BLIT by David Langford (Science Fiction)
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. The bomb wasn’t supposed to go off until you were six miles away.
The Last Surviving Gondola Widow by Kristine Kathryn Rusch (Science Fiction)
We’d heard about the Gondolas, but most of us hadn’t believed they existed. Not in America anyway, and certainly not made by the South. Reconstruction had ended the year before, and everyone knew the South was bankrupt. How it could afford not one, not two, but several fleets of Gondolas stretched the imagination.
The Lifehack by Paul Di Filippo (Science Fiction)
SueEllen grabbed Inkley by his ears, dragged his face smack up against hers, and kissed him deeply with an inordinate amount of tongue action. The next thing she knew, the security men were pulling Inkley away from her.
Corpse Vision by Kristine Kathryn Rusch (Fantasy, Horror)
He woke up thinking of the difference between the smiling girl in his dreams and the dead woman on the walkway, her skin cold against his fingertips.
Gigatech by David Langford (Science Fiction)
You never get the future you expect. We all knew, or thought we knew, that the next big thing would be a very small thing indeed: nanotechnology, molecular assemblers, microscopic robots unclogging arteries, restoring synapses lost to Alzheimer’s, and generally clearing the way to immortality.
The Litigation Master and the Monkey King by Ken Liu (Fantasy)
Ever since Tian was a little boy, he had been obsessed with the exploits of the Monkey King, the trickster demon who had seventy-two transformations and defeated hundreds of monsters, who had shaken the throne of the Jade Emperor with a troop of monkeys.
Some Like It Cold by John Kessel (Science Fiction)
The moment-universes surrounding the evening of Saturday, August 4th were so thoroughly burned—tourists, biographers, conspiracy hunters, masturbators—that there was no sense arriving then.
The Edge of Nowhere by James Patrick Kelly (Science Fiction)
The dogs squatted in a row next to the book drop, acting as if they owned the sidewalk. There were three of them, grand in their bowler hats and paisley vests and bow ties. They were like no dogs Rain had ever seen before.
Graffiti in the Library of Babel by David Langford (Science Fiction)
“Sir, someone’s done something nasty all over Jane Austen.”
Monkeys by Ken Liu (Science Fiction)
The “Monkey Shakespeare” project was an interdisciplinary collaboration between the humanities and the science departments. But after a short clip of the monkeys pooping into the typewriter was circulated online, everyone began to distance themselves from it.