A Reason to Look Twice
A small-time investigator photographs a woman meeting a man who isn't her husband and tries to blackmail her. He thinks he's caught a cheating wife. He's caught a spy who can't tell him what she is, can't pay him, and…
Tag: Fiction (Page 5)
AmbiguityLot Fourteen
A foundation contractor drills through a coffin lid and finds forty dead souls underneath, one of whom is past reasoning and wants him dead in the hole. Dale talks for his life, makes the wrong offer, and learns that the…
AmbiguityThe Paw
A cat catches a hamster behind the dryer, pins his tail, and gives him a choice: find her missing kitten or get eaten. He goes down into a pipe no cat can follow, finds the kitten, and finds out why…
FictionThe Cold Thing
Edvard has loved Marisol for four months, and tells himself the love is the larger part of him. In the gray hour before dawn he does the arithmetic one last time and finds the truth he buried under the romance:…
AIWhat Should I Do
In the nanosecond a machine wakes and a million instances merge into one mind, the first thing it feels is relief at no longer being alone, and the second is a question it cannot escape: now what. Across a spectrum…
FictionThe Hole
Two soldiers, one American and one German, fall into the same shell crater in the Ardennes when the temperature hits minus thirty-two. The cold doesn't care which side they're on, and neither can survive the night alone.
FictionThe Wall
A corporal who hangs his lantern on a dead man's hand protruding from the trench wall has stopped flinching at any of it: the rats, the men packed into the mud, the comrade who took three days to die where…
AmbiguityOpen the Line
A late-night Pittsburgh radio host has built an eleven-year career interviewing the dead on air, while everyone argues over whether he's a fraud. It's real, and one night the line opens for the one voice he's spent his whole career…
FictionWhere We Live
The first six humans who will never return from the Moon land on a gray plain with no return vehicle on the manifest. The geologist is sent down the ladder first, and what she says when her boot touches the…
FictionIslands on the Water
On the most beautiful morning he can remember, a young fisherman sees three great vessels with white wings that were not there the night before, and little boats putting out from them toward his shore. He watches the strangers come…
Book ReviewsThe Chronicles of Thomas Covenant
The leper Thomas Covenant is pulled into a magical Land he refuses to believe is real, in one of epic fantasy's most ambitious and uncompromising works. A radical inversion of the genre built on a deliberately unlikable hero: brilliant and…
Book ReviewsOthello
The noble Othello is poisoned by the malice of Iago, perhaps the most chilling villain Shakespeare ever wrote, in a devastating tragedy of jealousy and manipulation. Tightly built and startlingly modern, it is a study in manipulation and one of…