The Thing from - Outside: A Short Science Fiction Novel

List of science fiction short stories

---

Land of the Great Horses. The Last Command short story. The Last Defender of Camelot short story. The Last Full Measure. The Last of the Masters. The Last of the Winnebagos. Lest Darkness Fall and Related Stories. Let There Be Light Clarke short story. Let There Be Light Heinlein short story. Let's Go to Golgotha! The Liberation of Earth. Little Brother short story. The Little Sisters of Eluria. A Little Something for Us Tempunauts. Live Without a Net book.

Lorelei at Storyville West. The Love Letter film. The Machine That Won the War short story. The Man Who Bridged the Mist. The Man Who Came Early. The Man Who Ploughed the Sea. The Man Who Sold the Moon. A Martian Odyssey and Others. Matters Arising from the Identification of the Body. Maureen Birnbaum, Barbarian Swordsperson. The Men and the Mirror. The Men Who Murdered Mohammed. The Message short story.

Mimsy Were the Borogoves. The Monster of Lake LaMetrie. The Morphology of the Kirkham Wreck. Mortimer Gray's History of Death. Myths of the Near Future. Neutron Star short story collection. Notebook Found in a Deserted House. Nothing Ever Happens on the Moon. Old Hundredth short story. Old MacDonald Had a Farm short story. Old Music and the Slave Women. Or All the Seas with Oysters. The Oracle and the Mountains.

How I Picked This Top 10 Science Fiction Short Stories List

Orpheus with Clay Feet. Paladin of the Lost Hour. The Past Through Tomorrow. The People of Sand and Slag. The Persistence of Vision short story. Point of View short story. The Possessed short story. The Preserving Machine short story. The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World. Proxima Centauri short story. Psi-man Heal My Child! The Queen of Air and Darkness novella. Queen of the Black Coast.

The Queer Story of Brownlow's Newspaper. The Red Queen's Race. Red Star, Winter Orbit. The Resurrection of Jimber-Jaw. The Return of the Sorcerer. The Return of William Proxmire. The Riddle of the Universe and Its Solution. Ripples in the Dirac Sea. The Rocket short story. The Search short story. The Secret short story. Selkie Stories Are for Losers. The Sentinel short story. Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge.

George Allan England

The Shadow over Innsmouth. Shall the Dust Praise Thee? The Shambler from the Stars Short Story. Shell Game short story. Skirmish on a Summer Morning. The Skull short story.

List of science fiction short stories - Wikipedia

Sleeping Beauty short story. Her journey is based on chess moves, during the course of which she meets such figures as Humpty Dumpty and the riddling twins Tweedledum and Tweedledee. More challenging intellectually than the first instalment, it explores loneliness, language and the logic of dreams.

The year is - and other times. Fevvers, aerialiste, circus performer and a virgin, claims she was not born, but hatched out of an egg. She has two large and wonderful wings. In fact, she is large and wonderful in every way, from her false eyelashes to her ebullient and astonishing adventures. The journalist Jack Walser comes to interview her and stays to love and wonder, as will every reader of this entirely original extravaganza, which deftly and wittily questions every assumption we make about the lives of men and women on this planet.

Carmen Callil Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. The golden age of the American comic book coincided with the outbreak of the second world war and was spearheaded by first- and second-generation Jewish immigrants who installed square-jawed supermen as bulwarks against the forces of evil. Chabon's Pulitzer prize-winning picaresque charts the rise of two young cartoonists, Klayman and Kavalier.

It celebrates the transformative power of pop culture, and reveals the harsh truths behind the hyperreal fantasies. XB Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. Clarke's third novel fuses science and mysticism in an optimistic treatise describing the transcendence of humankind from petty, warring beings to the guardians of utopia, and beyond. One of the first major works to present alien arrival as beneficent, it describes the slow process of social transformation when the Overlords come to Earth and guide us to the light. Humanity ultimately transcends the physical and joins a cosmic overmind, so ushering in the childhood's end of the title EB Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop.

Chesterton's "nightmare", as he subtitled it, combines Edwardian delicacy with wonderfully melodramatic tub-thumping - beautiful sunsets and Armageddon - to create an Earth as strange as any far-distant planet. Secret policemen infiltrate an anarchist cabal bent on destruction, whose members are known only by the days of the week; but behind each one's disguise, they discover only another policeman.

At the centre of all is the terrifying Sunday, a superhuman force of mischief and pandemonium. Chesterton's distorting mirror combines spinetingling terror with round farce to give a fascinating perspective on Edwardian fears of and flirtations with anarchism, nihilism and a world without god. Clarke's first novel is a vast, hugely satisfying alternative history, a decade in the writing, about the revival of magic - which had fallen into dusty, theoretical scholarship - in the early 19th century.

Two rival magicians flex their new powers, pursuing military glory and power at court, striking a dangerous alliance with the Faerie King, and falling into passionate enmity over the use and meaning of the supernatural. The book is studded with footnotes both scholarly and comical, layered with literary pastiche, and invents a whole new strain of folklore: This classic by an unjustly neglected writer tells the story of Drove and Pallahaxi-Browneyes on a far-flung alien world which undergoes long periods of summer and gruelling winters lasting some 40 years.

It's both a love story and a war story, and a deeply felt essay, ahead of its time, about how all living things are mutually dependant. This is just the kind of jargon-free, humane, character-driven novel to convert sceptical readers to science fiction. Coupland began Girlfriend in a Coma in "probably the darkest period of my life", and it shows. Listening to the Smiths - whose single gave the book its title - can't have helped. This is a story about the end of the world, and the general falling-off that precedes it, as year-old Karen loses first her virginity, then consciousness.

When she reawakens more than a decade later, the young people she knew and loved have died, become junkies or or simply lost that new-teenager smell. Wondering what the future holds? It's wrinkles, disillusionment and the big sleep. It's not often you get to read a book vertically as well as horizontally, but there is much that is uncommon about House of Leaves.

It's ostensibly a horror story, but the multiple narrations and typographical tricks - including one chapter that cuts down through the middle of the book - make it as much a comment on metatextuality as a novel. That said, the creepiness stays with you, especially the house that keeps stealthily remodelling itself: Carrie O'Grady Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop.

It wasn't a problem at first: But the changes don't stop there: A curly tail, trotters and a snout are not far off. Darrieussecq's modern philosophical tale is witty, telling and hearteningly feminist. Joanna Biggs Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. The setting is a post-apocalyptic future, long past the age of humans. Aliens have taken on the forms of human archetypes, in an attempt to come to some understanding of human civilisation and play out the myths of the planet's far past. The novel follows Lobey, who as Orpheus embarks on a quest to bring his lover back from the dead.

With lush, poetic imagery and the innovative use of mythic archetypes, Delaney brilliantly delineates the human condition. Dick's novel became the basis for the film Blade Runner, which prompted a resurgence of interest in the man and his works, but similarities film and novel are slight. Here California is under-populated and most animals are extinct; citizens keep electric pets instead.

In order to afford a real sheep and so affirm his empathy as a human being, Deckard hunts rogue androids, who lack empathy. As ever with Dick, pathos abounds and with it the inquiry into what is human and what is fake. Much imitated "alternative universe" novel by the wayward genius of the genre. The Axis has won the second world war. Imperial Japan occupies the west coast of America; more tyrannically, Nazi Germany under Martin Bormann, Hitler having died of syphilis takes over the east coast.

The Californian lifestyle adapts well to its oriental master. Germany, although on the brink of space travel and the possessor of vast tracts of Russia, is teetering on collapse. The novel is multi-plotted, its random progression determined, Dick tells us, by consultation with the Chinese I Ching.

Foucault's Pendulum followed the massive success of Eco's The Name of the Rose, and in complexity, intrigue, labyrinthine plotting and historical scope it is every bit as extravagant. Eco's tale of three Milanese publishers, who feed occult and mystic knowledge into a computer to see what invented connections are created, tapped into the worldwide love of conspiracy theories, particularly those steeped in historical confusion.

As "The Plan" takes over their lives and becomes reality, the novel turns into a brilliant historical thriller of its own that inspired a similar level of obsession among fans. Nicola Barr Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. A woman drives around the Scottish highlands, all cleavage and lipstick, picking up well-built male hitchhikers - but there's something odd behind her thick pebble glasses Faber's first novel refreshes the elements of horror and SF in luminous, unearthly prose, building with masterly control into a page-turning existential thriller that can also be read as an allegory of animal rights.

And in the character of Isserley - her curiosity, resignation, wonderment and pain - he paints an immensely affecting portrait of how it feels to be irreparably damaged and immeasurably far from home. Determined to extricate himself from an increasingly serious relationship, graduate Nicholas Urfe takes a job as an English teacher on a small Greek island. Walking alone one day, he runs into a wealthy eccentric, Maurice Conchis, who draws him into a succession of elaborate psychological games that involve two beautiful young sisters in reenactments of Greek myths and the Nazi occupation.

Appearing after The Collector, this was actually the first novel that Fowles wrote, and although it quickly became required reading for a generation, he continued to rework it for a decade after publication. David Newnham Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. Before long, he is embroiled in a battle between ancient and modern deities: A road trip through America's sacred places is spiced up by some troublesome encounters with Shadow's unfaithful wife, Laura. She's dead, which always makes for awkward silences. The author of such outstanding mythical fantasies as Elidor and The Owl Service, Garner has been called "too good for grown-ups"; but the preoccupations of this young adult novel love and violence, madness and possession, the pain of relationships outgrown and the awkwardness of the outsider are not only adolescent.

The three narrative strands - young lovers in the s, the chaos of thebetweenalcoholics, English civil war and soldiers going native in a Vietnam-tinged Roman Britain - circle around Mow Cop in Cheshire and an ancient axehead found there. Dipping in and out of time, in blunt, raw dialogue, Garner creates a moving and singular novel. This classic of cyberpunk won Nebula, Hugo and Philip K Dick awards, and popularised the term "cyberspace", which the author described as "a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions". A fast-paced thriller starring a washed-up hacker, a cybernetically enhanced mercenary and an almost omnipotent artificial intelligence, it inspired and informed a slew of films and novels, not least the Matrix trilogy.

When three explorers learn of a country inhabited only by females, Terry, the lady's man, looks forward to Glorious Girls, Van, the scientist, expects them to be uncivilised, and Jeff, the Southern gallant, hopes for clinging vines in need of rescue. The process by which their assumptions are overturned and their own beliefs challenged is told with humour and a light touch in Gilman's brilliantly realised vision of a female Utopia where Mother Love is raised to its highest power.

Many of Herland's insights are as relevant today as when it was first published a hundred years ago. Joanna Hines Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. The shadow of the second world war looms over Golding's debut, the classic tale of a group of English schoolboys struggling to recreate their society after surviving a plane crash and descending to murderous savagery. Fat, bespectacled Piggy is sacrificed; handsome, morally upstanding Ralph is victimised; and dangerous, bloodthirsty Jack is lionised, as the boys become "the Beast" they fear.

Here are my criteria for this "best of science fiction short stories" list. I based inclusion on whether or not many of these factors were to the story's credit:.

These are the best science fiction stories of all time, according to somebody who spent much of her life thinking that science fiction sucked. You see, it was only a few years ago that I admitted that I don't like modern science fiction short stories. To misquote the late Douglas Adams: That's when stories were real stories. Plots were real plots. And small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were vivid, exotic, fantastic and all too possible.

As hokey as they may seem today, the old sci-fi short stories stand the test of time for good, solid fiction, if not for scientific accuracy. This might be obvious, but these are ten of the best science fiction stories ever in my own opinion. It was anxiety-producing to narrow it down this much, as the body of work is so huge. They are in no particular order - except the first one. That one really is the best. What you won't find: What I personally like about top 10 lists is the reviewer's opinions.

So that's what I've put here. Plot summaries can be found in the Wikipedia articles linked to here. So when I compiled this reader's list of the best science fiction short stories of the 20th century which is the same as "all time," as the genre became full-fledged only in the s , I noticed I was markedly favoring stories published from the s through the s. I tried to like modern speculative fiction, I really did. And I will again, when writers and publishers once again start turning out science fiction stories that actually give me the same sense of wonder as those old tales from the Golden Age did.

Besides being a true personality and a novelist, he was a rare beast amongst Golden Age science fiction writers. He didn't only tell a great tale - he could write. Many Golden Age writers, including one of the best-known, Robert Heinlein, were far better storytellers than they were writers. They had vision; words, not so much. Bester wrote with a deep understanding of the psychology of language. He knew English well enough to play with it, mangle it, do impossible things with it.

With Fondly Fahrenheit , the writing didn't just tell the story - it become the story. Which I suspect is why Fondly Fahrenheit was not ultimately dismissed as just another science fiction horror story. Though the story's disturbing premise - that a servile android-robot could turn on its human superiors and commit murder - was probably radical at the time, without Bester's way with words, Fondly Fahrenheit wouldn't have become the classic science fiction short story that it is today, still cited as one of the best sci fi stories ever.

It's just beautifully written, with a suspenseful mystery and a catchy song you won't forget but will want to. It's a story you have to keep reading. But feel free to dispute it if you like. As it is about a serial killer, Fondly Fahrenheit is a fairly dark story and may not be suitable for kids. Don't confuse the short story Time in Advance with the title of the volume of four stories that contains it, called Time in Advance.

William Tenn is one of those science fiction writers who are well-known by dedicated fans and hardly known by casual readers. When asked to choose a favorite William Tenn science fiction short story, many would name The Brooklyn Project. And The Brooklyn Project is almost a perfect short story - satirical, ironic, with cut-throat social commentary and deftly drawn archetypes.

But maybe because it's a linear, straight-shot fable-like morality tale, The Brooklyn Project is almost too perfect. I like character-driven stories, lighthearted humor and a twist that sneaks up on you, and science fiction author William Tenn delivered truly wicked humor and characterization in Time in Advance. Time in Advance is the story of a man who's about to commit a lethal crime - a crime for which he's already paid his debt to society.

Far from being a dark story of a vicious criminal secretly planning a covert murder, Tenn's tale takes a light approach. In this world, society views the crime as perfectly legal, if something of a novelty. The hero is aiming to commit a vile crime, and not only is nobody about to stop him How many times have you read a story that starts off with a good idea, but has poor execution? This is not one of those times. Time in Advance has almost perfect execution. The "what if" in this case is "What if people paid for the crime of murder before they committed it, and the penury was so heinous that nobody ever survived to commit the crime Tenn excels at twist endings - hilarious "aha" endings, such as in The Brooklyn Project.

Time in Advance not only has that, it also has a "feel good" ending, something sorely lacking in science fiction today, as if a happy ending would signify the end of speculative fiction as we know it. Yes, the ending somewhat dulls the cutting edge of the social commentary. I consider Time in Advance truly one of the best science fiction stories of all time. Connie Willis, speculative fiction novelist and author of tragic science fiction Passage and comic science fiction To Say Nothing of the Dog , is one of the most popular modern science fiction authors writing today.

A story she published back in , Daisy, In the Sun , appearing in the short story collection, Fire Watch , is one of the few ironically dark stories I love. And though it's not from the Golden Age, it is a real card-carrying, sense-of-wonder-bringing "what if" story. Though other readers rave about Fire Watch , and I'm a sucker for romance and would have loved to choose Blued Moon for this list, as it honestly is one of my favorite sci fi stories ever, I kept coming back to Daisy, In the Sun.

Daisy is disturbing, far more disturbing in its way than the devastating turn Wilis takes in A Letter from the Clearys. Not anywhere as gritty or extreme as the long and chilling All My Darling Daughters. And its scientific logic leaves It does have the usual Connie Willis twist, however. And despite being told as a kind of dreamy teen angst story, it's one of those stories you think about again and again. It's less character-driven than most of her stories.

And, as inadequate as that is, that's all I can say about it, without giving it away, because the describing of the story is the telling of it, which I suppose is one reason it's on this top 10 list. Henry Kuttner and his wife, C. Moore , produced an amazing body of work, both in quantity and quality. These were mostly short stories, written both individually and co-authored under several pseudonyms in the s and s.

One major pen name was Lewis Padgett. As Lewis Padgett, this writing team wrote marvelous science fiction and fantasy stories with great characterization - yes, you read me right, the stories featured that rare animal in science fiction, honestly likable characters. And each story really is a gem. If asked to cite a favorite science fiction short story by Lewis Padgett, many readers would pick the complex and interesting Mimsy Were the Borogoves , on which the movie The Last Mimsy was based. Others might pick the hilarious The Proud Robot or the now-not-so-new-and-different, but radical-at-the-time The Twonky about a robot that goes wonky.

Me - I'm a sucker for time travel. The kind of time travel many critics scoff at as cliched. Time travel in which the attempt to break the Second Law of Thermodynamics and betray Nature's linear preference causes a shocking paradox. Time travel used as a vehicle to teach bad people the good lesson that enterprise driven by self-serving greed has a price. That's a good story. And that's what's missing from today's fiction.

So my choice for one of the 10 best science fiction stories of all time is the piece, The Time Locker. It's not new rocket science. But it's creative, and funny, and it's one of the very best. If a bit disgustingly squishy. I'll probably be lambasted for not putting this one in the number 1 spot. Nightfall , published first in Astounding Science Fiction in , is a classic science fiction short story, no doubt about it. Asimov made it into a novel, too. I haven't read the novel.

But this story really is mind-blowing. But in a good way. It's not the writing.

Brian W Aldiss: Non-Stop (1958)

Nightfall is easy and enjoyable to read. But typical of Isaac Asimov, the writing is not as tight as it could be, and the dialogue wanders a bit. It's a tad long for what it is. The characters, though well-defined, lack that spark that would make them truly likable. But all that doesn't matter.

Because the ending is really unexpected - or it was, for me - and has a mind-blowing effect, even now. It's just not what you expect, and you're led to expect a lot of different things. Since Nightfall , other stories and films have been written using the premise of a world that never sees night except once in a rare aeon.

Nightfall is probably the reason why. I saw one such movie, and it was so forgettable, I forget the title. Nightfall is not forgettable. Nightfall is an example of how wonderful a "what if" story can be if handled by a born storyteller. I'll just say it - I'm not a big Robert Heinlein fan. Yes, I'm possibly the only science fiction fan who doesn't like Robert Heinlein. I've read a couple of his books, including Stranger in a Strange Land, and several short stories. While I found his ideas interesting - occasionally - his characters and writing never thrilled me. I'm told I haven't given him enough of a chance.

It's another time travel story. I still didn't like the main character. Heinlein's characters just don't do it for me. But at least this story is about a character, and not a society that doesn't seem real which is one of my complaints about Heinlein's stories. Reading the story is pure fun. The paradoxical logic was terribly clever. And as the story unfolded, it became obvious that it was perhaps the best time travel story I'd ever read.

As a bonus, it's re-readable, despite the fact that the ending is not exactly forgettable. It's like re-reading an Agatha Christie novel.

You remember whodunnit, but you want to see how you were tricked. But why is it in the top 10 science fiction short stories? Because it was one of the first science fiction stories to explore the time travel paradox. Because it did so to extremes. The story is a flawless, step-by-step execution of the time travel paradox.

Under the pen name Cordwainer Smith, Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger wrote a series of related short stories taking place in a futuristic world that is drawn with an eerie combination of cool, clinical precision and fairy tale lyricism. Scanners Live in Vain , a story clearly inspired by Mary Shelly's Frankenstein and one of the first ever featuring a half-man, half-machine protagonist, was published in and remains his most famous short work. I've read a few, though, and the one that stands the test of time for me is The Lady Who Sailed the Soul.

• I.T. Confidential, A Humorous Look at Work Life through the Eyes of an Info Tech Insider
• 21st Century U.S. Military Manuals: Human Resources Support (FM 1-0) - Manning the Force, Casualty Operations, Morale and Welfare Support (Professional Format Series)
• Luomo che guarda (I grandi tascabili) (Italian Edition)
• English Traits: New and Revised Edition
• Synesthesia: A Union of the Senses (Springer Series in Neuropsychology)
• Time-Saver Standards for Interior Design and Space Planning