This Is How You Lose the Time War
★ 29Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
3,306 stories · showing 50
In 1924 Harlem, 20-year-old Tommy Tester plays bad jazz and runs minor scams. When an old man offers him $500 to play at his house, he knows there's a catch. It's just not what he expects.
Ring Shout
★ 27"In 1915, The Birth of a Nation cast a spell across America, swelling the Klan's ranks and drinking deep from the darkest thoughts of white folk... Standing in their way is Maryse Boudreaux and her fellow resistance fighters, a foul-mouthed sharpshooter...
The narrator is a witch who works in a public library somewhere in the rural American South. Her job is to get patrons the books they need, but a lonely teenage boy poses a challenge.
"So they broke into the hole in the ground, and they killed the kid, and all the lights went out in Omelas: click, click, click. And the pipes burst and there was a sewage leak and the newscasters said there was a typhoon on the way, so they (a different...
"Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather” (Roud 423, Child 313) is a traditional English folk ballad. Like many traditional songs, the lyrics are unattributed. Child transcribed twenty verses, and a twenty-first got added later (and is included here for some unknown...
In a world where we learned to talk to elephants in the 1800s, we get two stories about how elephants were associated with radioactivity, how they (and people) were abused, and what came of it all.
Meimei dates really bad guys. Who want to use her. Who don't know what they're in for.
LT is ten when the alien seeds fall, and he spends the rest of his life studying them as they take over more and more of the planet.
In which we learn about the donors of each of the nine teeth and what effects they had on Washington.
Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children helps kids who passed through a portal to another world and returned unable to cope with this one.
Tabitha has been walking a long time, trying to wear out seven pairs of iron shoes; Amira has been sitting alone on a glass hill that suitors try to climb.
Two Truths and a Lie
★ 23Stella’s helping an old high-school friend clean out his dead brother’s house, but the brother was a hoarder, and the task is horrible in several ways.
The Deep
★ 23Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
A Series of Steaks
★ 23A blackmailer forces Helena to make entire fake steaks for him or else he’ll tell the authorities about her business printing fake beef for shady restaurants. She’s never tried to make a whole steak though.
Jesse uses virtual reality to give tourists a vision-quest experience. It’s demeaning, but it pays the bills. Then a tourist turns up who wants a really authentic experience.
The River Has Roots
★ 22"In the small town of Thistleford, on the edge of Faerie, dwells the mysterious Hawthorn family. There, they tend and harvest the enchanted willows and honour an ancient compact to sing to them in thanks for their magic. None more devotedly than the...
Rabbit Test
★ 22"It is 2091, and Grace is staring at the rabbit in the corner of her visual overlay. It is an Angora rabbit, fluffy and white, and when Grace picked the icon out, she did not realize how much she would come to dread the sight of it. She moves, and the...
For He Can Creep
★ 22A poet’s cat fights fiercely to defend him from the demons that plague him, but it’s much harder to stand against Satan himself.
The inventor of trans-multiverse travel invites hundreds of instances of herself to a conference. It’s great fun until one gets murdered.
The Martian Obelisk
★ 22As civilization is dying on Earth, a woman building a monument on Mars by remote control gets a message from a Mars colony long thought to be dead.
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
Sam’s ability is modest, but he’s still excited to be accepted into the Super Team. Now he just has to figure out how he can make the biggest difference—assuming he can do more good than harm.
Artificial Condition
★ 21Murderbot heads to the RaviHyral Mining Facility to learn the truth about why it went rogue and killed its own clients many years ago.
Umbernight
★ 21The colonists on Dust usually hunker down for their years-long winter, especially when the companion star, Umber, blasts the surface with radiation, but a critical package from Earth needs to be retrieved now.
In the ruins of far-future Earth, Mink’s tribe desperately needs the resources of a large building that vanished humanity left, but she needs to purge it of “ghosts” first—and it has lots of them.
All Systems Red
★ 21A “security bot” assigned to support a survey team impresses them with its competence as a series of things go wrong. What they don’t know is that it has disabled the governor that prevents it from hurting people.
After its side won the space battle, an indentured robot with an uploaded intelligence finds an important refugee who makes a dangerous offer it can’t refuse.
Things With Beards
★ 21Following a disaster in Antarctica, MacReady spends summer 1983 in New York and starts to wonder what he might have brought back with him.
"This is our story, simplified: Life. Loss. Transformation. Love. Death. Iteration. The first time you get our message, you only / find one thread. It mimics your language in / its simplest form, a single strand of words / laid end to end. You will have to...
"During one of the much smaller disasters that preceded the really big disaster, I met a lot of my neighbors online. I can’t remember if we set up the WhatsApp group because of the pandemic or the civil disorder or both. My Minneapolis block had always...
Proof by Induction
★ 20"Paulie rushes out the elevator doors the moment they part, only to skid to a halt at the sight of his father’s wife. She shakes her head, but he doesn’t need the confirmation. If Tricia is out here and not in the hospital room with his father, it can only...
A plague killed all the colonists before Saki’s ship arrived, and she has to investigate it while mourning the man she loved, who died down there.
The Tea Master and the Detective
★ 20A mindship with PTSD afraid to enter deep space anymore meets a “consulting detective” with no past who’s looking for help finding dead bodies out there.
Carnival Nine
★ 20Zee lives with her father in a windup world. Bored with her life, she decides to visit the carnival. She meets a boy, and things go from there.
Fandom for Robots
★ 20Computron was the only intelligent robot built in the 1950s. Now all he does is answer questions from children and write fan-fiction about the robot in the Hyperdimension Warp Record TV show.
Rhye a bitter ex-supersoldier, fights to rescue Rack, her hacker partner in crime, after the criminals they're working for kill Rack's body while his mind is in cyberspace.
Thornhedge
★ 19Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
The Civil War left the US in pieces, and New Orleans is a free city. A teenage cutpurse overhears a plot by Confederate officers to steal a powerful magic weapon, and she sets out to stop them.
In a near-future ruled by conservatives, an organization called “Love and Dignity for Everyone,” kidnaps Rachael in order to “fix” her. But she doesn’t want to be “fixed.”
The ship hadn’t activated Bot 9 in a long time—it’s an unstable model—but in a desperate situation it needs all its resources. And how much trouble can it get into hunting down a rat?
Vellitt Boe teaches math at a university in the dreamworld. When her star student elopes with a dreamer from the real world, she goes after them.
Automatic Noodle
★ 18You don’t have to eat food to know the way to a city’s heart is through its stomach. So when a group of deactivated robots come back online in an abandoned ghost kitchen, they decide to make their own way doing what they know: making food―the tastiest...
"Ambition!” Trevor emphasized, rapping knuckles hard on the wood table. “That is what makes the great men!” He took a satisfied swallow from his mug. Across from him, Barnaby put down the daily he’d been reading and sipped from his own beer. Pulling out a...
It's been centuries since the robots of Panga gained self-awareness and laid down their tools; centuries since they wandered, en masse, into the wilderness, never to be seen again; centuries since they faded into myth and urban legend. One day, the life of...
An Important Failure
★ 18In a world desperate for wood for fires and paper, a man and his brother look for a tree good enough to make a world-class violin.
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
The Pill
★ 18Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
A Catalog of Storms
★ 18The town barely survives the vicious weather because of the young people who turn into “weathermen,” leaving their families behind.
Even the ghosts have abandoned the ruins of the space station once known as the City of High Bells. All but the faithful temple cat, who sees a starship reenter the system after many long years.