“Orphans of The Helix” is a 1991 science fiction novella by Dan Simmons. It is about a group of deep space settlers who drop out of hyper-space to help some aliens protect their orbital forest ring.
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“Bow Shock” is a 2006 science fiction novelette by Gregory Benford. It is about an astronomer who discovers a very strange object on the other side of the galaxy.
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“Harrison Bergeron” is a 1961 science fiction short story by Kurt Vonnegut. It is about a future society in which talented and gifted people are forced to wear handicapping equipment to make them “more normal.”
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“A Woman’s Best Friend” is a 2008 science fiction short story by Robert Reed. It is about an alternate reality George Bailey who shows up on a strange world after jumping into a river to save an angel.
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“Scanners Live in Vain” is a 1950 science fiction novelette by Cordwainer Smith. It is about a sensory deprived man who tries to stop his Scanner brothers from killing a human who has just made a great scientific breakthrough.
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“Approaching Perimelasma” is a 1998 science fiction novelette by Geoffrey A. Landis. It is about a tiny downloaded human who agrees to take his spaceship into a black hole and hopes that an untested scientific trick can pull him back out again.
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“The Colour Out Of Space” is a 1927 science fiction novelette by H.P. Lovecraft. It is about a meteorite that falls from the sky in the 1880’s and the devastating consequences it has upon the people in a rural New England town.
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“Night Bird Soaring” is a 2008 science fiction short story by T. L. Morganfield. It is about a boy who is chosen to represent the god Tezcatlipoca in a modern day Teotihuacan.
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“Superiority” is a 1951 science fiction short story by Arthur C. Clarke. It is about a captured general who is giving the reasons why his side lost a war due to superior technology.
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“Exhalation” is a 2008 science fiction short story by Ted Chiang. It is about a civilization of mechanical beings who make a startling discovery about the nature of their universe.
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“Desertion” is a 1944 science fiction short story by Clifford D. Simak. It is about the director of a Jovian survey dome who keeps losing men to Jupiter’s open atmosphere.
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“When Thorns Are the Tips of Trees” is a 2008 science fiction short story by Jason Sanford. It is about a boy who is trying to deal with the local ramifications of a deadly, world-wide virus.
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“The Menace from Earth” is a 1957 science fiction novelette by Robert Heinlein. It is about a 15 year old girl who lives on the Moon and gets jealous when her partner acts as a tour guide for a beautiful Earth woman.
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“Evil Robot Monkey” is a 2008 science fiction short story by Mary Robinette Kowal. It is about a clay molding chimp whose implant makes him more than an animal but less than a human.
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“The Ray-Gun: A Love Story” is a 2008 science fiction novelette by James Alan Gardner. It is about an unpopular teenage boy who finds an alien ray gun in the forest.
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“Melville on Iapetus” is a 1983 science fiction short story by Jack McDevitt. It is about a group of astronauts who discover an ancient statue on one of Saturn’s moons.
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“The Hanging Stranger” is a 1953 science fiction short story by Philip K. Dick. It is about the one man in Pikeville who notices a dead stranger hanging from a lamp post in the middle of town.
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“Mars: A Traveler’s Guide” is a 2008 science fiction short story by Ruth Nestvold. It is about a person desperately trying to access a space suit’s computerized help system.
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“Yellow Card Man” is a 2006 science fiction novelette by Paolo Bacigalupi. It is about a formerly wealthy Chinese refugee living a very hard life in a future Bangkok.
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“Julian: A Christmas Story” is a 2006 science fiction novella by Robert Charles Wilson. It is about a 17 year old boy who gets caught up in the deadly political games of his uncle - the president of the United States.
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