from India and still haunted by memories of the starvation there, decides to smuggle a "calorie man"--a scientist--down south for profit, to buck the system. The protagonist's backstory is revealed in harrowing glimpses; the dénouement, though not without its tragedies, is deft and defiant.
Stephen Baxter
"Between Worlds" in Between Worlds, ed. Robert Silverberg. Sf. It starts in a far future, with an acolyte of a quantum-flavored religion and a desperate refugee mother willing to hold a ship hostage (via bomb) in order to be reunited with her daughter. Despite only having a handful of named characters, the novella has scope: you can really feel the grandeur and weirdness of the galaxy.
"Silver Ghost" in Asimov's Sept. 2000; "On the Orion Line" in Asimov's Oct./Nov. 2000. Sf set in an eerie far future where an expansionist humanity, committed to survival of the fittest--themselves--clashes with alien scholars.
Peter S. Beagle
"Professor Gottesmann and the Indian Rhinoceros" in Peter S. Beagle's Immortal Unicorn 2. Fantasy. A tale of two philosophers, one an aging professor, the other an Indian rhinoceros who professes to be a unicorn, and their friendship.
Greg Bear
"Hardfought." Military sf. Not to be read when you're depressed. A recursive love story and a tragedy in a far future when humans are at war with an old, old alien species...and take measures that cause them to become more like the aliens.
Alfred Bester
"Disappearing Act" in Virtual Unrealities. Sf. A delight of sardonic wit, friendly but tasteful bafflegab, and musing on the meaning of the "American Dream" as the general with his aparently infinite pool of specialists tries to figure out what's going on in the mysterious Ward T of St. Albans Army Hospital. This has just enough depth to be stinging.
"Fondly Fahrenheit" in The Road to Science Fiction vol. 3. Sf. A harrowing and fascinating portrayal of a man entangled with a psychotic android whose murders are triggered by temperature, and the ensuing psychological problems.
Lloyd Biggle, Jr.
"Tunesmith" in Masterpieces: The Best Science Fiction of the Century.
Everyone calls it the Center. It has another name, a long one, that gets listed in government appropriations and has its derivation analyzed in encyclopedias, but no one uses it. From Bombay to Lima, from Spitsbergen to the mines of Antarctica, from the solitary outpost on Pluto to that on Mercury, it is--the Center. You can emerge from the rolling mists of the Amazon, or the cutting dry winds of the Sahara, or the lunar vacuum, elbow your way up to a bar, and begin, "When I was at the Center--" and every stranger within hearing will listen attentively.
Sf. A dated but affecting piece about one of the last real composers in a world dominated by hacks writing "coms" (commercial jingles). The "power of music" theme is predictable, but the story's worth perusing.
Terry Bisson
"The Edge of the Universe" in The Year's Best Science Fiction 10, ed. Gardner Dozois. Sf. A friendly poke at the kind of bafflegab you find on Star Trek, through the amazing discoveries of a scientific genius.
E. Michael Blake
"Science Fiction for Telepaths" in 100 Great Short Science Fiction Stories. Sf. This has the unusual distinction of being the only short story in the world I can recite in its entirety--because it's only one sentence long. But what a sentence!
James P. Blaylock
"Paper Dragons" in Imaginary Lands, ed. Robin McKinley.
It occurs to me sometimes that if without warning a man could draw back that veil of cloud that obscures the heavens, snatch it back in an instant, he'd startle a world of oddities aloft in the skies: balloon things with hovering little wings like the fins of pufferfish, and spiny, leathery creatures, nothing but bones and teeth and with beaks half again as long as their ribby bodies.
Fantasy. A surreal tale of crabs crawling out of the sea, and a man whose neighbor, Filby, is desperate to create a mechanical dragon and imbue it with life, which may or may not lead to a subtle fraying of reality.
James Blish
"A Work of Art" in Masterpieces: The Best Science Fiction of the Century. Sf. Mind-sculptors bring Strauss "back" to compose for them, but the nature of the artwork is other than what Strauss thinks it is. I confess that I'm with Strauss-as-portrayed on aleatory and twelve-tone music. A rich and melancholy work.
Michael Blumlein
"The Thing Itself." Magical realism. A love story about a doctor with cystic fibrosis and a nurse.
Ben Bova
"The Café Coup" in F&SF Sept. 1997. Sf. What if some time travelers, convinced that World War II was caused by the results of World War I, went back and changed events so that Germany won World War I? A splendid example of a second-order counterfactual scenario.
Hannah Wolf Bowen
"Under the Bridge" in Chizine. A graceful but not sentimental tale of a troll bridge, a toll bridge, and loneliness.
Ray Bradbury
"Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed" in Masterpieces: The Best Science Fiction of the Century. Science fantasy. One of the Mars fables, which one might, if so inclined, read as a commentary on assimilation. The telling is by no means didactic, however, and there's a spooky beauty to Bradbury's portrayal of Mars.
Scott Bradfield
"The Devil Disinvests" in The Year's Best Fantasy, ed. David Hartwell. Fantasy. A short, irreverent and chillingly humorous look at what happens when the Devil decides it's time to retire from the business of running Hell.
Fredric Brown
"Letter to a Phoenix" in Space Mail. Sf. Doubtless this story is dated, but its recasting of immortality is lovely. It's a letter from an immortal man to the only other "phoenix" he knows of.
Mark Budz
"Toy Soldiers" in F&SF May 1995. Fantasy. Appreciation of this story probably requires a knowledge of American children's toys like Potato Head and G.I. Joe, and the second Gulf War (Desert Storm and all that). A soldier returns from the war, only to discover that it has damaged his soul more than he realized. There's some gripping imagery in here.
Jack Cady
"The Night We Buried Road Dog" in F&SF Jan. 1993. Fantasy. A tale of a young boy growing up in Montana and the cars that shape his life as well as that of his mentor Jesse. They are also haunted by the Road Dog, a highway wanderer, of whom they hear much but see little until the finale. Anyone who has felt a moment's sentimentality for an old car ought to try this.
Robert R. Chase
"Transit of Betelgeuse" in Analog (issue?). Sf. A group of humans find themselves holding the threads to an old war. It's told from the viewpoint of an emotionally cold man who was once a boy scarred by murder in the family, and that's the part that gripped me.
C.J. Cherryh
"Pots" in Masterpieces: The Best Science Fiction of the Century. Sf. Atomics and archaeology. In the hands of a less controlled author, this could have been limp. But Cherryh does taut very, very well.
"The Scapegoat" in The Best Military Science Fiction of the 20th Century. Military/alien sf. Alliance-Union, though prior knowledge of Cherryh's extensive sf universe isn't required. After bloody battles with the aliens they know only as the "elves," humanity has tracked them to their homeworld. They have all but given up hopes of peace and negotiation when a single elf places himself into the hands of a puzzled soldier, John deFranco, and reveals just how alien his species can be, and how human.
Ted Chiang
"Liking What You See: A Documentary" in Science Fiction: The Best of 2002, ed. Silverberg & Haber. Sf. A multifaceted, thoughtful piece centering around a college campus debate on "calliagnosia"--an induced (and reversible) agnosia that short-circuits the brain's ability to distinguish between "beautiful" and "ugly," specifically in faces. Should "calli" be required of Pembleton College's students? Or not? Chiang does a genuinely good job at capturing the ambivalence and multiple interests/arguments on the question of "lookism," and the end features an appropriately science fictional twist that probes into the issue even more deeply.
"Story of Your Life." Alien/linguistics sf.
Arthur C. Clarke
"The Nine Billion Names of God" in Masterpieces: The Best Science Fiction of the Century. Sf. A Tibetan monastery's attempt to list the real names of God has results that their computer-suppliers did not anticipate.
"The Star" in The Super Hugos. Sf. A Jesuit finds that, in discovering the remnants of a dead and beautiful alien civilization, he must confront the roots of his own faith.
Tina Connolly
"On the Eyeball Floor" in Strange Horizons. Sf love story/tragedy set in an android factory.
Jim Cowan
"Spade of Reason." it's a story of math and combinatorics and probabilities, it's a story of physics in your basement and in cosmic background radiation, it's a story of finding yourself walking toward a sanity you always knew you had. I believe it would work for a non-mathy reader, because the terminology is given context so you know what's happening and why it's happening, so you have fragments and metaphors to give you the shape of the thing; meanwhile, I sat there in crescendoing delight as I recognized this mathy thing and that mathy thing and how they accumulated in the narrative. And it's a human story, powerfully so, in several senses of the word.
Tony Daniel
"A Dry, Quiet War" in The Year's Best Science Fiction 13, ed. Gardner Dozois. Military sf. A soldier returns home from an unbelievably exotic war against entropy at the end of time, only to find that exotic troubles have followed him in his attempts to rebuild a relationship with a woman he knew. I loved the mixture of the mundane and the not-so-mundane, and the ethics implied.
Avram Davidson
"Or All the Seas with Oysters" in The Fourth Galaxy Reader. Sf. A perfect little gem of metamorphosis, bicycles, and horror.
Charles V. De Vet & Katherine MacLean
"Second Game" in Thirteen Crimes of Science Fiction. Sf. Dodgy science, but really neat musings on games and strategy.
Gordon R. Dickson
"Dolphin's War" in The Road to Science Fiction vol. 3 and The Ascent of Wonder. Sf. When mankind passes a threshold by beginning to learn to communicate with another intelligent species--dolphins--aliens come to contact Earth. But the purpose of their contact is other than what man might wish.
Greg Egan
"Oracle" in Asimov's July 2000. Quasi-historical SF. A beautiful novella of an alternate history where Robert Stoney (Alan Turing) discovers both the darker and lighter sides to Faust's bargain, and John Hamilton (C.S. Lewis) confronts the divide between faith and science.
Harlan Ellison
"The Deathbird" in Deathbird Stories. Science fantasy. I spent two days in shock after reading this, mainly because I'm a Christian. But it's a stunning piece even if you aren't a Christian; the storytelling techniques Ellison uses are just amazing. Adam and Eve, a "revisionist" Bible and equal time, the end of the world...
"Jefty Is Five." Fantasy. Bittersweet.
"'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman" in The Super Hugos or Masterpieces: The Best Science Fiction of the Century. Sf. A biting satiric extrapolation of (Western?) society's increasing dependence on exact times and schedules and deadlines. And civil disobedience. (I also have to admire a title like this one.)
Charles Coleman Finlay
"Footnotes." Sf. A future disaster as told through footnotes, the interstices between truth and cover-up: little is stated, but much is implied.
Jeffrey Ford
"The Empire of Ice Cream." Sf or fantasy, take your pick. The tale of a synaesthete who finds that the taste of coffee elicits, not sound or color, but a mysterious young woman. Quirky and quietly disturbing.
Karen Joy Fowler
"Face Value" in Masterpieces: The Best Science Fiction of the Century. Alien sf. An eerie story about a relationship dissolving inexorably, and communication with uncommunicative aliens.
Esther M. Friesner
"The Godsman and the Goblin" in F&SF Dec. 2000. Fantasy. A gentle story about an overprotective single father and his deal with a goblin to take his daughter away to a less harrowing world.
"Men in the Rain" in Asimov's Jan. 2002. Fantasy. A ghost story involving an old veteran and his wartime comrades, and most especially the young woman who is his health aide, who is sweet, frightened, and trapped in a relationship beyond her control.
James Alan Gardner
"Three Hearings on the Existence of Snakes in the Human Bloodstream." Historical sf. A short and stunningly original alternate history based on biology. (I think the "snakes" may be something like Rh factor, but don't know enough biology to be sure.)
Neil Gaiman
"Other People" in F&SF Oct./Nov. 2001. Fantasy. A very short, elegantly brutal tale of what awaits a man in hell.
Valerie Atkinson Gawthrop
"Hemparius the Trader" in Sword & Sorceress XII. Fantasy. This author was in her teens when she sold this story, I believe--and if she has a novel out there somewhere, I want it. When the dead meet the nameless maskmaker, they get what they want in the form of what they deserve. This is a short, humorous piece about poetic justice, yet it manages to convey an astounding depth of milieu.
William Gibson & Michael Swanwick
"Dogfight" in Masterpieces: The Best Science Fiction of the Century. Cyberpunk. Virtual dogfights, and a drifter-thief, Deke, who yearns to defeat the crippled ace Tiny. When he meets ace programmer Nance, he finds he might have a chance, and she finds she might be able to steal happiness for herself. A taut and vivid portrayal of the unexpected prices of victory-at-any-cost.
Tom Godwin
"The Cold Equations" in The Ascent of Wonder or The Road to Science Fiction vol. 3. Hard sf. I knew the plot (including the ending) of this story before I ever got a copy to read. One of my high school hobbies was to track down any sf/f commentary/criticism I could find and read that, because the actual sf/f was bloody hard to get (I was in Korea). This being a rather well-known story, it didn't take me long to piece everything together. Yet, when I read it, I cried at the end. Knowing what happened didn't detract from the tragedy of the situation Godwin portrays. A young girl stows away on a ship so she can visit her brother, but the ship has exactly enough fuel to reach 6 dying men with a cure. The girl must suffer the consequences of physical law, though she has done little wrong by human law....I believe there was a follow-up called "The Cold Solution" by Don Sakers (published in some issue of Analog). Though the latter is a clever story, it misses the essential point of the original: that the laws of the universe are non-negotiable, no matter how we'd like to try otherwise. Mark Rosenfelder has an alternate view (spoilers).
Lisa Goldstein
"Fortune and Misfortune" in Asimov's May 1997. Fantasy. A warm, witty story about a friendship between two actresses--and luck.
"Reader's Guide" in F&SF July 2008. A meta story on the nature of reading and writing, warmly told.
George Guthridge
"The Mirror of Lop Nor" in Peter S. Beagle's Immortal Unicorn 2. Fantasy. A double-edged tale of the Chinese unicorn, a man's betrayal by his Mongolian adopted father, and revenge across the years.
Joe W. Haldeman
"Hero" in The Best Military Science Fiction of the 20th Century. Military sf. The majority of the story is a fascinating exploration of boot camp in exotic environments as humanity seeks to bring battle to aliens who have destroyed their ships. Unfortunately, the dénouement shifts focus to an underdeveloped moral question, and the ending begs for a continuation.
Merrie Haskell
"Huntswoman" at Strange Horizons. Fairytale retelling, by turns macabre and wondrous, strange and whimsical.
Robert A. Heinlein
"All You Zombies" in The Road to Science Fiction vol. 3 or Masterpieces: The Best Science Fiction of the Century. Sf. A solipsistic take on time travel. Anything more I could say would give it away.
P.C. Hodgell
"Stranger Blood" in Imaginary Lands, ed. Robin McKinley, or Blood & Ivory: A Tapestry by Hodgell. Fantasy. I read this and fell in love with the setting. Only years later did I learn that it takes place after Hodgell's KENCYRATH series (currently in progress). Hodgell does wondrous fantasy worldbuilding, and her characters are a delight. Here, she explores ties of blood and bastardy in a keep perilously near the Barrier and the unending threat of Perimal Darkling. Those who have read what exists of the KENCYRATH will be interested in Jame's cameo appearance.
Nalo Hopkinson
"Greedy Choke Puppy" in The Year's Best Fantasy, ed. David Hartwell. Fantasy. A story about "vampiric Caribbean tales of women who can turn into blood-sucking balls of fire," the proverb "Craven choke puppy (a puppy that's greedy will choke)," and above all, a grandmother's love.
Gwyneth Jones
"Red Sonja and Lessingham in Dreamland" in The Year's Best Science Fiction 14, ed. Gardner Dozois. Sf. The unsettling story of a woman addicted to virtuality and her search for a satisfying sexual experience.
Daniel Kaysen
"The Jenna Set" in Strange HorizonsÄ. Sf. Genuinely funny humor about what happens when AI systems get too smart for their own good.
Helen Keeble
"In Stone" in Strange Horizons; "In Ashes" in Strange Horizons. Fantasy. Examinations of the human cost of elementalism, poignantly, compassionately, and relentlessly presented.
Damon Knight
"Masks" in The Road to Science Fiction vol. 3 or Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison. Sf. What happens to a man's attitude toward his own kind when he's transplanted to a non-human but human-created, mechanical body? The story is quietly told, but becomes more disturbing the longer you think about it.
C.M. Kornbluth
"Gomez." Sf. This one's a partly humorous take on the Cold War. A scientific genius, Gomez, is obliged by the U.S. government to uncover physics that will lead to even more destructive weapons than those in existence; but Gomez, in spite of all his genius (or perhaps because of it) is still human, with human(e) concerns.
Nancy Kress
"Shiva in Shadow" in Between Worlds, ed. Robert Silverberg. This is a luminous, tightly-woven, absolutely fantastic novella about two unstable scientists, Kane and Ajit, and the captain/Nurturer who keeps balance between them both, Tirzah. They are on a science mission to investigate Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole in the galaxy's heart. Kane is a genius; Ajit is very smart himself, but second-best, and he knows it, and resents it all the more, not helped by Kane's callousness.
In order to gather data, they send copies of their personae in a probe. The story hops back and forth between the three-in-the-probe and the three-in-the-ship, and things unfold (as you might imagine) differently in both, in ways that illuminate what has gone wrong.
What really shines here is the thoroughness with which the themes are integrated into the story: the speculative science and the turn of events, the shadows hanging over the human heart, the figure of Shiva that becomes a symbol of what is to come, the ending's inversions, cannot be extricated from each other.
Naomi Kritzner
"The Golem" in The Year's Best Fantasy, ed. David Hartwell. Fantasy told from a female golem's point-of-view. During the Holocaust, Hanna creates a golem to save what few people they can. The golem knows her creator is doomed, for she has knowledge of destiny, and waits patiently for freedom even as Alena and Hanna teach her what it means to love.
Henry Kuttner & C.L. Moore
"Mimsy Were the Borogoves" in The Ascent of Wonder. Sf. A disturbing tale of what happens when two children, their minds malleable enough to accept a non-human paradigm, happen across alien toys.
R.A. Lafferty
"Eurema's Dam" in Masterpieces: The Best Science Fiction of the Century.
He was about the last of them.
What? The last of the great individualists? The last of the true creative geniuses of the century? The last of the sheer precursors?
No. No. He was the last of the dolts.
Sf. This is Lafferty all over: outrageous, folksy, inventive. And saturated with irony on the nature of intelligence and invention.
Jay Lake
"The Angel's Daughter" in Realms of Fantasy Aug. 2004. Fantasy.
David Langford
"Comp.Basilisk FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)" in Asimov's Aug. 2000. Sf. A brief and amusing story of in the form of a newsgroup FAQ; to say more would spoil the fun.
Tanith Lee
"Bite Me Not or Fleur de Fur" in Asimov's May 1997. Adult fairytale.
"Black as Ink" in Red as Blood. Adult fairytale. A nonmagical but nonetheless wrenching retelling of the ballet/folktale Swan Lake.
"The Golden Rope" in Red as Blood. Adult fairytale. An unusual retelling of Rapunzel.
"La Reine Blanche" in Asimov's July 1983. Adult fairytale. A lovely and symmetrical tale of a queen and king blinded by their pride.
Ursula K. Le Guin
"The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" in Masterpieces: The Best Science Fiction of the Century.
Joyous! How is one to tell about joy! How describe the citizens of Omelas?
They were not simple folk, you see, though they were happy. But we do not say the words of cheer much any more. All smiles have become archaic. Given a description such as this one tends to make certain assumptions. Given a description such as this one tends to look next for the King, mounted on a splendid stallion and surrounded by his noble knights, or perhaps in a golden litter borne by great-muscled slaves. They were not barbarians. I do not know the rules and lwas of their society, but I suspect that they were singularly few....
Fantasy? Sf? A beautiful piece both for its well-handled moral dilemma and accompanying commentary on the price of happiness (or, alternately, our perception that meaningful happiness must be built on someone's suffering), and the unusual anthropology-Gedankenexperiment narrative.
Paul Levinson
"The Chronology Protection Case" in Analog Sept. 1995. Sf. Levinson takes the "chronology protection" conjecture (Hawking, I believe) and turns it into a murder mystery and love story. Fun.
Tom Ligon
"Amateurs" in Analog July 1996. Hard sf. I wanted to write the author and gush when I read this first. (I don't remember why I didn't.) I don't have the technical background to understand what was going on, and I was still fascinated. Maybe someday I'll get an engineer to explain it to me.
Barry B. Longyear
"Enemy Mine" in The Super Hugos. Alien sf. I'm dubious about the alien-ness of the Drac, but hey. A war-story of friendship between species.
H.P. Lovecraft
"The Whisperer in Darkness." Sf. Part of the Cthulhu mythos, but it also works as "aliens among us" sf told in an epistolary format. Freaked me out when I first read it.
Jack McDevitt
"The Fort Moxie Branch" in Standard Candles. Sf. In his introduction to Standard Candles, Charles Sheffield remarks that this story "has a theme guaranteed to appeal to any writer, or would-be writer, who has felt under-appreciated."
"Gus" in Standard Candles. Sf. Monsignor Chesley is convinced at first that the Augustine AI module, or "Gus," is a more a menace to the seminary than its dubious pedagogical value. In spite of himself, though, he finds himself speaking more and more to Gus, and their theological discussions take an interesting turn...
"Time Travelers Never Die" in Standard Candles. Sf. A love triangle plays out its inevitable end--if end it is--amid a time traveler's refusal to return home to die. The tale is by turns humorous, clever, and wry.
"Translations from the Colosian" in Standard Candles. Sf. George, an English professor, accompanies a friend on an impossible jaunt through space to watch, in astonishment, Antigone--by an alien playwright, in an alien language. And that's just the beginning of the subtle, extensive and historical plagiarisms that he stumbles across.
Ian MacDonald
"Scenes from a Shadow Play" in Asimov's July 1985.
Oh, but the Infanta Serenade is graceful and the Infanta Serenade is fair and when Dom Perellen sees her descending the grand staircase on the arm of the host, his ex-patron, the night of the pageant at the House Merreveth, he knows someone will have to die.
Science fantasy. A baroque, bizarre tale of intrigue and revenge in the decadent City of Man.
Ian MacLeod
"Breathmoss" in Asimov's May 2002 or Science Fiction: The Best of 2002, ed. Silverberg & Haber. Sf. A beautiful exploration of "the Pain of Distance" in a dreamy, Islamic-flavored future in the Ten Thousand and One Worlds. Jalila is brought by her three mothers to live in a coastal settlement, where she meets a boy (one of only two males there--and she's vaguely surprised to see them at all), tastes infatuation with lovely Nayra, and finds herself yearning, inevitably, toward the stars. The milieu is seductively, painstakingly drawn; apparently there is at least one other story in this setting and I can only hope I'll be able to find it. I wish I knew Arabic, and what to make of the terminology, which is evocative but never overwhelming.
George R.R. Martin
"Blood of the Dragon" in Asimov's June 1997; "Path of the Dragon" in Asimov's (issue?). Fantasy. These are the Daenerys-viewpoint parts of the novels A Game of Thrones and A Storm of Swords, respectively. Daenerys Targaryen seeks to reclaim rule of Westeros from those who exiled her and her brother, and along the way begins to learn what leadership means. They read well as a stand-alone sequence, and are a great way to decide whether you're interested in Martin's vast and gritty fantasy saga, A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE.
"SandKings" in The Super Hugos.
Simon Kress lived alone in a sprawling manor house among the dry, rocky hills fifty kilometers from the city. So, when he was called away unexpectedly on business, he had no neighbors he could conveniently impose on to take his pets. The carrion hawk was no problem; it roosted in the unused belfry and customarily fed itself anyway. The shambler Kress simply shooed outside and left to fend for itself; the little monster would gorge on slugs and birds and rockjocks. But the fish tank, stocked with genuine Earth piranha, posed a difficulty. Kress finally just threw a haunch of beef into the huge tank. The piranha could always eat each other if he were detained longer than expected. They'd done it before. It amused him.
Alien sf or horror, take your pick. Creepy (and illegal) alien pets run into the protagonist, a creepy man. Also a disturbing exploration of the relationship between the mores of a "god" and the developing mores of his charges.
Lisa Mason
"Daughter of the Tao" in Peter S. Beagle's Immortal Unicorn. Fantasy. A colorful tale of two servant girls, the Chinese unicorn, and redemption.
Judith Merrill
"That Only a Mother" in The Road to Science Fiction vol. 3. Sf. The specter of radiation and mutation passes a younger mother by--or seems to.
David Moles
"Five Irrational Histories" in Petting Zoo. Twisted exuberant counterfactuals.
Ecbatana, Media--Overcome with grief at the death of his lover, Alexander--Emperor of Persia, King of Macedonia, and Hegemon of the Corinthian League--invades the land of the dead.
C.L. Moore
"Bright Illusion." Sf. This is a love story in an unexpected milieu: a man and the alien world to which he comes, with a mission of his own. The descriptions of setting become, at times, repetitious; I almost thought I was accidentally rereading the same passages. There are perhaps POV-reaction reasons to do this, but the effect distracted me, and I don't know whether it was deliberate or not. Nevertheless, Moore's prose at its best--when it evokes strange wild beauty--is breathtaking. What is best about this story, despite the flaws of narrative, and a trope that could have been overtrodden, is the careful development leading up to its bitter, unexpected ending, with a logic devastating in its thoroughness.
"Shambleau." Sf; one of the NORTHWEST SMITH series of stories (arguably the high point). A strange and lovely tale depicting the haunting seductiveness of danger and evil and alienness.
"Vintage Season." Sf.Oliver lets out a house to some mysterious tourists, who evoke a "feeling of luxury" (270) and have tastes sometimes strangely divergent from the ones he knows. At the insistence of his fiancée, he stays--which isn't forbidden by the contract--in order to drive them out, because the first group are apparently in competition with another group of tourists who have offered a greater sum for the house. By now you have probably guessed, ah, where the tourists come from. One of the tourists, the woman Kleph, apparently breaks a set of rules in talking to Oliver--and she lets slip fragments that make no sense to Oliver at the time, whose significance becomes horrifyingly apparent later.
The power of the story lies in the deft, darkening emotional exploration. The ending implicates the reader as well in the decadent in/humanity of Oliver's visitors; its final ironies (the last three paragraphs) are shatteringly metatextual.
Larry Niven
Sf. A sober take on what people would do, and two people in particular, if it seemed the world were indeed coming to an end, in the light of a madcap moon. (Yes, this is compatible with "sober.") Impressive.
Susan Palwick
"Going after Bobo" in Asimov's May 2000. Sf. A gently-told tale of a lost cat and a troubled family. More fiction than science, but well worth the read.
Richard Parks
"Golden Bell, Seven, and the Marquis of Zeng" in The Year's Best Fantasy, ed. David Hartwell. Fantasy. A fable of the trials that Seven goes through to win the love of a concubine named Golden Bell.
Michelle Pendleton
"Great Economy of the Saurian Mode" in Asimov's July 2000. Alien sf. The tale of a woman who is pheremonally bonded to some predatory aliens, giving her "control" over them (which, as she'll tell you in the story, is the wrong way to look at it), and their encounter with a government agent. Some really neat characterizations in here.
Roy Phillips
"The Yellow Pill." Sf with a psychological bent. How to mess with the characters' and readers' minds. What if there were a drug that let you see reality? Real reality?
Frederik Pohl
"Day Million" in The Road to Science Fiction vol. 3. Sf. A sassy, humorous look at life on "day million" (a million days from "now," which I think was in the '70s or '60s at the time, but what's a few decades among friends?) and how it compares to our lives. Worth reading for the narratory hijinks alone.
"Outnumbering the Dead" in The Year's Best Science Fiction 10, ed. Gardner Dozois. Sf. Immortality is great unless you're the lone mortal in a world of immortals.
"The Tunnel Under the World" in Masterpieces: The Best Science Fiction of the Century. Sf. A spooky tale in which it's the same day over and over again, and the sound-trucks and nightmares are but clues to the strange dystopian reality in place. Kicker of an ending.
Robert Reed
"Mirror" in Asimov's Jan. 2001. Sf. An evocative short story about the relationship between a man and his wife as refracted through alternate versions of an old rival-sometimes-friend.
Mike Resnick
"The Elephants on Neptune" in Asimov's May 2000. Sf. A satire about a meeting between elephants and men on Neptune, reminiscent of George Orwell's Animal Farm.
M. Rickert
"Many Voices" in F&SF Mar. 2004. Dark fantasy. A disturbingly poetic story from the viewpoint of a woman-murderer, formerly a health care worker, who hears angels.
Kate Riedel
"Words and Music" in Realms of Fantasy Aug. 2004. Used-bookstore fantasy.
Bruce Holland Rogers
"In the Matter of the Ukdena." Historical sf. A gem: mostly alternate history in which the Amerinds prevailed, and a meditation on might-have-beens.
"Little Brother (TM)" in Strange Horizons. Sf. A brief story about a boy and his new little brother, who isn't what he seems. This one hit me like a kick to the stomach; thanks to my sister for pointing it out.
Christopher Rowe
"The Voluntary State" in SCIFICTION. Sf.
Now, here's the secret of those feathers. The one Jenny gave to the police and the one the cluenets had caught already. The secret of those feathers, and the feathers strung like look-here flags along the trails down from the Girding Wall, and even of the Owl feathers that had pushed through that fence and let the outside in. All of them were oily with intrigue. Each had been dipped in potent math, the autonomous software developed by the Owls of the Bluegrass.
Those feathers were hacks. They were lures and false attacks. Those feathers marked the way the Kentuckians didn't go.
The math kept quiet and still as it floated through Jenny's head, through the ignorable defenses of the telephone and the more considerable, but still avoidable, rings of barbed wire around Jenny's Operator. The math went looking for a Detective or even a Legislator if one were to be found not braying in a pack of its brethren, an unlikely event.
he math stayed well clear of the Commodores in the Great Salt Lick ringing the Parthenon. It was sly math. Its goals were limited, realizable. It marked the way they didn't go.
Rudy Rucker
"Message Found in a Copy of Flatland" in Ascent of Wonder. Sf. The most funnily horrible, or horribly funny, story I've ever seen. A man finds himself on the trail of the Flatlanders and meets with betrayal. Read Edwin Abbott's Flatland first.
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
"Flowers and the Last Hurrah" in Analog Mar. 1999. Sf. Clones, tabloid reporting, corruption, and intrigue.
Brett Alexander Savory
"The Bottom Drawer" in Vestal Review. A mordant, metaphorical examination of connections and love and frustration--and the last, hardest thing of all, at the end. It is an earned ending; this story should join the list of things I should tape over my desk, as a reminder during hard times.
Sylvog J. Van Scyoc
"When Petals Fall." Sf. Humans are kept alive as vegetables, but when do you pull the plug--and who gets to decide?
Stephanie Shaver
"At the Tolling of Midnight" in Sword & Sorceress VII, ed. Marion Zimmer Bradley. High fantasy. If Death had a song, what would she sing?
Bob Shaw
"Light of Other Days." Sf about slow glass.
Robert Sheckley
"Pilgrimage to Earth" in The Road to Science Fiction vol. 3. Sf. On the surface, a funny/sad tale of true love, disillusion, and why there's a market for a shooting gallery with women as the targets. (Men, too, but that's not relevant for the story's purposes.) On a deeper level, it explores the cultural clash between the jaded, cosmopolitan culture of a "big city" and the "country" backwaters, and probes the reader to consider which values are more worth keeping.
Lucius Shepard
"The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule" in Asimov's Dec. 1984.
In 1853, in a country far to the south, in a world separated from this one by the thinnest margin of possibility, a dragon named Griaule dominated the region of the Carbonales Valley, a fertile area centering upon the town of Teocinte and renowned for its production of silver, mahogany, and indigo....
Fantasy. A nuirky tale about a man who decides to paint a comatose dragon in a town called Teocinte, and the subtle loss of magic that results in himself and around him.
Robert Silverberg
"Born with the Dead." Sf. What if the dead could be resurrected--but lost interest in their former lives? What would you do if the one you loved came back and didn't care about you anymore?
"Sailing to Byzantium." Sf. What might life be like as an anachronism from centuries past, in a future when people live solely for their own pleasure and curiosity?
Clifford D. Simak
"Desertion" in The Road to Science Fiction vol. 3. Sf. Volunteers to settle another planet by becoming members of its most intelligent alien species never return. A man and his dog find out why--and, in the process, discover the limitations of their natures.
Cordwainer Smith (Paul Linebarger)
"The Ballad of Lost C'mell" in The Rediscovery of Man. Sf. A story about "cat-values" (as Bujold puts it), a rebellion by the underpeople against the masters who created them from the genes of beast and man, and true love. Familiarity with Smith's Instrumentality of Man setting is helpful.
"She got the which of the what-she-did,
Hid the bell with a blot, she did,
But she fell in love with a hominid.
Where is the which of the what-she-did?"
"The Crime and the Glory of Commander Suzdal" in The Rediscovery of Man. Sf. A strange story about honor, desperation, and the ruthlessness of the Lords of the Instrumentality. It also has one of the neatest openings I've ever seen for a story:
"Do not read this story; turn the page quickly. The story may upset you. Anyhow, you probably know it already. It is a very disturbing story. Everyone knows it. The glory and the crime of Commander Suzdal have been told in a thousand different ways. Don't let yourself realize that the story is the truth.
"It isn't. Not at all. There's not a bit of truth to it. There is no such planet as Arachosia, no such people as klopts, no such world as Catland. These are all just imaginary, they didn't happen, forget about it, go away and read something else."
"The Game of Rat and Dragon." Sf.
S.P. Somtow
"A Thief in the Night" in Peter S. Beagle's Immortal Unicorn 2. Fantasy. History, saviors, and God from the tempter's point of view, but unlike Harlan Ellison's "The Deathbird," a tour-de-force of compassion rather than cynicism.
Bud Sparhawk
"Resurrection" in Analog Jan. 1996. Alien sf. A Christian missionary-of-sorts thinks he finds an alien convert among a cannibalistic species, but the convert understands things differently. Sensitively written.
Brian Stableford
"Chanterelle" in The Year's Best Fantasy, ed. David Hartwell. Adult fairytale. A poignant, multilayered tale hinging on several meanings of "chanterelle" that starts, deceptively, like Hansel and Gretel but rapidly ventures into malicious magic, illusion, and loss.
John E. Stith
"Naught for Hire" in Analog July 1990. Sf. A wacky detective story in a near-future peopled with hostile (well, sometimes) technology. And I do mean peopled.
Theodore Sturgeon
"The Silken-Swift" in E Pluribus Unicorn. Fantasy. Perhaps the unicorn story, concerning the squire's virginal daughter Rita, the quiet girl Barbara, and blond hunter Del; and what it is to be "gloriously Fair."
"Thunder and Roses" in The Road to Science Fiction vol. 3. Sf. After a nuclear strike, two people risk themselves in order to preserve the rest of humanity by not striking back.
"The World Well Lost" in E. Pluribus Unicorn. Sf. A strangely convergent tale of love, when the odd pair of Captain Rootes and Grunty are charged with returning two loverbirds to their homeworld of Dirbanu.
All the world knew them as loverbirds, though they were certainly not birds, but humans. Well, say humanoids. Featherless bipeds. Their stay on earth was brief, a nine-day wonder. Any wonder that lasts nine days on an earth of orgasmic trideo shows; time-freezing pills; synapse-inverter fields which make it possible for a man to turn a sunset to perfumes, a masochist to a fur-feeler; and a thousand other euphorics--why, on such an earth, a nine-day wonder is a wonder indeed.
Michael Swanwick
"The Raggle-Taggle Gypsy-O" in The Year's Best Fantasy, ed. David Hartwell. Science fantasy. Apparently written with "two elements that nobody could possibly fit into a ballad story," dinosaurs and "a picnic hamper full of dead puppies." (Read it and you'll see.) A man and a woman are in the business of traveling through time to supply a gladiatorial arena with exotic beasts, among other things; and true love really is immortalized by song and story. Reminiscent of Zelazny, as Hartwell says in his introduction, citing in particular "Damnation Alley" (which I haven't read); I find myself thinking of the CHRONICLES OF AMBER.
William Tenn (Philip Klass)
"Brooklyn Project" in the Road to Science Fiction vol. 3. Sf. The possible perils of time travel--even that of a single unobtrusive probe--are made abundantly clear to the reader, if not to the characters.
James Tiptree, Jr.
"And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill's Side." Alien sf. A disturbing examination of humanity's fascination with aliens.
"Houston, Hosuton, Do You Read." A dystopian feminist future in which there are no men, and what happens when men arrive. (Hint: if you're thinking "in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king," H.G. Wells is closer to the mark than you are.)
"Love Is the Plan, the Plan Is Death." Sf. Love, joy, and death, and the greatest of these is death. It is a celebration of a story, an exuberant caress of a story, and it made me cry hysterically at the end. Also, I may never be able to look at a spider again.
"A Momentary Taste of Being." Thoroughly logical, ruthlessly plotted, and existentially black in its implications. The story sheathes itself in a familiar form: a human expedition ship seeks colony worlds for an overcrowded world, and finds a new planet--a paradise that sounds too good to be true. But Lory Kaye, the scientist sent back from the planetfall team, seems to be holding a secret; the sessile alien she brought back as a sample may or may not have caused the collapse of a man; and people are starting to see the man's doppelgŠngers. Aaron Kaye, Lory's brother, has suspicions that he cannot piece together until it's too late. In itself, this is a taut story for all its length (novella? novelette?). However, the final pages reveal the true darkness of the story's worldview, the unsparing bleakness of Aaron's epiphany.
"We Who Stole the Dream." Framed as history/reminiscence of the alien Joilani's escape from their Terran oppressors, fleeing their conquered world in the desperate hope that the old stories are true, that they too were once starfaring and that there will be Joilani elsewhere to welcome them home. The story comes together in flashes, stitched together by death and common purpose; its biting irony at the end, the tainted fruit of their travels, is all too effective. I loved the Joilani refugees, but this one hurts to read, and not just because of its commentary on colonialism/assimilation. It is fundamentally cynical.
Julian Todd
"Mine the Primes." Sf. A stardrive fueled by prime numbers!
Catherynne Valente
"Milk and Apples" in Electric Velocipede #11. Retold fairytale, hauntingly told.
John Varley
"The Manhattan Phone Book (Abridged)." Post-apocalyptic sf, absolutely devastating.
"The Persistence of Vision." Sf. A gentle and beautiful portrayal of a future blind community, and in some ways a humane rebuttal to H.G. Wells' story (whose title eludes me, alas) on what happens when a sighted man encounters a blind society.
"Press Enter." Sf. A murder investigation leads both to love between a veteran and a Vietnamese refugee turned computer programmer, and to the creeping conviction that computers aren't as benign, or even indifferent, as we'd like them to be.
Joan D. Vinge
"Media Man" in Eyes of Amber and Other Stories. Sf. Chaim Dartagnan has finally squirreled his way into becoming the "media man"--someone who's willing to put the requested spin on anything for a living--for Demarch Siamang, the son of a wealthy entrepreneur and a psychological sadist. The mission: to rescue a stranded man in anticipation of buying the valuable computer programs he possesses. While Dartagnan makes a lousy first impression on Siamang's female pilot, Mythili Fukinuki, the two are more alike than they realize in their fundamental honesty. The question becomes, who is more willing to do what it takes to stop Siamang--and who is right, in the final analysis? Vinge's portrait of a "radical democracy" is chilling in its implications.
"Tin Soldier" in Eyes of Amber and Other Stories. Sf. "Soldier," as his clients know him, is a cyborg bartender who watches the starship crews come and go as he, too, ages no more slowly than they in their interstellar journeys. He finds himself tangled in a growing relationship with crewmember Brandy, even though as a man and a cyborg he is forbidden to join her, instead waiting for her twenty-five-year-interval visits. A tender, bittersweet romance with resonances of the Hans Christian Andersen fairytale.
"To Bell the Cat" in Eyes of Amber and Other Stories. Sf. Piper Alvarian Jary, condemned for genocide, now serves as the "catspaw," or brainwiped experimental victim/slave assistant, of scientist Orr. Ironically, it is Jary who shows compassion for the alien creatures that Orr and his colleagues are attempting to study, and is given an opportunity to make contact with them, as the others' interactions show the callousness with which they regard each other, let alone nonhumans.
Howard Waldrop
"The Ugly Chickens." Sf. A sad/hilarious portrayal of what happens when a scientist discovers that the dodo is indeed still alive...as a farm animal.
Scott Westerfeld
"The Movements of Her Eyes." A luminous portrayal of the relationship between Rathere, an interstellar trader's daughter, her "minder," the AI in charge of her, and her father, who doesn't realize what's going on until it's too late. Part of Westerfield's novel Evolution's Darling (and arguably the best part).
Deborah Wheeler
"Poisoned Dreams" in Sword & Sorceress VI. High fantasy. A princess whose father has come to depend on a captured faery dreams of unicorns, and discovers the cost of her dream.
Wendy Wheeler
"Tears of Tjahja" in Pandora #24. High fantasy. A wonderful story about a sorceress who discovers the keys to magic and friendship, among other things.
Walter Jon Williams
"Wolf Time" in The Best Military Science Fiction of the 20th Century. Cyberpunk/military sf. Reese, a mercenary who killed ethical concerns within herself, becomes involved in an informational revolution and comes to wonder if the people above her are really any better. A taut, suspenseful narrative.
Kate Wilhelm
"Naming the Flowers" in F&SF Feb. 1993. Sf. A man's encounter with a mutant child, what she does to his life--and what he does to hers. Wilhelm's style is quiet, subtle and altogether appropriate.
"Yesterday's Tomorrows" in F&SF Sept. 2001. Sf. A sensitive love story between a historian and the hitchhiker he picks up, who turns out not only to be the daughter of a member of the House of Representatives, but the key to an unethical scientist's downfall. Sf-wise, it's also an exploration of the nature of time, the fourth dimension, to which the title refers.
Connie Willis
"At the Rialto" in Impossible Things. Sf. Mathematicians and scientists at a conference on chaos theory discover its manifestations in more ways than they'd realized. Willis' understanding of chaos theory is funky, but this is a quite funny story.
"Spice Pogrom" in Impossible Things. Sf. Romantic comedy with a well-meaning alien who is prone to Spoonerisms.
Gene Wolfe
"Detective of Dreams" in The Fantasy Hall of Fame. Fantasy.
Jane Yolen
"Evian Steel" in Imaginary Lands, ed. Robin McKinley. Fantasy. An Arthurian tale in which Arthur makes no appearance. Instead, Yolen tells us of Ynis Evelonia, the Isle of Women, where the finest swords are forged, and in particular of two girls whose friendship foreshadows later tragedies. Yolen tells it best:
Timothy Zahn
"Cascade Point" in The New Hugo Winners. Hard sf. A routine flight through space takes an unexpected twist when a psychiatrist and his patient comes on board--and one of their instruments disrupts the stardrive. The "hyperdrive" in this story is just cool--or is it 'cause I was a math major?
Roger Zelazny
"The Engine at Heartspring's Center." A man who's half machine. A doomed love. The wages of life are death. Pick any of the above, and you may be right. Zelazny's flamboyant style is much in evidence, and frames the ethical tragedies nicely.
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