Fantasy Short Fiction

After quitting her job as a therapist, Tess's life became pretty slow. A tad boring, even. It thus came as no small shock to her when she was chosen by a god. Suddenly thrust into a new world where magic, monsters, and character levels are par for the course, Tess will find that simply surviving can be a challenge. It doesn't help that dark forces are stirring, she's woefully underpowered, and spiders keep trying to claw her face off.

Nadine is the only witch of her kind. With unique powerful abilities, she's a prime contender to sit on the witch's council, yet she's anything but welcome. A haunting family curse threatens to force her out of her magical college, and revealing her greatest secret may lead to the destruction of her people. Lucas is the only warlock of his generation destined to ferry the souls of the dead. Accepting his dark gift is as brutal as investigating the coven's mysteries. He's prepared to fight the darkness alone, until he receives a warning beyond the grave from Nadine's mother.

This collection includes the first four books in the Return of the Elves romantic fantasy series: Soulbound, Sundered, Exiled, and Seared.

As the crown prince of Lustburg, Sol Luxuria had the dream life: beautiful maids trained to please his slightest desires, a strict but gentle wolf girl serving him as a knight, a beautiful witch as a teacher and a mature Saintess with some very interesting tendencies. Once he awakened and truly inherited the crown, it would get even better... but first, he might have to put down a few pesky nobles with rebellious thoughts.

The best science fiction scrutinizes our culture and politics, examines the limits of the human condition, and zooms across galaxies at faster-than-light speeds, moving from the very near future to the far-flung worlds of tomorrow in the space of a single sentence. Neil Clarke has selected the short science fiction (and only science fiction) best representing the previous year's writing, showcasing the talent, variety, and awesome "sensawunda" that the genre has to offer.

Watch out - the Earth just fell into a dark sun's orbit! Or maybe you'd rather visit a theme park called Hell? These are just two of the strange and unnerving tales you'll find in this collection of great science fiction and fantasy stories.

In this sweeping, threaded narrative of the global phenomenon known as the Vampire Wars, mankind is unwittingly infected by a millennia-old bacteria unknowingly exhumed by a scientific expedition in Antarctica. Now, in some rare cases, a person’s so-called junk DNA becomes activated. Depending on their racial and ethnic heritage, they begin to manifest one of the many diverse forms of the "others" that are the true basis for the legends of supernatural creatures. These aren’t your usual vampires and werewolves - it goes much deeper than that.

Carl Ramsey has a heist to run and the crew to pull it off. All he’s missing is a specialized computer and the tech to run it. But when an unrelated robbery loses him both, the prospects for a successful job look grim. Unfortunately the one who hired them won’t take excuses, and the owners of the computer come looking for their stolen gear. Caught between a local crime lord and thugs from a galaxy-spanning syndicate, Carl needs to come up with a plan that doesn’t get them all killed.

When DARPA builds the ultimate tactical weapon—a portal capable of instant travel across any distance—they recruit Marine Raider Captain Jackson Glover and his elite team to test it. But this isn’t just a new form of transport: it’s Pandora’s Box. Every time the portal opens, the team must pass through Other Earths—alternate realities filled with hostile environments, alien ecosystems, and threats that defy human comprehension. What should be a shortcut through space becomes a gauntlet of survival, where each “layover” could unleash horrors capable of annihilating our world.

Step into the golden age of imagination with Classic Science Fiction Short Stories, a powerful collection of visionary tales from the masters who defined the genre. Featuring works by Isaac Asimov, Frank Herbert, Philip K. Dick, Ray Bradbury, Andre Norton, and E. E. Smith, this anthology explores humanity’s future, the limits of technology, distant worlds, and the nature of reality itself.

Pitting ordinary men and women against a carnivorous, chaotic cosmos, Occultation's eight tales of terror (two never before published) include the Theodore Sturgeon and Shirley Jackson Award-nominated story "The Forest" and Shirley Jackson Award nominee "The Lagerstatte."

Stranded on the distant planet Tschai, young Adam Reith is the sole survivor of a space mission who discovers the world is inhabited - not only by warring alien cultures but by human slaves as well, taken early in Earth's history. Reith must find a way off the planet to warn Earth of Tschai's deadly existence.

Like the creation myths they supersede, the revelations of science are seared into our collective imagination through storytelling. From Archimedes' bath to Newton's apple, vivid accounts of scientific discovery help us understand the principles behind each theory, and add to the larger narrative of how the universe works, and how we came to be here. This anthology draws out and distils science's love of narrative from a wide range of scientific disciplines, weaving theory into very human stories.

Welcome to Newford: to the music clubs, the waterfront, and the alleyways where ancient myths and magic spill into the modern world. Gemmins live in abandoned cars and skells traverse the tunnels below, while mermaids swim in the gray harbor waters and fill the cold night with their song. Come meet Jilly, painting wonders in the rough city streets; and Geordie, playing fiddle while he dreams of a ghost; and the Angel of Grasso Street gathering the fey and the wild and the poor and the lost.

Damien was a simple man, cruising on the highway of life. A goddess of temptation lures him into a deal he scoffs at. To him, superstition is for the foolish. Small problem: she's real, her ritual works, and Damien is magically teleported into a strange new realm. He awakens in Nordan, a land of myth and magic. A realm where humans battle legendary creatures for the amusement of the gods. In a war between man and myth. Damien's powers set him above the rest, a lord of life and death - enemy of all. Stranded, but not alone, will he perish, or conquer his way home?

Who would suspect that the same mind that created the most famous literary detective of all time also took on the eternally popular genre of vampires? Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a contemporary of Bram Stoker, gave us some fascinating works of vampire fiction. From the bloodsucking plant in "The American's Tale" to the bloodsucking wife in "The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire," he reveled in the horror created by creatures who survived on the blood of men and women.

The Origin series is empire building at its finest, with 100 episodes and over 2.5 million words in the military science fiction serial detailing the rise of Star Force from corporate entity into an interstellar empire over the course of more than a millennium. Follow a core group of characters known as the Trailblazers as they use alien technology and knowledge discovered in Antarctic ruins to obtain limited immortality and lead humanity out into the galaxy, encountering, befriending, and fighting hundreds of alien races.

Like a smaller and much scruffier Greta Garbo - finally - Markham speaks! It's Christmas and time for the first (and almost certainly last) St Mary's Annual Children's Christmas Party - attendance compulsory, by order of Dr Bairstow. Discovered practising his illegal reindeer dance and poo-dropping routine, our hero, along with fellow disaster magnets Peterson and Maxwell, is dispatched to Anglo-Saxon England to discover the truth about Alfred and the cakes.

Jane Yellowrock and the Younger brothers, partners in Yellowrock Securities, are hired by the state of Louisiana to track, hunt, and dispatch a small pack of marauding werewolves. They may be part of the larger pack that Jane destroyed in the novel Mercy Blade. The job sounds easy on the surface, but is anything ever easy for Jane or her Beast?

New research has uncovered deeply buried military secrets—both the Allied and Axis special operations during WWII included monsters. Did the Soviets use a dragon to win the Battle of Kursk? Did a vampire fight for the Canadians in Holland? Did the US drop the second atomic bomb on a kaiju? This collection takes real events from World War II and injects them with fantastical creatures that mirror the “unreality” of war itself. Each story—and two poems—feature mythical, mystical, and otherwise unexplainable beings that change the course of history.